IS OTTAWA, DARE WE SAY IT, LIVELY?
City is brimming with exciting, vibrant dining, arts and entertainment scenes
As Canada celebrates its sesquicentennial, what lies ahead for the city of Ottawa? In a series of stories and vignettes, the Citizen looks at how our city and its fabric, its people and its infrastructure, will change in the decades ahead. Today, we look at whether the town that fun forgot is actually finding its groove.
Alain Miguelez has little patience for those who perpetuate the old stereotype of Ottawa as a sluggish, sleepy place.
“It keeps getting repeated like a chant around a fire, some tribal incantation that we reinforce to ourselves,” the City of Ottawa planner sputters. “It’s really completely unfair and passé. It’s time to put an end to that.
“We’re one of the major cities in Canada. We’ve got a lot of good cultural offerings here. People come here to have fun. It’s something we should embrace.”
Whew. Good rant. But Miguelez is right: Ottawa’s dining, arts and entertainment scenes today are lively, varied and expanding rapidly.
“Those who don’t live in Ottawa think of it as a sleepy government town. But the reality is that there’s lots going on here now,” says Abacus Data CEO David Coletto.
He’s lived here, off and on, since 2000, and says it’s “a completely different place” now.
“Now we’ve got amazing restaurants and diversity, not just centred in one area, but different neighbourhoods. If I didn’t live in Ottawa, I might come here just to try all the cool restaurants and all the brew pubs and all the things that are making Ottawa a really interesting place.”
Growing up in Wellington West, Meredith Brown remembers being explicitly told to steer clear of Hintonburg. The 1980s and ’90s were unkind to the area, as it became wrought with prostitution, drug use and general uncleanliness.
“It was a pretty rough neighbourhood,” says Brown, who now manages the Hintonburg Public House, a restaurant and bar that features the work of local artists and craft beers.
Hintonburg has become the place Brown “wants to continue to live,” and she gives full credit to the community association for tackling the crime and literal filth that plagued the streets in her childhood.
“It’s becoming a destination,” says Brown, who attributes the area’s popularity to the “support local” trend.
Across town, the redevelopment of crumbling Lansdowne Park hasn’t pleased everyone, with some saying stores such as Winners make a mockery of the developers’ grandiose promise of a unique urban village.
But Coletto says the park’s remake has sparked a remarkable transformation of Bank Street in the Glebe.
“That area has now moved upscale. The Glebe always had some character and interesting shops, but now I think it’s gone up to the next level.”
And while he says Lansdowne’s programming needs work, urbanist George Dark calls the redeveloped park transformative.
“It’s the only thing you have that’s like that,” he says. “I’ve been there for Redblacks games. They’re extraordinary.”
There are vibrant cultural offerings on a lot of main streets, Miguelez says.
“Wellington West is one of those places where you can go on a Monday or Tuesday night and the bars are full and the venues are full. That’s Ottawa today.”
And indications are it’s only going to get better. For years, the Downtown Rideau BIA has tried to market the area as Ottawa’s arts, fashion and theatre district. It always seemed a bit of a stretch.
That’s about to change. The new Ottawa Art Gallery, built to the standards of a first-class museum, is set to open next October and renovated performance spaces in adjacent Arts Court will be up and running by the middle of 2018.
“It’s a full city block of culture, which we’ve never seen in the downtown core at the local level,” says Peter Honeywell, executive director of the Ottawa Arts Council. “It’s a really significant move.”
Add to that the $340-million makeover of the Rideau Centre and major renovations at the venerable Ottawa Little Theatre and La Nouvelle Scène, the city’s leading French theatre. Suddenly, Downtown Rideau’s boast appears quite credible.
“You’ve got all kinds of really interesting arts entities happening within one or two blocks of Rideau,” Honeywell says.
The proximity to the 75 restaurants and bars in the ByWard Market only enlarges the arts and theatre district, and light-rail transit will deliver the customers and audiences.
“It’s right there. It’s on our doorstep,” Honeywell says.
Ottawa is becoming an optimal development ground for young artists, says Pat Durr, one of the city’s pre-eminent visual artists.
“The new history is being farmed in these rooms,” Durr says, gesturing to the exhibitions featured at the Ottawa Art Gallery.
Durr, who made her debut in the arts scene in the 1960s, says representation of the arts in Ottawa has come a long way in the past half-century.
She says that in time for Expo 67 in Montreal, all major cities in Canada had a public gallery, except Ottawa. This prompted the Ottawa Art Association to hold annual exhibits to “stimulate public interest,” with an overarching message of “we need a public gallery.”
Today the National Gallery of Canada, SAW Gallery, Ottawa Art Gallery, Gallery 101, as well as smaller galleries at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University, offer plenty of wall space for artists from across the country with varying degrees of experience to showcase their work.
“It’s important to have a place where you come face to face with things that challenge you,” Durr says, stressing the important role the arts play in the community as well.
“We need to have a place where people are exposed to creativity. They don’t all become artists, but they become thinkers.”
Outside of the galleries, Durr hopes Ottawa will do a better job of integrating art into the cityscape. With the expansion of the light-rail transit system, the public commission program may be calling for more artists to spruce up bus stops and LRT stations, Durr says.
“Everybody needs some way to express their creativity,” Durr says, noting that the prominence of art throughout the city gives people “another way to look at the world, making them a happier, whole person.” Then there are the festivals. Ottawa already has the highest per capita audience attendance in the country, partly due to the sheer number of festivals in the city. While some traditional art forms, such as opera and classical music, are struggling to find audiences, Honeywell sees a lot of young music and theatre groups thriving.
“We are, I think, on top of something interesting. We’re starting to see it moving forward in the music area. We’re starting to see smaller, interesting music festivals.”
Ottawa has the potential to become a music city, a Canadian equivalent to Austin in the U.S., Honeywell says.
“With the right investment and the right sort of circumstances, Ottawa could really move into that Canadian niche.”
It all adds to the city’s outstanding qualify of life, judged to be the best in Canada — and 17th-best in the world — in two separate rankings in 2016.
Honeywell sees change in the way city hall views the arts, as well.
“I don’t think the arts need to bash our heads against the table at every budget and justify ourselves,” he says. “I’m finding more and more, the city gets it. They know there’s an economic benefit to the arts, there’s a social benefit, there’s a community benefit.”
(Not everyone shares that rosy view, it should be said: Festival organizers have criticized the city for not ramping up 2017 funding for their events sufficiently.)
To really unleash Ottawa’s talented artists, the city needs to collaborate more with arts organizations when choosing how to dispense its grant money, Honeywell says.
“They’ve been very paternal. I think there’s an opportunity in the next two or three years to shift the way we do things in this city and actually respect the creative strength of boards of directors.
“That’s the one big change that would make the city just absolutely go off the map.”