This was to have been a post just for infrastructure geeks, demonstrating the process of road building ca. 1910 through a series of photos from the City of Ottawa Archives. The steps in laying a good roadbed haven't changed that much in a hundred years. But these pictures revealed more than that. Spotted in the distance were two of Ottawa's most archivally illusive vanished buildings.
This is a view of the new road going in on Slater Street looking east from Lyon Street. They started by pouring the concrete sidewalks - massively deep judging by the boy sitting on the edge of the new sidewalk on the left. To form the street bed crushed rock was added in graduated layers of decreasing sizes, then graded and compacted.
The changes in the streetscape from the early 1900s to the early 2000s are total. There isn't a trace of the old to make a good then and now comparison - but here is the same block of Slater, just so you'll know where we are (were).
West of Bank was a mix of industrial and residential uses. The Ottawa Car Company was a complex of assembly buildings that filled most of the block between Slater and Albert Streets west of Kent and east of Lyon. They manufactured carriages, railway cars, and streetcars. Founded in 1891, it was the manufacturing arm of the Ottawa Electric Railway Company, controlled by Thomas Ahearn and Warren Soper. The photo shows the final stages of road making. The last layer of gravel was down, and paving was about the begin.
The block was rephotographed in 1938 by the Department of Public Works. (Library and Archives Canada - this is one of a vast collection recently digitized from large format negatives.) By the late 1930s Slater Street hadn't changed that much. The sidewalks were still in good shape, and the company had become Ottawa Car and Aircraft Limited. It might even be the same pavement .
To finish the surface steam rollers compressed the asphalt, a hot bituminous mixture of tar and granular material.
It likely came from Ottawa's asphalt plant on Booth Street, where barrels of tar were melted, mixed with the gravel, and hauled away in horse-drawn carts. Smelly work.
While putting shots of the paving sequence into order, a tall thin church spire kept reappearing in the distance. It looked somewhat like the steeple on Christ Church Cathedral, but the direction was wrong.
And then I discovered this picture of the Bank Street Presbyterian Church from the same angle. Its spire, which was uncommonly thin, stood over 120 feet high.
The stone church had been built at the northwest corner of Bank and Slater Streets in the late 1860s.
The was the Sunday School. When the church was sold to the Booth family for redevelopment in 1912 (as the site of the future
Jackson Building) the congregation moved into a much grander edifice, the
Chalmers Presbyterian Church at O'Connor and Cooper - now the
Dominion Chalmers United Church.
The fire insurance atlas plate from the same year shows the church, the streetcar works, and a third building - the Central School on Kent Street.
Peeking out from beside the gambrel-roofed dormers on these rowhouses in one of the paving series pictures is an octagonal cupola.
It is Central Ward West School's bell tower. The school stood on the east side of Kent Street between what is now Laurier Avenue and Kent Street. The Central School was built in 1869 when public education had briefly been the responsibility of municipal government, and new school buildings were built based on the city's ward system. Although it operated for almost a hundred years, very few photographs of the Kent Street school are known to exist and
Heritage Ottawa lists it as one of the city's preeminent 'Lost Buildings'..
Looking down Kent Street from Queen in the late 1930s, amongst this nondescript melange you would have seen a square building at the left in the middle distance.
Again, the comparison with the same corner today shows a very different place.
Zooming in on the old photo, there it is - sandwiched between a billboard and an oval Imperial Oil sign - the Kent Street/Central Ward School. Sometime after the paving pictures were taken the third floor had been raised, and the cupola seems to have gone.
Looking north up Kent from Laurier in a 1938 shot, the school made another appearance. Judging by the number of kids it must have been taken on a school day.
The same corner today. I angled the direction to capture a glimpse of the
Justice Building, the only point of comparison between the then and now views.
There was a large paved school yard around the school. In the 1960s it was closed and sold to the Campeau Corporation for the Journal Towers.
This was to have been a post just for infrastructure geeks, demonstrating the process of road building ca. 1910 through a series of photos from the City of Ottawa Archives. The steps in laying a good roadbed haven't changed that much in a hundred years. But these pictures revealed more than that. Spotted in the distance were two of Ottawa's most archivally illusive vanished buildings.
This is a view of the new road going in on Slater Street looking east from Lyon Street. They started by pouring the concrete sidewalks - massively deep judging by the boy sitting on the edge of the new sidewalk on the left. To form the street bed crushed rock was added in graduated layers of decreasing sizes, then graded and compacted.
The changes in the streetscape from the early 1900s to the early 2000s are total. There isn't a trace of the old to make a good then and now comparison - but here is the same block of Slater, just so you'll know where we are (were).
West of Bank was a mix of industrial and residential uses. The Ottawa Car Company was a complex of assembly buildings that filled most of the block between Slater and Albert Streets west of Kent and east of Lyon. They manufactured carriages, railway cars, and streetcars. Founded in 1891, it was the manufacturing arm of the Ottawa Electric Railway Company, controlled by Thomas Ahearn and Warren Soper. The photo shows the final stages of road making. The last layer of gravel was down, and paving was about the begin.
The block was rephotographed in 1938 by the Department of Public Works. (Library and Archives Canada - this is one of a vast collection recently digitized from large format negatives.) By the late 1930s Slater Street hadn't changed that much. The sidewalks were still in good shape, and the company had become Ottawa Car and Aircraft Limited. It might even be the same pavement .
To finish the surface steam rollers compressed the asphalt, a hot bituminous mixture of tar and granular material.
It likely came from Ottawa's asphalt plant on Booth Street, where barrels of tar were melted, mixed with the gravel, and hauled away in horse-drawn carts. Smelly work.
While putting shots of the paving sequence into order, a tall thin church spire kept reappearing in the distance. It looked somewhat like the steeple on Christ Church Cathedral, but the direction was wrong.
And then I discovered this picture of the Bank Street Presbyterian Church from the same angle. Its spire, which was uncommonly thin, stood over 120 feet high.
The stone church had been built at the northwest corner of Bank and Slater Streets in the late 1860s.
The was the Sunday School. When the church was sold to the Booth family for redevelopment in 1912 (as the site of the future Jackson Building) the congregation moved into a much grander edifice, the Chalmers Presbyterian Church at O'Connor and Cooper - now the Dominion Chalmers United Church.
The fire insurance atlas plate from the same year shows the church, the streetcar works, and a third building - the Central School on Kent Street.
Peeking out from beside the gambrel-roofed dormers on these rowhouses in one of the paving series pictures is an octagonal cupola.
It is Central Ward West School's bell tower. The school stood on the east side of Kent Street between what is now Laurier Avenue and Kent Street. The Central School was built in 1869 when public education had briefly been the responsibility of municipal government, and new school buildings were built based on the city's ward system. Although it operated for almost a hundred years, very few photographs of the Kent Street school are known to exist and Heritage Ottawa lists it as one of the city's preeminent 'Lost Buildings'..
Looking down Kent Street from Queen in the late 1930s, amongst this nondescript melange you would have seen a square building at the left in the middle distance.
Again, the comparison with the same corner today shows a very different place.
Zooming in on the old photo, there it is - sandwiched between a billboard and an oval Imperial Oil sign - the Kent Street/Central Ward School. Sometime after the paving pictures were taken the third floor had been raised, and the cupola seems to have gone.
Looking north up Kent from Laurier in a 1938 shot, the school made another appearance. Judging by the number of kids it must have been taken on a school day.
The same corner today. I angled the direction to capture a glimpse of the Justice Building, the only point of comparison between the then and now views.
There was a large paved school yard around the school. In the 1960s it was closed and sold to the Campeau Corporation for the Journal Towers.
Amazing view through history. Really enjoyed this post. I have a fondness for the Crowne Plaza. Ottawa's only nesting Peregrine Falcons have used the shelter under the penthouse overhang for their nest sites for over a decade now.
ReplyDeleteThank you, MidCentury Modernist, for the detailed comments of the Then and Now photos. I quite enjoy the seeing the differences and changes in Ottawa, all the while being nostalgic/being bitter at the obliteration of heritage/history.
ReplyDeleteAn Ottawa railfan, hoping that Union Station will be revived....
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