RIVER REVIVAL
The Ottawa River used to be central to city life. After decades of neglect, Don Butler reports that connection is coming back.
On a crisp, sunny day in early November 1864, delegates from the Confederation conferences in Charlottetown and Quebec City boarded the steamer England for a river tour of Ottawa, this new country’s proposed capital.
Ottawa was still little more than a rough lumber town, and many delegates weren’t convinced it should be the capital. But the view from the Ottawa River surprised and impressed them, Queen’s University professor David Gordon recounts in Town and Crown, his 2015 illustrated history of the capital.
“The sun shone out gloriously, gilding land and water and rendering the scenery as beautiful as it can be,” the Toronto Globe’s correspondent gushed, adding that the nearly completed Parliament Buildings “could be seen to much greater advantage on the river than in the city.”
The Chaudière Falls, then running free, left the Fathers of Confederation gobsmacked, the Globe writer reported. “Our Guests gazed their fill on the seething, boiling Devil’s cauldron, and pronounced it the most beautiful scenery witnessed by them since Montmo-renci (sic) Falls.”
In the 152 years since that excursion, the central place of the Ottawa River in the life of the capital has faded. While other river cities have embraced the water, Ottawa and Gatineau have seemingly turned their backs to the river as each developed. Key institutions — the Parliament Buildings, the Supreme Court, Library and Archives Canada, the National Gallery of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mint — were all built facing inward, metaphorically cold-shouldering the historic waterway to their rear.
The rise and fall of the lumber trade, pollution, questionable planning decisions and the arrival of the automobile all played a role in the decline of the river’s onceflourishing culture.
The river remains incredibly important to Ottawa and to Gatineau. For one thing, it provides a plentiful and reliable supply of clean drinking water. But, says Carleton University professor Randy Boswell, “It isn’t at the centre of our consciousness as a city.”
“There’s no doubt that people don’t understand how important the river is to their life,” says Ottawa Riverkeeper Meredith Brown. “There’s a of people who love it, and it really invokes this sense of passion and values. But really, fundamentally, I think most people have lost touch with the fact that the river is sustaining us. We need this river.”
Those perceptions are almost certain to change over the next decade or so. Thanks to initiatives of the National Capital Commission and other projects that will restore public access to the islands and lands around the dammed — but still awe-inspiring — cauldron at Chaudière Falls, a river renaissance seems imminent.
It’s being driven by several happenings: the planned redevelopment of LeBreton Flats; the creation of linear waterfront parks and other new access points on both sides of the river; Ottawa Hydro’s new generating station at Chaudière Falls; and Windmill’s adjacent development on 37 acres of islands and shoreline.
Adding impetus is the Ottawa River Action Plan, the City of Ottawa’s strategy to improve the quality of the river’s water, as well as its designation last month as one of 39 Canadian Heritage Rivers.
Over many decades, the NCC and its predecessors have gradually repatriated industrial waterfronts in the capital into the public realm. “If the 20th century was the era of reclaiming those lands and making them picturesque,” says Mark Kristmanson, the NCC’s chief executive officer, “I think the 21st century will be the century to reactivate and reanimate them.”
Ironically, past planning decisions probably contributed to the Ottawa River’s 20th-century eclipse. The 1960s’ demolition of LeBreton Flats forced the relocation of thousands of residents who had direct access to the river. And while the NCC’s decision to build parkways on riverfront lands protected them from development, it also separated communities from the water.
“Just try to get to the river shoreline in Ottawa,” says Boswell, who grew up in a small riverside town in Ontario. “I was down at the river every day. I was fishing, I was walking across the dam, I was swimming, I was in a boat. That’s not easy to do when you have to lug your boat three kilometres to get to a place where you can put it in the river.”
“I go out on the river and it’s insane,” marvels Meredith Brown. Particularly on weekdays, “there’s nobody out there.”
That wasn’t always the case. “There was a time when people were socializing on the river,” Brown says. Boaters would arrive for weekend parties. Steamboat trips and excursions were popular for about a century. Logging industry shantytowns dotted the shorelines. “There was a lot more life on the river than there is now,” she says.
Stephen Willis, until recently the NCC executive director of capital planning, acknowledges the riverfront lands haven’t been used to their full potential. “But the fact that they actually are secured in public control means that we’re not trying to carve out little tiny chunks of waterfront space like they have to do in Brooklyn or .Toronto,” he says.
“We actually have the land already. So we’re a step ahead of many other communities, who would envy what we have right now. So now it’s all about, what can you do with it?”
Under Kristmanson, improving public access and adding new connections to the capital’s shorelines and waterways has become the NCC’s second-highest priority, behind only the redevelopment of LeBreton Flats.
“There’s a real appetite for this,” he says. “That’s what we’re seeing in the community. People are looking for those lateral connections to use those waterfront lands in new ways.
“What will give our capital its future distinctive signature?” Kristmanson asks. “I think the shorelines are a big part of that. This is an asset that other cities don’t have.”
The draft Plan for Canada’s Capital, the NCC’s 50-year planning document, lists more than a dozen key policy directions in its chapter on shorelines and waterways. One, for example, says that the NCC and its federal partners “will improve waterway lands to regain the flourishing water culture that has been lost in the past 50 years.”
As well as developing the longdormant lands on LeBreton Flats and creating new parks and access points on both sides of the Ottawa River, the NCC wants to rejuvenate Nepean Point, a stunning river lookout, and create a continuous “multi-use promenade” along the river from the Rideau Canal east to Rideau Falls, incorporating Lady Grey Drive, currently all but invisible.
Lady Grey Drive, says Willis, “was meant to be a major public promenade, but the whole city turns its back on that space. It’s very much our backyard, but it could be our front yard.”
While the new generating station now under construction at Chaudière Falls appears to eliminate any possibility of freeing the falls from the existing ring dam that regulates water flow, it will provide direct public access to the cataract as early as next summer.
“This will reopen what was essentially a wonder of the world for the first time in about a century,” Kristmanson says.
“In August and September, there is no better place to be than standing out there above those falls, looking out at the Ottawa River,” rhapsodizes Bryce Conrad, Hydro’s president and CEO. “You have no sense of the true power of that water flow until you’re standing 30 feet above it.”
Windmill’s Zibi development, which will take as long as 12 years to complete, straddles Chaudière and Albert islands and the adjacent Gatineau shoreline.
It is bitterly opposed by nine recognized Algonquin nations that consider the site to be sacred, but they have so far failed to block it. Construction of its first phase is scheduled to begin next year.
Once the $1.2-billion project is complete, as many as 3,500 people will live there and as many again will work there. There will be cafés, patios and shops to serve residents and workers and attract visitors.
“Success for us would be if we could ask citizens of Gatineau and Ottawa, ‘Do they live in a waterfront city?’ and the answer would be ‘yes’,” says Jeff Westeinde, the Windmill Development Group’s executive director. “Because currently, not many would say yes.”
Riverkeeper Brown, for one, likes the proposed changes, though she has some reservations. She’s thrilled by Hydro’s plan to reopen public access to Chaudière Falls. “How many people have driven across (the Chaudière Bridge) and craned their necks over and said, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ To be able to bring people there to really see it and feel it and enjoy it is fantastic.”
In adding activities, the NCC shouldn’t lose sight of something that’s “absolutely priceless,” Brown says.
“We’re living in the capital city of Canada, but you can go down to the river in places and you can lose yourself. You don’t feel like you’re in the city. If we lose that, we’re fools.”
Getting people living along the river again, in places such as Zibi and LeBreton Flats, is the key to its revival, Boswell believes. “The river is going to be reasserted as a feature of the city.”
Brown, who has seen a huge change in people’s embrace of the river over time, agrees. “It’s a pretty amazing thing that we have flowing through our backyard,” she says. “That river belongs to all of us. It’s really important that everybody connect with it.”