Posted Apr 10, 2020, 4:42 PM
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Join Date: May 2016
Location: Ottawa
Posts: 2,807
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Ottawa's story is interesting because many of Ottawa's inner urban neighbourhoods were actually once independent villages that were founded separately from Ottawa in the 19th century and were annexed to it in the 20th.
Only the innermost core of city (downtown, Sandy Hill, Lowertown, Centretown, Centretown West, Lebreton Flats) grew as expansions of the original Bytown settlement. All other urban neighbourhoods (the Glebe, Hintonburg, Mechanicsville, Westboro, Old Ottawa South, Old Ottawa East, New Edinburgh...) were founded as separate villages and then annexed to Ottawa later. Hintonburg, for example, was founded around 1870, incorporated as a village in 1893, and then annexed to Ottawa in 1907. Westboro was founded in the 1890s and wasn't annexed to Ottawa until 1950. (Fun fact: telephone numbers and mailing addresses in Westboro were officially listed as "Westboro, Ontario" until around 1975).
You can see the legacy of this in development patterns. If you take a long walk down the Richmond/Wellington West/Somerset corridor, you'll notice that there's these awkward sort of gaps of non-mainstreet development separating out the neighbourhoods of Westboro, Hintonburg, and Centretown West. Westboro's mainstreet sort of ends at Tweedsmuir, and it's not until Western Avenue (a good 5-10 minute walk to the east) that Hintonburg's streetwall starts, and in turn, this sort of ends around Spadina Avenue and doesn't pick up again until almost Preston Street. This is because Hintonburg and Westboro developed separately from Ottawa and at the time they were annexed, there were rural gaps separating them from the "city". In the case of the Westboro-Hintonburg gap, it's extremely jarring because the rural gap wasn't developed until the 1950s, so it's filled with suburban style development (a couple used car lots, a couple strip malls, a big box grocery store--which is a really huge contrast to the charming mainstreets on either side of it. In recent years that suburban development is being replaced with condo towers, but they're doing a really bad job integrating those condo towers into the street, so it still has this sterile feel and is not helping to bridge the gap at all, unfortunately.
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