LEBRETON, FLATTENED
Residents look back, 50 years after their homes destroyed
In April 1962, the National Capital Commission announced it was expropriating a large swath of land known as LeBreton Flats.
Located 1.5 kilometres west of Parliament Hill, the Flats was a working-class mixture of residences — mostly apartments and row houses — and businesses and industry, with large rail yards servicing the pulp and paper and timber interests on the Ottawa River at the north end of the neighbourhood.
Urban renewal was the banner under which Flats residents were forced out. The houses, most built immediately following the Great Fire of 1900 and to no particular code, were rundown, while a key component of The Gréber Report’s recommendations to make Ottawa a great capital city was to move its industry off the river and its railroads away from the downtown core. The Flats, it was announced, would be home to shining government office towers, including a large new headquarters for the Department of National Defence — the Pentagon of the North, it was dubbed. The 3,000 residents were told to leave, their homes levelled soon after each was vacated. Fittingly, perhaps, the Duke House Hotel was the last building razed. Almost 150 years earlier, in 1819, Firth’s Tavern was one of the first buildings erected on LeBreton Flats.
But for about 40 years after the expropriation, nothing happened. Consensus on its use could not be reached, and the discovery of contaminated soil — the result of a century or more of heavy industrial use, worsened by the post-expropriation use of the land as a snow dump — made development prohibitive.
In 2005, though, the Canadian War Museum opened on the Flats, followed in 2008 by the arrival of the area’s first new residents, in condominiums on the eastern edge of the property. In 2011, the population of the Flats was 373.
In January, the NCC made public two proposals to further develop LeBreton Flats, each boasting sports facilities, retail outlets, restaurants, condominiums, a library and public spaces. With public interest in the LeBreton Flats and its future renewed, the Citizen reached out to residents who, more than 50 years ago, were told to leave, and asked them to return, at least figuratively, to tell us what life was like there.
Judy Cosenzo turned 16 on July 25, 1964, a Saturday, and her family celebrated with a party that evening at their home at 31 Lett St., in LeBreton Flats. Her oldest brother, John, his wife, Margaret, and their children, who lived just across the street and down a few doors at 22 Lett, took part, as did some of Judy’s other siblings and relatives.
They had pasta for supper, and, to mark such a special occasion, a store-bought birthday cake for dessert. Judy wore a blue blouse and pleated skirt, and remembers scarcely seeing the living-room floor as her older brother Frankie Jr. spun her around to the music of Elvis Presley and Bill Haley.
She doesn’t recall any of her friends attending the party, though. “They had all moved away by then,” she says.
A week later, on Aug. 1, Judy and her family moved to Spruce Street, while John and Margaret and their brood left for nearby Rochester Street. They were the last families to leave the Flats. All their neighbours who lived between their two houses — the Zacconis, Rivets, Moores and Milks, the Tavernas, Craigs and Jim Dodds — had already left, taking their backyard chickens and basement winemaking with them. Even Joss and Rose Pasqua, who ran Pasqua’s Confectionery at the corner of Ottawa Street, where you could get an entire wheel of Parmesan cheese, were gone.
Two years earlier, in April 1962, the federal government announced it was expropriating the Flats to make way for a new Department of National Defence headquarters — the Pentagon of the North, it was dubbed. The announcement, Judy believes, was a contributing factor in her father, Frank’s death of a heart attack in 1963.
But by the summer of ’64, any misgivings they might have harboured about the expropriation had largely dissipated on piles of debris and clouds of dust.
“The houses would come down as people left,” recalls Laura Cosenzo (now Andrusek), the eldest of John and Margaret’s five children and nine years old when her family left the Flats. “I can remember walking to school. The industry was behind us as I walked south, and it was like … empty.
“But after all the houses being torn down, anywhere would have been better than that, because there were no kids to play with anymore.”
“The houses,” adds Judy — now McLellan, “were flattened. It was basically rubble.”
Until the expropriation notice, the Flats was a tightly-knit community, a mixture of residential, commercial and industrial buildings. The quieter streets teemed with children playing, while the backyards and alleyways were littered with cars either being worked on by their owners or abandoned.
The houses there abutted the sidewalks. When the Exhibition parade made its way through the Flats from Hull to Lansdowne Park, excited youngsters watched from up close.
Residents knew and looked out for one another. “It was a neighbourhood,” recalls Laura. “Everyone knew everyone else. You played outside. You weren’t supervised. You just went out.”
“And you knew,” cautions Judy, “that if you did anything wrong, it’d get to your parents before you got home. It was a real neighbourhood. You don’t get that anymore.”
After his tile business faltered in the Second World War, Judy’s father, Frank, started a taxi business — Frank’s Taxi — with a fleet of one. Customers called the house, at CE5-6326, where his wife, Emmabelle, and children knew to answer the phone by saying “Frank’s Taxi.” They’d write down the caller’s name and address, and then phone the Prescott Hotel on Preston Street, where whoever answered would relay the information to Frank, who ran his business from a small booth adjacent to the hotel. If Frank wasn’t in his booth or out with a fare, he might be in the bar, chatting with the boys, rarely but sometimes with a rye in his hand. He seldom drank, although the Sunday spaghetti dinner was the occasional exception, when he might cut a glass of red wine with cream soda.
Some of his customers were regulars: two women who worked at the Grace hospital, for example, one afflicted so severely with arthritis that she needed crutches to walk. And a pair of sisters — of the Catholic variety — who lived at the Saint-Jean-Baptiste convent on Empress Avenue and taught at Our Lady of Perpetual Help School on Eccles Street, where Judy, Laura and their siblings attended. Judy believed that it helped her standing there that her father drove the nuns to and from school.
But by the time the expropriation began, she was in high school, at Commerce, located then in the same building with Glebe Collegiate, at Carling and Bronson.
“I could have taken a bus from Spruce Street,” she recalls, “but I used to keep that money for cigarettes, from Frieda’s, on Gladstone. Two for a nickel. It was a confectionary-restaurant, with booths. We would go there for french fries and a Coke. And we could smoke there, and buy cigarettes. Player’s, I think. And that was after we’d been rolling them in the garage at Brazeau’s, when we were about 12.”
By then, the Flats was looking tired and rundown. The houses, most of them built to no particular code following the great fire of 1900, were showing their age, and residents typically didn’t have much money for maintenance, let alone renovations. The Gréber Report, meanwhile, recommended eliminating the heavy industry and railway tracks from Ottawa’s core, which meant that much of the Flats, including its housing, was doomed.
“I think if they had given people a choice,” says Laura, “most would have been happy to stay there.”
But it was time. While the Flats might not have been the filthy slum that planners described it as, it was on its way.
“But it was a good neighbourhood,” Judy says. “People looked out for one another and helped each other. It was a waste to put people out of their homes.”
These days, Laura lives in the Carlington area, while Judy lives in Carleton Place. Judy still stays in touch with an old friend from the Flats, but admits she rarely drives by the once-vibrant neighbourhood.
“It used to depress me to think that it had changed so much, and I had so much fun there and met so many people. There was a lot of love and caring.”
Laura recalls when the first condos were built on Lett Street, in 2008, and thinking at the time that it might be nice to live there again. “But it was like a ghost town. It would be like being the last people there again.
“So I’m hoping that whatever proposal they do, it gets done. And it’s affordable. Where’s the affordable housing? I’m afraid that’s going to be the last piece of the puzzle, or not one at all.
“But that’s the last piece of prime real estate. They’d better do a good job.”
“It would nice to see families there,” adds Judy. “A lot of values came out of there.”
You knew that if you did anything wrong, it’d get to your parents before you got home. It was a real neighbourhood.