A breathless century of Ottawa history
Changes light a fire under capital, sometimes literally
“The Twentieth Century, destined to be Canada’s!” as a fortune-telling prime minister predicts in a chauvinist shout-out, comes in blazing for Ottawa.
A really big fire starts in Hull in April 1900, jumps the river and levels LeBreton Flats. Three thousand homeless, seven dead.
Ottawa, finally, gets a library in 1906 after going fedora-in-hand to a billionaire American. The building, built to last forever, is torn down 70 years later. In 1908, there is an auto show at Lansdowne Park, and the city starts driving itself crazy. Downtown gets classier soon after with the building of a Union Station and the Château Laurier, which has a sign outside saying FUTURE HOME OF KARSH. There are plans to put a subway under Wellington Street, but they go under. In the midst of a war so terribly bloody it is called Great, fire takes the Parliament Buildings. A new, sleeker set take five years to assemble. No one notices the absence of governance.
Not to be outdone by the Feds, in 1931 City Hall on Elgin Street burns down and, in order to keep taxes down, is not rebuilt for 27 years. No one notices the absence of governance until the arrival of Charlotte In-Your-Face Whitton, the city’s first female mayor, in 1951. Just in time for the outbreak of another really big war, a memorial archway to the previous great war is erected right downtown.
Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King decides to rebuild the city centre and, because this is Canada, brings in a Frenchman to do it. Jacques Gréber detrains downtown, orders LeBreton Flats levelled again, and puts a parkway along the river, thereby handing the city over to car fever.
The oxymoronic “rush hour” gets rolling and gradually comes to last all day. The sight of streetcars rolling past their windows while they are stuck in traffic proves so annoying to commuters that they (the streetcars) are scrapped in 1959. Westgate shopping mall opens in 1955; it multiplies and invades the suburbs and a bylaw is passed forbidding pedestrians from shopping: minivans only.
In the Sixties, the Sparks Street Mall, first of its kind in Canada, opens and nobody knows what to do with it except to keep putting the rent up. They still don’t. Because it is working class and mostly inhabited by French-Canadians and not pretty, LeBreton Flats is wiped away, this time on purpose. For the next four decades the Flats stay flat, while a host of neat ideas for what to do with them are proposed. The National Capital Commission holds out until some really bad ideas arrive and then goes for them.
Ottawa’s second female mayor, Marion Dewar, is elected in 1978 and turns out to be our best mayor so far. A form of provincial government called Harrisment sweeps the province in time for the turn of the century (and later takes over the whole country) and there is an outbreak of amalgamation. Ottawa catches it in 2000 and city hall is told to administer a lot more people with fewer elected officials. They are also told to “ride two horses with one behind;” in other words, manage both the capital of the country and a really big rural area. The horses start to slowly move apart.
In the first decade of the 21st century, city hall is invaded by a squadron of developers who seal up the planning department and begin an assault on the city’s air space. Ground level pockets of resistance are formed across downtown, but are unable to defeat the capture of half of Lansdowne Park. The idea of the subway tunnel under Wellington is revived a century later. The Big Dig begins.