A century ago, the Ottawa of the future
Phil Jenkins, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: January 18, 2015, Last Updated: January 18, 2015 9:00 AM EST
Drawing No. 5 from the 1915 master plan for Canada's capital shows Elgin Street looking north.
I’m looking at the title page of
an old report. It informs me that this document is graciously submitted to the Minister of Finance by the Federal Plan Commission, and that it concerns a general plan for the cities of Ottawa and Hull. The date printed at the bottom of the frontispiece is 1915. Without the aid of a computer, I figure that was exactly a hundred ago, when the population of Ottawa was just under 100,000, and quite a few members of the males in that number were overseas trying not to get slaughtered.
The title page also lists the commissioners. Topping the list is a Sir, Sir Herbert S. Holt, and the report became known as the “Holt Commission” and the “Holt Plan.” Holt was once described as the richest man in Canada, and the most reviled. He was essentially a banker, and when his death in 1941 was announced at a baseball game in Montreal, where he lived, the crowd burst into hurrahs. The ideal man, then, to lead a commission tasked with designing the future Ottawa. Also on the commission was our mayor, Nelson Porter – a hockey player who scored the first competitive goal for the Ottawa Hockey Club – the mayor of Hull, and some lesser cheeses, including a gentleman delightfully called Home Smith, whom I suspect was English. The two mayors were ex-officio, and none of the main commissioners was from Ottawa.
In their introduction, the commissioners told the minister that they had taken a look at spiffing up “the location, laying out and beautification of parks and connecting boulevards, the location and architectural character of public buildings, and adequate and convenient arrangements for traffic and transportation with in the area in question.” The area was roughly what we would now call downtown Ottawa, Upper and Lower.
In 1992, the speculative-fiction novelist Robert Harris published Fatherland, which is set in 1964 Berlin and supposes that Hitler won the war. The book describes a Berlin rebuilt according to Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect. It will be interesting to go through the Holt Commission report and do a little “what if” of our own. Suppose, for the first time in the history of reports, everything recommended in the Federal Plan Commission Plan had been implemented, and remained intact up to the present day? How would the city look nowadays?
The Report has a speculative drawing at the back, Drawing Number 5, that depicts the northern portion of Elgin Street, river at the top, the three-year old Chateau Laurier and Union Station top right. The building mid-far right is the post office, and the town hall is opposite it on the extreme left. It’s as if you were standing on the bell tower of today’s city hall, looking north. I don’t know about you, but there is a hint of Washington’s Mall in it for me, and it epitomizes the word boulevard. It’s a ceremonial route. The dominant architectural style of the buildings lining the west side is Beaux-Arts, fashionable then following Chicago’s lead. The canal is below grade and skinnier than now, with the adjacent railway lines also down a level, which I appreciate. This is one of those old drawings and postcards of Ottawa that I’ve collected that I would to climb into and spend a day walking or cycling around. Judging by the traffic volume, the arrival of the car being only 15 years earlier, there would little chance of being a vehicular victim.
In its recommendations pertaining to building style and layout, the Commission was keen that Parliament Hill remain unhindered by “competitive development”, in other words that it be kept free and clear of view blockers, of tall buildings. (Those Parliament buildings would disappear the following year in a fire.) So, the commissioners recommended a city-wide bylaw that would cap all buildings to a height of 110 feet, with an even lower restriction at the edges, so that the maximum allowable development of 110 feet would occur at Sparks and O’Connor Streets, the lowest at Lyon Street, at 80 feet. As it happened, since a World War, a Depression, and another World War followed on, the 80 foot modification was not enacted, and the 110-foot limit presided for 50 years; then it went the way of the dodo. Now the sky’s the limit.
Look again at the picture, and you’ll notice park up in the very top right, along the west side of Sussex, with Nepean Point just discernable. The park is bigger than Major’s Hill, and to put it there now would involve removing elsewhere the Art Gallery and the American Embassy (OK by me as regards the latter). In the section devoted to parks and playgrounds, the Commission goes big; my 1915 Spring day tour would have provided many salubrious stopping points. The principles Holt et al laid down for the green parts of town were for a future city of 350,000, and they thought that “the parks should be brought to the people, instead of people being forced to travel long distances to the parks.” You can’t have too many parks. They also dictated, on the playground front, that “there will be a playfield of eight to 10 acres within one-half mile of any dweller in the city.” Their total playground count for Ottawa and Hull came to 46, which using their formula should put us at close to 200 today. I doubt there are that many, surely. Interesting to see on their schematic for parks that the Ottawa River islands are all coloured green, and that their Central Park is four times the size of the one we have now off Bank just south of the Queensway.
On the transportation side, I’ve spoken in the past in several columns about railways and subways, so won’t do so here, but the Holt Plan section on water transportation did intrigue me, given that I find our river woefully under enjoyed, and under employed. There was a ferry service at Edwards Dock then, at the foot of Crichton, which was a good idea in the wrong place. Myself, I’d gladly take a no-cars ferry with bicycle capacity between the Bytown museum and the Museum of Civilization. And is the revival of barges and passenger boats to Montreal as there was in 1915, this time electric, such a crazy idea?
Lack of money for remodeling, the national finances being siphoned off for foreign battle, meant that the Holt Commission’s plans for us never did get off, or into, the ground in any substantial way. But, if you have a moment, visit the Holt plan and take a virtual walk around the Ottawa that might have been. A nice place to visit.
The city had to wait almost half a century to get a good going over, and that arrived with the Frenchman Jacques Gréber’s plan, which completely reversed Holt’s intended railway scheme by yanking up the rails and shutting the downtown station. So Ottawa has been graced with a makeover plan every half century or so, which makes us due for another, perhaps this time with a major focus on the river. Any volunteers? Can we keep it in-house this time? Perhaps get the universities’ planning departments to have a go. Imagine.
Phil Jenkins is an Ottawa writer. Email
phil@philjenkins.ca.
http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/col...-of-the-future
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