From Tunney’s, past minaret and onion domes
More history unfolds on a tramp through Ottawa
For some reason, the grey squirrels have chosen just one large maple in the backyard of a tidy postwar home on busy Scott Street to build multiple nests. While the winter-born young grow inside, the grey world below goes about its business, and I continue eastward. At the corner of Scott and Sir Frederick Banting Driveway (after the insulin-associated Nobel Prize winner born in Ontario: came in fourth on the Greatest Canadians list; promises to do better next time), Tunney’s Pasture begins, taking up 50 hectares between Scott and the parkway.
The Tunney in Tunney’s Pasture was a farmer called Anthony, an Irishman who immigrated to Ottawa in the year of Confederation, built a home on Parkdale Avenue, and grazed cattle on the field beside him, with permission from a lumbermen’s association that owned the pasture. In the middle of the 20th century, the lumbermen’s association sold it to the government for the building of a campus dedicated to public service. Many of the original yellow brick buildings remain, but their simple grace has been overshadowed by the several Mussoliniesque grey towers on the campus that went up in the 1970s. I worked in one of these, writing for the Canada Year Book, which was axed in 2012. The best part of the day was walking up to Wellington Street at lunchtime.
The main entrance to the Pasture is at Holland Avenue. The Holland family that gave their name to the north-south arterial road were an interesting bunch, founding members of the Ottawa Land Association. Two of the Hollands, brothers Andrew and George, were entrepreneurs anxious to introduce new technologies to Ottawa, including the phonograph and the Vitascope, which they displayed for the first time in Canada in West End Park, where Fisher Park school is now.
A small stretch of car-related, pleasantly untidy buildings starts up after Holland on the south side, and in the window of one repair shop hangs a sign reading POWER IS NOTHING WITHOUT CONTROL. At first I think it has something to do with the present government, but it turns out to be a slogan designed to sell tires.
To complement the minaret of the Ottawa Mosque further west, the golden onion domes of the Russian Orthodox Church shine on the north side of the Transitway. Is there a connection between centres of spiritual gathering and interesting architecture? Each branch of the tree of religions seems to find an eye-catching way to point heavenwards. Certainly the religious centres across the city are becoming the bastions of non-greyness, while the towers of commerce have nothing to say.
And here, a little way after Parkdale which forms the boundary of Tunney’s Pasture and is lined by a wall of condos north of Scott, is the boarded up, abandoned Odawa Native Friendship Centre, formerly a school built in 1933. Snow has piled up the steps all the way to the front door, and the silence within reverberates. As recently as 2012, the centre was commenting on the presence of a rogue elk on Scott, calling it a good omen for Ottawa, but the police shot the elk, and the Odawa closed, moving to the City Centre. There is — surprise, surprise — an unfriendly argument going on between the city and a developer as to how tall the condos that will replace the centre should be.
Now the road reaches Bayswater Avenue and rises in a bridge over the railway lines, and on the south side the recently renovated, architectural oddity, the City Centre building. I can hear the noise of construction as I walk up the bridge, and at the crest the work site of the digging of the Confederation Line, due to mostly open 150 years after Anthony Tunney pastured his cows, is full of workers dressed to beat the endless cold snap.
The Tunney in Tunney’s Pasture was a farmer called Anthony, an Irishman ...