Byward is in a crisis
City’s beloved market needs a vision and a feasible plan
When Heather Matthews decided to ditch her day job as a graphic designer to open a kitchen-equipment store in the 1970s, the ByWard Market was the natural location to set up shop.
“Because people who cooked came to the market, it was the obvious place for a cookware store,” says the former owner of Domus, who is currently the proprietor of Scone Witch. “I felt we were an absolute complement to the market.”
Since 1826, when Col. John By himself laid out the street plan for the market, ByWard was where Ottawa shopped for food, bought sardines from barrels, live chickens from cages, tomatoes from bushels.
“In the ’70s, the market was still the place where people came to buy all their groceries,” says Matthews. “People were lined up at the fish stores and the butcher shops on Friday nights, when they were open later.”
That ByWard Market no longer exists. And for many, that’s a problem.
If you’ve frequented the market on a summer Saturday morning, or wound your way through the throngs on a Friday night, you might well wonder what all the recent fuss is about. ByWard is still a thriving, bustling place full of life.
But it’s not quite as bustling on a weekday outside the tourist season.
Most people don’t come to ByWard to do their grocery shopping. And while Domus is still a cool store, you can now buy a KitchenAid stand mixer at Canadian Tire.
While there have always been taverns in ByWard — including Ottawa’s oldest, the Chateau Lafayette, established in 1849 — in the last couple of decades more and more market real estate has been given over to bars and restaurants.
In the meantime, the outdoor vendors have been disappearing, especially the sellers of flats of flowers, who can’t compete with the likes of Costco and Loblaw, who in turn have expanded their offering of gourmet food stuffs. In the past four years, the number of “agri-food” stands has fallen 30 per cent to 59 stalls.
If left unchecked, this trend could see the market reduced solely to a tourist/ entertainment destination, much to the chagrin of some retailers who are looking to attract customers throughout the day to their shops, whether they’re hair salons, art galleries or food retailers.
When the ByWard retailers (through their Business Improvement Area) and the city finally decided to start examining the issue, they hired the highly regarded New York City-based nonprofit Project for Public Spaces to study the problem. PPS went so far as to exhort “that if nothing is done, the City is in danger of losing the public market forever.”
The New York consultancy made a number of recommendations, but one of its key messages was that the city not only has to “save” the public market, but also must attract more fresh-food shops.
The fixation PPS has with the farmers’ market and food retailing in general is both understandable and problematic.
Understandable because food culture is part of ByWard’s heritage. PPS is right when it says that the significance of the market isn’t just its architecture of the area, but its historical uses.
But the focus on food for the market is problematic for a number of reasons.
If ByWard’s outdoor farmers’ market is struggling, it is largely because farmers’ markets are so successful — they’ve sprouted up across Ottawa, creating competition that previously never existed. Of particular note is the Ottawa Farmers’ Market, a hugely successful experiment that started fewer than 10 years ago with 19 vendors, and now boasts three locations and more than 100 stalls.
Now that OFM is so established outside of ByWard, you have to wonder how many large public markets Ottawa can support. At The Forks in Winnipeg, a destination that’s successful on so many levels, the produce market is struggling somewhat, trying to compete with the long-entrenched St. Norbert’s Farmers Market.
That’s not to say that food and farmers’ stalls shouldn’t be an integral part of ByWard, but it’s debatable whether we should peg the market’s future so overwhelmingly to fresh-food sales.
If anything brings more food shops to the market, it will likely be the increase in people moving into the market proper, as well as into condo towers sprouting up in nearby neighbourhoods. In fact, the food retailers who are still in ByWard say that the spike in local residents has helped stem the loss of their suburban customers. Nicastro’s La Bottega on George Street, for example, has only expanded over the last decade, combining a small restaurant, panini takeout counter and Italian groceteria.
Another issue is that ByWard can’t really be compared to most other markets in North America: ours is more of a district that contains a few public spaces rather than, say, Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market or Montreal’s Atwater Market, both of which are self-contained buildings.
Indeed, PPS confined its recommendations to a Tshaped area of the market that includes outdoor vendors and the two city-owned buildings: the ByWard Market building and the parking arcade.
Interestingly, the ByWard Market building, which was restored and has been operated by a private group for the last 20 years, has become the focal point for criticism in the debate over the future of the market. It was supposed to be filled with fresh-food shops — butchers, bakers, delis — and instead houses about 20 prepared food shops, a sort of highend international food court. (Our reporter David Reevely will delve into the challenges of running the ByWard Market building and of attracting food retailers in Friday’s Citizen.)
The New York consultancy made a number of recommendations, but one of its key messages was that the city not only has to ‘save’ the public market, but also must attract more fresh-food shops.
While we can argue how important food culture should be to the future of ByWard, PPS gets lots of things indisputably right.
Foremost among them is its recommendation to “replace the parking garage with a landmark structure.” Indeed, the parking garage, in the heart of the market, is among the ugliest buildings in otherwise charming ByWard.
Urban planner George Dark, who has consulted on a number of projects in Ottawa, couldn’t agree more. While he’s a little skeptical about PPS’s “romantic” concept for expanding the public markets at ByWard, Dark says the city should definitely “tear down the parking garage and build something really great — not a condo!”
Dark suggests that the new building could have some sort of arts and culture use, a sector that’s under-represented in ByWard. He envisions work and retail studios for artisans going into that space, not unlike a model that exists in Toronto’s Distillery district.
“Once you open that box, there are so many creative things you could do,” says Dark. “That’s one of the most amazing places the city owns. Act accordingly.”
Of course, if the city takes away parking spots, it needs to add them elsewhere. Parking is a huge issue at ByWard, especially for vendors who want Ottawans to come do their shopping in the district. One of the most intriguing ideas is to put an underground garage beneath York Street, between Sussex and William, and turn the onstreet parking area on York into a public square, something completely lacking in ByWard. (Our reporter Derek Spalding examines the ever controversial issue of parking in Saturday’s Citizen.)
And what may be PPS’s most controversial recommendation is also one of its best: that the ByWard Market be overseen by an independent management group. It’s worked for public spaces in other cities, including the aforementioned Forks in Winnipeg, but it’s often usually difficult for those currently in charge to relinquish their duties. But the fact is, there’s no single entity overseeing how the market works as a whole, with two overworked city departments dealing with outdoor market issues and parking, the BIA representing some, but not all, business interests, while community groups try to bring residents’ concerns and views to the fore.
A properly funded management group — with a board that includes representation from all the stakeholders — could not only better handle issues facing ByWard, like noise and security, or parking, but also bring new programming to the area, like a Christmas market or a local food festival or a Sunday antique market on York Street.
City councillors have had a few months to mull over the New York consultants’ recommendation. The key now is for our municipal leaders to commit to doing something.
The V-word is bandied about too often, but the future path for the ByWard Market truly deserves some vision from our city leaders. That doesn’t necessarily mean some grandiose undertaking, but it does require two things: a concrete plan, and money.
The city needs to engage citizens about what they’d like to see in the district — whether that entails an expanded outdoor market or an increased presence of arts and culture — and move forward. It should not take two years, which is when council is expected to hear back from city staff on how to proceed with the PPS’s recommendations.
Sure, some aspects of the market rethink will take a little longer — a new governance structure, replacing the parking arcade — but many improvements can be made soon.
Not everyone will agree exactly how to proceed with developing the market, but if we’re going to do anything other than talk about it, we need the city’s leaders to step up to the plate.
Where are the cobblestone or interlocking-brick streets and sidewalks that grace other historical market areas? Where is the public seating, the attractive lighting, the greenery? Is there any reason we can’t start looking into the York Street underground garage idea right now?
We all know ByWard Market is a special place in the city. Hence, let’s act accordingly.