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  #281  
Old Posted May 27, 2015, 2:36 AM
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That never built Bronson Place looks similar to Telus Plaza in Edmonton.
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  #282  
Old Posted May 30, 2015, 10:47 AM
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  #283  
Old Posted May 30, 2015, 2:04 PM
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Awesome!

Love that second picture; great view of the Market area with cars dominating (even more than today) a rough and beaten area, pre-1983 destruction from The Bay expansion over Freiman Street and the Rideau Centre.

Times Square (which would be on the far right of the third picture) didn't replace anything significant, which is a relief. You think about the area today, and so many buildings have been lost, while others have been beautifully restored.

What really stands out (back to second picture) is the Freiman Building with proper façades of bricks and windows, the old Canada Post distribution centre (huge loss for Ottawa), abandoned Union Station with the giant Centennial Logo, better looking rear façades of the Transportation and Plaza buildings and of course the CBD with much tighter height restrictions, which is about to change, thanks to Campeau's Place de Ville (I assume the Skyline Hotel and Tower B are completed, but hidden by Tower A under construction).
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  #284  
Old Posted Jun 5, 2015, 4:28 AM
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From the Canada section..

Quote:
Originally Posted by drawarc View Post
Quote:
Originally Posted by Trans Canada
Nice shots of Ottawa, look to be taken from the Union du Canada building (RIP)

Any idea when Dalhousie was punched through the Loblaws, or what the big square building in the middle is? (Looks similar to the Archives on Wellington)
I think the Dalhousie street extension occurred in conjunction with the Rideau Bus Mall experiment in the early 80s, but I could be wrong.

Re: the big square building, it used to be the Ottawa Police Headquarters. Sadly, like Union du Canada, it was also demolished.


http://urbsite.blogspot.ca/2009/08/p...in-ottawa.html
Very interesting. 60 Waller Street, architect Peter Dickinson (article linked above), built 1954-1957 and demolished 1994. Dug up a couple articles from 1994:

Quote:
http://sextondigital.library.dal.ca/...dpi_PDFA1b.pdf (article p.16)
Bulletin 19.4, Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada, Dec 1994.

In "Protecting Our Recent Architectural Heritage: Requiem for the Former Ottawa Police Station," Edgar Tumak illustrates the poor record we have in Canada for protecting our recent architectural heritage. As a case study in suspect decision-making, Tumak recounts the recent loss of the former Ottawa Police Station, a vacant International Style building which was demolished in spite of sound fiscal, environmental, and social reasons for re-using it. Tumak decries the vilification of the previous generation's architectural aspirations, and calls for a more responsible attitude when dealing with our recent architectural heritage.

(continued in article)

and


Quote:
http://heritageottawa.org/sites/defa...ws_1994_04.pdf (article p.3)
Heritage Ottawa Newsletter 21.1, Heritage Ottawa, Spring 1994

"Ottawa's Waller Street Police Station - Recent Heritage?" by Jean Palmer


(continued in article)
Yet another building worth protecting, now a vacant lot... my NCC-spidey-sense is tingling.
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  #285  
Old Posted Jun 5, 2015, 2:21 PM
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I dunno... that police station looks pretty bland to me.

Canada in general, and especially Ottawa, has way too much mid-century stuff already most of which is pretty ugly. That stuff basically dominates the skyline, for pete's sake. If it was some rare style with lots of great examples about to become extinct, then I'd get concerned about preserving them.
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  #286  
Old Posted Jun 5, 2015, 11:04 PM
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We can all agree I'm sure that the Waller Police Station's design was head and shoulders above the current Elgin bunker, but from what I've heard from my father (retired OPS officer), the building was badly designed for its purpose; low ceilings, cell block on the second floor, access and safety issues...

Considering what will be soon be built on that spot, I'm OK with the demise of the old police HQ.

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  #287  
Old Posted Jun 13, 2015, 8:05 PM
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  #288  
Old Posted Jun 14, 2015, 1:08 PM
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wow!so much have changed.what is that building at the place of city hall?
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  #289  
Old Posted Jun 14, 2015, 4:01 PM
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Awesome picture of Ottawa around 1975. Well appreciated drawarc!

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Originally Posted by gatt View Post
wow!so much have changed.what is that building at the place of city hall?
One of many temporary buildings built during WWII.

http://urbsite.blogspot.ca/2011/09/t...-speaking.html
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  #290  
Old Posted Jun 15, 2015, 1:47 PM
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wow!so much have changed.what is that building at the place of city hall?
Former National Defence Head Quarters. Honestly, I very much prefer those buildings to both the MGen Pearkes and the new Carling locations. They just have the look that one expects with the military. And after they were torn down that area became a parade square/parking lot for the new NDHQ/Cartier Square.
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  #291  
Old Posted Jun 15, 2015, 3:45 PM
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and another urbsite post for more background on the old tempos:
http://urbsite.blogspot.ca/2009/08/tempo.html
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  #292  
Old Posted Jun 16, 2015, 12:16 AM
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interesting.
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  #293  
Old Posted Jun 16, 2015, 1:19 AM
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Originally Posted by drawarc View Post
In the late summer/fall of 1988, I camped at a city of Ottawa campground at LeBreton Flats. I think it was at the top right corner of this picture. It was my first time in Ottawa so the details are a little fuzzy. Can anyone confirm the location of this campground or share some pics? It was really cool to be able to pitch your tent right beside downtown, in the shadow of parliament.

Last edited by khabibulin; Jun 16, 2015 at 12:33 PM. Reason: typo
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  #294  
Old Posted Jun 16, 2015, 12:54 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by khabibulin View Post
In the late summer/fall of 1988, I camped at a city of Ottawa campground at LeBreton Flats. I think it was at the top right corner of this picture. It was my first time in Ottawa so the details are a little fuzzy. Can anyone confirm the location of this campground or share some pics? It was really cool to be able to pitch your tent right beside downtown, in the shadow of parliament.
Yes there was definitely a campground at Lebreton Flats in those years. Sorry I can't provide more info.
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  #295  
Old Posted Jun 16, 2015, 3:39 PM
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Originally Posted by khabibulin View Post
In the late summer/fall of 1988, I camped at a city of Ottawa campground at LeBreton Flats. I think it was at the top right corner of this picture. It was my first time in Ottawa so the details are a little fuzzy. Can anyone confirm the location of this campground or share some pics? It was really cool to be able to pitch your tent right beside downtown, in the shadow of parliament.
I moved here in '92 and found it odd / interesting that a campground existed. It was located in the SE corner near the Fleet St. pumping station, situated inside some constructed landfill hills, and the bike path ran alongside it. The site was leveled more than ten years ago when they started removing all the contaminated soil in the area.
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  #296  
Old Posted Jul 6, 2015, 5:47 PM
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Transforming Ottawa: How Jacques Gréber's plan forever changed the capital, for better and worse

Bruce Deachman, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: July 6, 2015 | Last Updated: July 6, 2015 12:54 PM EDT



Slater Street, looking east from Lyon, circa 1937. The photo is one of hundreds commissioned by urban planner Jacques Gréber for his assessment of Ottawa.

It’s difficult to imagine what Ottawa would look like today had city planner Jacques Gréber never set foot here. We would most certainly not have the Greenbelt that rings the city, nor perhaps as many of the national museums, galleries and performance venues we now enjoy. Car traffic throughout downtown might have slowed to a crawl as scores of trains criss-crossed their way to and from Union Station on Rideau Street. The tall gritty smokestacks of industry, meanwhile, might otherwise now be photo-bombing every tourist snapshot of the Peace Tower, chewing up our precious waterfront and blotting the skyline with their grey effluent clouds.

On the other hand, LeBreton Flats, left to its own devices, might well have evolved into an exciting and vibrant warehouse district similar to Toronto’s Distillery Historical District or Vancouver’s Yaletown, instead of being razed and left empty for 40 years, then handed over to developers to turn into mean towers of condominiums. Visitors arriving in the capital aboard VIA Rail cars might have debarked smack dab in the distinguished heart of the capital, rather than five kilometres away at an otherwise featureless site overlooking the Trans-Canada Highway. And itinerant ramblers mightn’t have had to cross four lanes of quasi-highway simply to sit along the riverbank to contemplate where in hell you could get a drink around here.

Alain Miguelez, 46, an urban planner with the City of Ottawa and a weekend historian, has wondered these things; how The Gréber Plan of 1950 — Ottawa’s official plan — fundamentally changed the face of Ottawa, and the lessons we can learn from its implementation. It fascinates him, and he’s hoping it will intrigue enough other people to help support a book he’s written on the subject.

At the heart of the book, titled Transforming Ottawa: Canada’s capital in the eyes of Jacques Gréber, are hundreds of photographs of street views of Ottawa from the late 1930s that Miguelez discovered at the National Archives more than a decade ago. At the time, Miguelez was doing research for his first book, A Theatre Near You, about movie houses in the Ottawa-Gatineau region.


Wellington Street between Metcalfe and O’Connor, circa 1937.

The historic photos were commissioned by Gréber for his report. A Parisian best known for his 1917 plan for the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia and the 1937 Paris International Exposition, the latter for which he was head architect, Gréber was hired by then-prime minister Mackenzie King to create a city plan worthy of a national capital, on the sort of scale of a Washington or London.

Until then, Ottawa had grown like a weed, rather than a formal garden, a hodgepodge of factories and industrial, office and residential spaces sitting shoulder-to-shoulder. Almost 100 years after becoming Canada’s capital, the city still appeared very much a provincial town, and there was a growing sense that it was time to make it more noble, more majestic. (Click here to watch A Capital Plan, a short NFB documentary about conditions in Ottawa immediately following the Second World War and the need to implement Gréber’s Plan)

“That was every city then,” Miquelez says of he gritty mix of which Ottawa was comprised. “That was Montreal, that was Toronto, that was Hamilton, that was Sudbury. That was pretty much every town in Canada. It was everyone’s daily life back then, and it was jobs for people. Ottawa had factories and industry, and the fact that it was seen as a problem, and the fact that we were in for radical surgery as a result of that problem, was what they needed to sell. They had to sell people on an idea that was unusual in Canada back then — we’re going to spend a whole bunch of money to remake a city.”

Chief among Gréber’s concerns about Ottawa then was that there were too many rail lines, especially along the Rideau Canal as they approached Union Station, and too much downtown industry. His plan eventually saw Union Station closed and a new one built, in 1966, on Tremblay Road, which allowed Colonel By drive to be built along the canal. But, according to Miguelez, the hope that those industries forced out of the downtown core and off the Ottawa River would relocate in the same direction as the station didn’t quite pan out, as many of them simply chose to relocate or consolidate elsewhere, effectively eliminating the city’s blue-collar sector.

“You’d never do that again,” says Miguelez. “You don’t touch the economic base of a city and give it a bodycheck of that nature and get away with it. But back then, you look at the grime, the smoke, the noise of trains and industry, and it was easy to say ‘We need something new. We need something clean and green and safe.’ And greenery — grass, lawns, trees, parks — is something that’s easy to get a buy-in for.

“Who’s against nature? But as a result, we’ve now got nature separating streets and neighbourhoods from one another. We lost the intimacy of the pedestrian scale.”

The Gréber Plan also saw Ottawa’s streetcars eliminated — Gréber felt the overhead wires were unsightly — and the establishment of the Greenbelt around the city, intended to slow urban growth. Much of Gréber’s planning was done with the belief that the region’s population — then 273,000 — would never exceed a half million, a mark it surpassed in just over 15 years.

As a result, Miguelez sees where the plan has not held. The trains coming downtown could have finished their journeys in underground tunnels, he says, and streetcar wires could have been put in the road, as other cities have done. Much of the green space that was created actually makes Ottawa less livable, he contends. “Look at all the green space in Confederation Heights (surrounding Heron Road and Riverside Drive). It’s a lot of land with a lot of open space that nobody uses for anything. It’s green, it looks good, but the only enjoyment you have of it is through your windshield as you speed by in your car at 80 km/h. So it extends the distance of the city and makes it impossible to walk. It introduces a barrier that forces you to use a car.” The Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway, meanwhile, makes it difficult for pedestrians to access the Ottawa River except for at a few sites.

And Gréber’s design, very much geared to the nascent automobile age that followed the Second World War, compartmentalized and separated offices, industry and residential areas, leading to an unnatural city where these groups no longer mixed, says Miguelez.

Yet he lauds many of the plan’s aesthetics, including the height restrictions that insist the silhouette of the Parliament Buildings is always prominent. “Gréber also made some commentary that we would repeat today, such as that the national capital needs good national museums and a national theatre, hence the NAC was born.”

In Transforming Ottawa, Miguelez shows the Ottawa that Gréber saw when he first came here in 1937. Some of the street scenes look remarkably familiar. Most don’t. In his accompanying text, Miguelez explains how, for better or worse, the Gréber Plan really set Ottawa’s skeleton in place for centuries to come; how, in his mind, it works and where it fails, and what we might consider as the city continues to grow. It doesn’t pretend to have the answers, just some of the questions we should ask.

“I’m hoping that it leaves people with a healthy dose of information about how the city’s growth in the past 65 years came from a set of ideas that may be outmoded, and maybe we need to revisit what our core ideas are before we continue this discussion about how this city should grow.”

We should still have the ambition that Gréber displayed, he adds. “Ottawa should be the top city in the country. We are the window to the world. We should look dignified and sharp and noble. But we can be a fun, active, urban place, too. But how to get there is more complex now. There is no oracle to show the way, and we should be mistrustful of anyone trying to do that. We have to take stock of everything we have, and, really, the right question is how can we have it all and be smart about it, and what are the trade-offs?

“The Ottawa of 300,000 people is not the Ottawa of a million-and-a-half. The Ottawa of a million-and-a-half has a few issues to solve.”

The book will be released in time for Christmas, and Miguelez is attempting to raise $20,000 for its publication through crowdfunding site Indiegogo. With his July 24 deadline looming, he’s about halfway there.

Additionally, those interested can attend a fundraising talk and slide show being held at Laurier Social House from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Wed. July 8. For tickets or information, visit http://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-eveni...ts-17421245414. His Facebook page can be found at www.facebook.com/transformingottawabook/timeline. The Indiegogo address is http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tr...-ottawa#/story.

bdeachman@ottawacitizen.com


The Gréber Report: The good and the bad

We asked Transforming Ottawa author Alain Miguelez to list the greatest successes and failures of the Gréber Report. These were his picks:

Successes:
— The Parliamentary Precinct View Protection: the rules that ensure the prominence of Parliament’s silhouette on the city skyline.
— Recommendations for national museums, theatres and cultural institutions, which led to the creation of the NAC and new museums.
— Preserving the Ottawa River waterfront from manufacturing industries.

Failures:
— Planning for a city that would never surpass half a million in population, which justified the plan’s low-density approach to urban expansion.
— Relocating Union Station from Rideau Street to Tremblay Road, and removing the streetcars.
— Recommending the segregation of city functions (dwelling, offices, retail, schools, parks), thus departing from normal city-building principles of mixed uses and pedestrian proximity.
— Replacing high-impact rail infrastructure with high-impact car infrastructure, neither of which supports a human-scaled walkable urban environment.
— The wholesale demolition of LeBreton Flats.
— The loss of many heritage buildings in the name of de-densifying the city.
— The loss of Ottawa’s previously diverse economic base that included a significant manufacturing and industrial component.
— The idea that a square box building, if surrounded by “enough green space,” is a suitable substitute for distinguished, ornamented, classical architecture.


Highlights of the 1950 Gréber Plan:

On Ottawa in general:
“It is a fact that most of the artificial capitals, limited as they are to their governmental and administrative functions, are economically burdensome to their nations, unless they have acquired the normal character of self-supporting communities. Ottawa presents this fortunate condition of not being a huge metropolis with complex problems, but a city of reasonable importance, spacious and uncongested.”

On parking:
“The parking problem in Ottawa has become a matter of major concern. Despite the utilization of many vacant lots and unbuilt grounds for temporary parking, approaches to business sections, administration buildings and hotels are crowded by parked cars occupying space which should be utilized entirely for through traffic.”

On the railways:
“Eleven different lines traverse Ottawa and Hull, and segregate the whole in isolated parts. More than one hundred and fifty grade crossings obstruct circulation and constitute dangers within the urban area. More than one hundred streets lack outlets by reason of the railway-created obstacles. Residential developments are scattered in a framework of tracks, warehouses, factories and railway depots, with their concomitant noises, smoke and danger. Industries, naturally following railway facilities, add to the blight already caused by railway barriers, and both railway operations and industrial development are hampered by crowded surroundings, with no opportunity for expansion.”

On office space:
“Due to lack of space, many government services are housed in obsolete buildings. The headquarters of the National Film Board occupy an abandoned mill, in which the employees serve under deplorable hygienic and working conditions, and hazard of fire. Furthermore, this structure mars one of the most beautiful sites in the Capital, the Rideau falls, and the immediately contiguous French Embassy, one of the finer buildings in the City.”

On the performing arts:
“Theatres are also lacking in Ottawa. Opera, music and dramatic performances are given in privately owned theatres, especially cinemas, and even in an indoor sports arena, the Auditorium, which is better suited for wrestling and boxing matches, hockey games, rodeos and pageants, and if need be for popular concerts.”

On industry:
“Across the river from the stately buildings of the nation are piles of unsightly and disorderly industrial materials, factories, railway sidings, warehouses, and chimney stacks spreading soot, smell and smoke. The beauty of the Chaudière Falls is hardly perceptible from portions of an antiquated bridge and ‘roadway laboriously finding their way through this unsightly mass of structures. The hill and Parliament Buildings can only be seen occasionally through such environments.”

bdeachman@ottawacitizen.com

http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-...tter-and-worse
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  #297  
Old Posted Jul 6, 2015, 6:36 PM
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  #298  
Old Posted Jul 6, 2015, 10:10 PM
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Originally Posted by rocketphish View Post
Alain Miguelez, 46, an urban planner with the City of Ottawa and a weekend historian,
Who is this Miguelez planner guy. He should get on SSP
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  #299  
Old Posted Jul 7, 2015, 11:28 AM
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How do you know he isn't?
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  #300  
Old Posted Jul 7, 2015, 9:16 PM
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I'm looking forward to reading his book. I wasn't able to donate much, but I gave what I could
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