Ottawa: Then and Now

[MoreTrains]

Originally Posted by Uhuniau

Canada in general has a shortage of brass bands and marching bands. We oughta do something about that.

Part of that was due to major cutting of federal funds to military bands in the late 60s early 70s. There are currently no Army bands on strength of the regular Armed Forces. There are two Navy brass bands, an Air Force Brass band and an Air Force Pipes and Drums band. There was in the past though, associated to every infantry regiment in the forces, a band. Those bands that still exist and are not the aforementioned are currently required to be self-sufficient and sometimes even require players to purchase their own instruments. I am sure if the Armed Forces returned to funding these bands we would have many more local bands as there would be a larger pool of retirees and such to fill out their ranks.

[Uhuniau]

Originally Posted by MoreTrains

Part of that was due to major cutting of federal funds to military bands in the late 60s early 70s. There are currently no Army bands on strength of the regular Armed Forces. There are two Navy brass bands, an Air Force Brass band and an Air Force Pipes and Drums band. There was in the past though, associated to every infantry regiment in the forces, a band. Those bands that still exist and are not the aforementioned are currently required to be self-sufficient and sometimes even require players to purchase their own instruments. I am sure if the Armed Forces returned to funding these bands we would have many more local bands as there would be a larger pool of retirees and such to fill out their ranks.

They don't have to be military.

[MoreTrains]

Originally Posted by Uhuniau

They don't have to be military.

I know, but the retirees would likely want to continue their passion for music through creating civilian bands. Thats mostly what I was getting at.

[rocketphish]

The Ahearns: Descendants of 'Ottawa's Edison' say city's greatest innovator is unsung

Bruce Deachman, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: February 19, 2016 | Last Updated: February 19, 2016 12:38 PM EST


Thomas Ahearn, Mayor Thomas Birkett, city council members and other guests take the first street car to Ottawa's Exhibition Grounds, 1891.

In one of three stories looking at living descendants of Ottawa’s founding families, Bruce Deachman spoke to Robert Toller and Jane MacTavish, great-grandchildren of Thomas Ahearn, “Ottawa’s Edison.”

lmost three years after writing him, Robert Toller is still hoping to hear back from Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson.

In his letter dated Dec. 18, 2012, Toller congratulated the mayor for his role in bringing light rail to Ottawa, and then got to the nut of the matter: His great-grandfather, he wrote, was an early adopter, inventor and visionary behind what today is OC Transpo, and helped completely transform Ottawa in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Currently, however, the only public tribute to Thomas Ahearn — known as “Ottawa’s Edison” — is a bronze bust that was once part of a public drinking fountain at Lansdowne Park. The bust is expected to again find a home at Lansdowne, in the small plaza at Bank and Holmwood, no later than next spring. But perhaps, wrote Toller, Ahearn’s name might also be given to one of the LRT stations.

“Considering what that man did for this city,” says Toller, “I always thought he was unsung.”

Neither Toller nor his cousin Jane MacTavish, who are neighbours in Chelsea, ever met Ahearn — he died in 1938 at 83, before either was born — but MacTavish recalls her mother, Lilias Janet Southam, of another famous Ottawa clan, describing him as a doting father and grandfather.

“She adored him. She and her first cousin, Joan Ahearn, used to go over to his house in Nanny Goat Hill. They were picked up after school on Friday afternoon by his chauffeur, whose name was Read, and they’d go to the house and have tea, and then their grandfather would come home from wherever he was, and they would play with him. Then they’d bathe and be put to bed, and the next morning was the best; they’d wake up and get into bed with grandpa, and he was just a fund of stories. He’d tell them all these wonderful stories, and then they’d have breakfast with him.”

MacTavish likes, too, to recount the story of how Ahearn was tossed out of the Catholic college he attended for kicking a priest. “He used to tell people that he graduated over the back fence. The story goes that he was excommunicated.”

If an ecclesiastical upbringing wasn’t the ideal fit for Ahearn, it wasn’t for a lack of smarts on his part. His aptitude for things mechanical and electrical revealed itself at a young age, when, as a teen, he devised a series of electrical relays to allow his mother, in frail health and often bedridden, to open the front door of their LeBreton Flats home without having to get up.

From there it was one innovation and invention after another. His career began as a messenger for the Montreal Telegraph Company, its Ottawa quarters located in J.R. Booth’s office. In 1881, at the age of 26, he and partner Warren Soper founded Ahearn & Soper, an electrical contracting outfit that brought electricity and outdoor lighting to Ottawa. In 1892, he filed a patent for the first electric oven, which was showcased the following year at the World’s Fair in Chicago. He also had the patent for a system to heat streetcars using electrically heated water.

Ahearn also made the first long-distance phone call from Ottawa, in 1878, calling Pembroke using a pair of telephones he made from wires, magnets and cigar boxes.

He founded and was president of the Ottawa Electric Railway Company, providing Ottawa its streetcar service. He also manufactured streetcars that were used not only in Ottawa, but across North America, and devised a large electric spinning brush so that the cars could clear tracks of snow and thus be used throughout the winter in northern cities.

“When you think of the infrastructure of all the track and snow systems back then, and the fact that it was all locally done, it was quite pioneering.

“He was this interesting guy who came along at a time when ingenuity was something you could sell well.”

In 1927, Prime Minister Mackenzie King appointed Ahearn the first chairman of the Federal District Commission, which later became the National Capital Commission. It was during Ahearn’s five-year term there that the region’s parkways and the Champlain Bridge were developed.

“I remember my mom saying, ‘My grandfather built this bridge,’” recalls MacTavish.

In 1948, Ahearn sold his transit system to the City of Ottawa for $6.3 million, the equivalent today of $66.2 million.

Ahearn married twice, first to Lilias Mackey Fleck, and then to Margaret Howett Fleck. His first marriage produced two children: Frank, a member of Parliament and the owner of the original Ottawa Senators, and Lilias, who married Ottawa Citizen publisher Harry Southam.

Toller sees something of Ahearn in his family, particularly in his son, Chris, an engineer. “I think there’s some of that ingenuity and drive in him, whether he realizes how far up the family chain it came from.

“Between Ahearn and Southam,” he adds, “for us to be born into that pairing is pretty amazing when you think of the influence. Southam was national, and Ahearn more local, but the impact is remarkable. That’s what marvels me as a descendant of all this. That amazing ingenuity back in a time when you pretty much had to hammer everything out yourself. And to think of the influence of both those families on the development of Ottawa, and the philanthropy, it’s really something.”

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http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news...n-say-citys-greatest-innovator-is-unsung

[Norman Bates]

20 some years ago I worked with a Chris Ahearns who was a foreign service officer here in Ottawa.

[rocketphish]

The Booths: A famous name (and nose) mostly a blessing, sometimes a curse

Bruce Deachman, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: February 19, 2016 | Last Updated: February 19, 2016 12:36 PM EST


John Rudolphus Booth stands beside a rail car of his timber.

In one of three related stories looking for living descendants of Ottawa’s founding families, Bruce Deachman talks with lumber baron J.R. Booth’s great-grandson John (Rowley) Booth.

John Booth jokes that when he first walked into Ottawa’s Trinity College, people said, “Oh, there’s J.R.”

“Because somehow through the generations, the nose profile hasn’t changed a whole lot.”

Indeed, the 71-year-old Ottawa businessman, who now lives in Nepean, did inherit his great-grandfather’s prominent nose — and some of his wealth — but not a lot else. The original J.R. — John Rudolphus — was shrewd and frugal. His successful bid to provide all the wood for the original Parliament Buildings, for example, undercut his competitors by using unemployed longshoremen from Montreal to cut trees for much less than the going rate.

“I’m told I’m much more like my grandfather,” says John, “in that I deal with people well.”

His great-grandfather, known as The Great J.R., lived to nearly 99 — outliving five of his eight children — and worked almost until the very end of his very long life.

When J.R. wanted to secure a princely $45,000 loan to buy 250 square miles of timber rights for the Parliament job, and the bank asked what collateral he had, he famously held out his hands and said, “These.” The story may be apocryphal, but it’s not out of keeping with what we know of the Bytown lumber baron who arrived in 1852 with nine dollars in his pocket and went on to become the largest timber-limits owner in the British Empire and a major player in shaping of the nation’s capital.

“If J.R. had lived in any other area in Canada except Ottawa,” says John, “he’d be a really famous man. I mean, a lot of people remember who he is if you’ve been in Ottawa, and you’ll see references here and there, but because Ottawa was the political capital of the country, business was just business.”

Up at 5 a.m. each day and always dressed in shabby work clothes, J.R. founded the region’s lumber industry, oversaw the country’s largest privately owned railroad, and became a shipping magnate. He and his descendants shaped Ottawa, establishing a hospital and building churches and mansions, Union Station, a YMCA and day nursery. He was friends with both Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir Wilfrid Laurier, although he ultimately helped defeat Laurier over reciprocity. The Booth, Transportation and Jackson buildings, all eventually expropriated by the federal government and the NCC, are among the Booth family’s legacies, while a pair of Booth streets, one each in Ottawa and Gatineau, and Booth Road, at Kingsmere, are named for them. A new breed of chrysanthemum, developed at the Experimental Farm, was also given J.R.’s name.

Among Canada’s richest men, his estate was probated at $23 million when he died in 1925, the equivalent today of more than $300 million. The total would have been higher, but for some “gifts” he gave to family members before his death. The family paid more than $4 million in succession duties following his death, but a dozen years later, the Ontario government claimed it was owed more, and changed existing legislation that might have prevented it from collecting an additional $3 million from the Booth family.

“Here’s the crowning thing,” says John. “If you take all the wealthy families in Canada today, the really old-school wealthy families, most of them came from the booze business, which was illegal. So they didn’t pay taxes; it was all cash. So what J.R. did was that much more impressive.

“But I heard he was tough,” John adds. “He didn’t suffer fools at all, and took no prisoners.”

John (also a J.R.; his middle name is Rowley) never met his famous forebear; the elder Booth died 19 years before John’s birth in 1944. But the old man’s forceful personality and enduring legacy were never far away.

“Growing up being a part of a wealthy family has its challenges. There is an expectation that you should be as great as your great-grandfather, or a complete failure. Either way, you will be judged and it is difficult.”

John was 10 or 12 when he became aware of his family’s significance in Ottawa.

“When you’re a kid, you don’t know that you’re from a wealthy family; it’s just a family. We spent summers in Montebello at the Seigniory Club. I called it going to the cottage, although it was everything but.”

It wasn’t until he attended Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B. that John discovered a downside to his life of privilege. The school’s winter carnival included a performance by Ian and Sylvia Tyson, who only months earlier had released their biggest hit song, Four Strong Winds. Booth recalls that copies of the January 1964 Chatelaine magazine, featuring the folk duo on its cover, were plastered all over the campus. Before long, however, students began reading another story in that issue, titled The Booths of Ottawa. “No Canadian family,” wrote Doris French in her article, “has left a greater impression on Ottawa than the Booths.”

“So all of a sudden people put two and two together,” recalls John. “Until then I was just John Booth; nobody knew who the hell I was. I had the freedom to be a university student without ever thinking about the old Ottawa name and all that went with it.

“It came as a shock, because what happened was that I gained some new friends – that, I expected. But I lost some friends that I’d made down there, and that was really hurtful and upsetting. I challenged them on it, and their response was that they couldn’t co-exist with me because they weren’t in the same class, financially. And I thought that was really sad.”

John was briefly raised at his grandfather Jackson’s home at 252 Metcalfe St. The house was built shortly after the Ottawa fire of 1900, which destroyed J.R.’s home.

He was only three years old when his family sold the brick, turreted mansion to the Laurentian Club, an exclusive businessmen’s enclave of which Jackson and his brother, Fred, were members, and of which John was later president.

“I like to joke that I was conceived in the bar of the Laurentian Club,” says John. “My parents’ bedroom actually became the bar there.”

Soon after the sale of the Metcalfe Street house, John’s father, Rowley, built another, in Rockcliffe. John and his brother, William, attended Ashbury, where each was head boy.

And while it may dwarf in comparison to J.R.’s contributions, John, too, had a hand in helping shape Ottawa.

After the massive Canada Day festivities on Parliament Hill in 1967, about a decade followed without July 1 celebrations there. Then one year, John’s lawyer and accountant, Bernie Shinder, held a Canada Day picnic at Vincent Massey Park, to which, John recalls, 25,000 people showed up. The event was subsequently moved to Parliament Hill, and John was asked to join Shinder’s group of organizers. Around 1980, John was asked to take over, which he did until 1985, after which the NCC assumed control. “It was a whole lot of fun,” John recalls. He offered to continue organizing the event for another 10 years, but never received a reply from the NCC.

“But being part of J.R.’s legacy feels really good,” he says. “I’m certainly proud to be Canadian, and proud to be from Ottawa.

“I’ve had a great life so far, and while not having the great successes, business-wise, that my great grandfather had, have had my own successes. Also, I have three wonderful sons, four grandchildren and lifelong friends, which make my life a success. I’ve experienced several close calls with death and have learned what is ultimately most important in life: Love.”

[email protected]

http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news...nose-mostly-a-blessing-sometimes-a-curse

[rocketphish]

The Wrights, the Sparks (and more): Wayne Lester is the Kevin Bacon of Ottawa ancestry

Bruce Deachman, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: February 19, 2016 | Last Updated: February 19, 2016 4:22 PM EST



In one of three stories looking to find living area descendants of the families that built Ottawa, Bruce Deachman speaks with Kanata resident Wayne Lester, great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Philemon Wright, the Ottawa area’s first settler and founder of what is now the Hull sector of Gatineau. Lester is also related to Nicholas Sparks.

Wayne Lester may well be the Kevin Bacon of Ottawa ancestry, with no more than a handful of degrees of separation between him and who knows how many of the city’s founding families.

As a youngster growing up in City View, relatives often told him of his roots: “We’re descendants of Philemon Wright.” “You’re related to Nicholas Sparks.”

To a 10- or 12-year-old boy, though, these ties to some of the region’s foremost settlers seemed just vague statements or unverified legends of a long-distant past. Like the lists of British kings memorized in school, they were far from the things that then interested him.

“I didn’t follow up with the right questions while my parents or grandmother was alive,” he recalls. “‘Tell me more about my grandfather Horace Sparks. Do you know anything of his father, George Alexander Sparks?’ And ‘How far back can you remember?’ It’s the farthest thing from your mind. I listened but didn’t pursue it.”

It wasn’t until 1996, when the then-51-year-old left his job with Bell Canada and entered semi-retirement that the time, interest and resources to start navigating his family tree came together.

The stories proved true, and then some. Initially researching his mother’s side of the family tree – her name was Mavis Sparks – Lester discovered that he was a direct descendant of Nicholas Sparks’s brother, George, who emigrated from Ireland to Ottawa in 1824, eight years after his better-known brother. Like Nicholas, George came to the area to start a new life farming.

While George eventually bought land and settled near Moodie Drive, it was Nicholas who indelibly stamped his name on the history of Ottawa. In charge of Wright’s stables and regularly travelling to Montreal and Quebec to purchase supplies for Wright, he fastidiously saved his earnings, and in 1821 bought 200 acres of land across the Ottawa River from Wrightstown, land that is now the capital’s most valuable.

At the time, his property, bound by Wellington, Bronson, Laurier and Waller streets, had little more than a log cabin on it.

“He wanted to get set up in business for himself as soon as he could, and maybe he couldn’t afford to buy on the Quebec side,” says Lester.

Sparks eventually established himself in a stone house on Wellington Street around 1830. “That’s when he became a land baron and got into all kinds of things.”

“When he first saw the land he bought, he probably took a deep breath and thought, ‘What the hell have I done here? Why did I buy all this scrubland?’ But he needed a place for himself. He wanted to be able to take care of himself.

“There were lots of people who came here who didn’t have enthusiasm, who just wanted to survive. But Nicholas saw a different way of life. He saw an opportunity to make money. It seems that whatever he touched turned to gold. He had good business sense. They say he was really good with numbers; he didn’t need a pad of paper to work things out. He was very smart.”

Lester later began climbing the Wright family tree, and learned of his direct descent from the region’s first family. He is the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Philemon Wright, the region’s first permanent settler, arriving from Woburn, Massachusetts in 1800 with five families, at first farming the area, and later adding lumbering to his empire. In 1806, he floated a raft of timber to Quebec City, launching the region’s lumber trade.

“It pulls you into local history,” Lester says of his ancestry research. “You have to read a bit to find out what happened to a person; you read about the local history of an area, and you get a sense of how people lived in certain areas at a certain time.

“I think of Philemon Wright and what his thought process might have been. He’s living on established farmland in Massachusetts and was fairly wealthy. And I guess he had the desire to move away and do his own thing. He must have had some idea. His originally idea was to start something in Hull, but not necessarily to settle there. But at some point he must have thought ‘I wouldn’t mind living here,’ so they brought their families and stayed here.

“In school you learn about the kings and queens, and the feudal system and the Plains of Abraham. Those are historical markers. But nobody said ‘Do you realize that this city was founded by a guy named Nicholas Sparks, and a handful of others? And they started in a log cabin, probably as poor as church mice. And look at all this around you now; this prized piece of property with all these buildings on it. And it all started with one small person.”

Among the surprises Lester discovered along the way was that his parents were fourth cousins, once removed, by marriage. He also learned of his direct relation to Richard Lester, a stonemason who helped build the original Parliament Buildings. When he first arrived here from England in 1857, Richard Lester wrote in his diary: “My heart failed within me. I thought I had made a sad mistake in coming to Ottawa. Comparing it to London, it looked like a group of rabbit hutches.” Lester Road, near the airport, was named for his family.

Lester also discovered he was related to George Clarke, who first settled the Hazeldean area where Lester currently lives with his wife, Deborah.

“For those of us in endless pursuit of our family history, we tend to subconsciously trace out our physical features, strengths, and weaknesses through the family line. We learn what motivated our ancestors to adopt the lives they led. It’s always a source of true amazement when we put our ourselves in the shoes of our ancestors to feel what they felt, see what they saw and imagine what it would have been to live in their times. It’s like peering into a time capsule. To learn that one’s ancestry flows from several connected Bytown first families is a golfer’s hole-in-one. One can’t help but feel a sense of personal pride knowing you are part of local history prominence.”

[email protected]

http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news...er-is-the-kevin-bacon-of-ottawa-ancestry

[rocketphish]

Expectations of grandeur: The Lord Elgin turns 75

Randy Boswell, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: February 26, 2016 | Last Updated: February 26, 2016 2:18 PM EST



The Lord Elgin hotel is now a stately landmark in downtown Ottawa, but it was almost built as a boxy budget hotel — until Prime Minister Mackenzie King got involved. Randy Boswell shares three inside stories from a book he wrote for the hotel to mark its 75th birthday on Saturday, Feb. 27.

Planning a hotel for a wartime capital: “I had to use some shenanigans”

On May 3, 1940, a meeting was held between Prime Minister Mackenzie King, Ford Hotels president Jack Udd and Redverse Pratt, manager of the city’s hotel sub-committee headed by alderman Chester Pickering. The group had been working hard to secure a major new hotel for Ottawa, which was badly needed to accommodate the military personnel converging daily on the wartime capital.

The lobbyists pitched King on the idea of building an Ottawa branch of the Ford chain on land along Elgin Street recently acquired by the federal government. But the prime minister quickly nixed any plan for a standard, boxy, brick-faced Ford Hotel with its uninspired architecture and cheap construction materials.

“I gave them to understand that the government would probably consider favourably the erection of a first class hotel in that locality, providing it fitted into Gréber’s plan for development,” King recounted that evening in his diary, referring to the beautification scheme for the capital being designed at his request by French urban planner Jacques Gréber.

“The company is now prepared to erect a hotel as fine in appearance as the Mount Royal in Montreal … This shows how wise we have been to secure this frontage when we did. That was my own thought, and I had more or less to use all the power I could command to secure the appropriation.”

While there were many more steps to take before the city’s hotel dream could be realized, the stars were aligning. The tentative support of Canada’s prime minister — not to mention his direct involvement in the proposed placement and design — had pushed the imagined hotel a good way towards reality.

According to Pickering, the crucial moment in securing The Lord Elgin came on July 24, 1940. On that day, below a banner headline about deadly firefights in the skies above England, the Ottawa Evening Citizen carried a front-page picture of an architectural drawing that showed the city’s future hotel impressively positioned on the northwest corner of Laurier and Elgin streets.

Envisioned at the site of what was then a lowly gas station, the building’s great scale, handsome stone-covered walls and château-style roof not only conformed to King’s expectations of grandeur, but also seemed to declare Ottawa’s coming-of-age as a city of consequence and ambition.

The article, in fact, had been planted to help persuade King to give his final stamp of approval.

“Admittedly I had to use some shenanigans,” Pickering recalled in a 1973 memoir of his life in business and politics. A plan had been hatched, he claimed, to use the news coverage to project the notion that the new hotel was so perfect an addition to Ottawa’s skyline that “getting permission to build there was almost a foregone conclusion.”

It was arranged through Pickering’s friend Walter Turnbull, the prime minister’s private secretary, that the day’s newspaper would be placed promptly in King’s hands.

“We heard later from Turnbull,” Pickering wrote, “that when the ‘Old Man’ came in, even though those were the busiest hours of the war, he spent a full half-hour looking at that picture and daydreaming. The stage was set.”



A construction spectacle, and a hotel with no name

By November 1940, the ground had been broken, the concrete foundation was being poured and hundreds of workers were swarming day and night over the Elgin Street construction site between Laurier and Slater. So intense was the interest that a special observation deck was constructed to allow spectators a good view of the excavation and other activity below. “On nice bright mornings, when the autumn air is not too chill, the folks gather elbow to elbow to watch the show on downtown Elgin Street,” the Globe and Mail reported. “They can watch a steam shovel, concrete mixers, and a fleet of trucks that travel the pit with the precision of ballet dancers.”

What the hotel still needed was a name — a seemingly simple step that, in fact, prompted 154 different proposals, months of debate and indecision and, at long last, a choice that was widely and warmly embraced: The Lord Elgin Hotel.

But it might well have been called The Kingsford (to triply honour King George, Mackenzie King and the Ford Hotel Company), The Tweedsmuir (after the late governor general Lord Tweedsmuir, who had died suddenly in February 1940) or The Winston Churchill (in tribute to Britain’s inspiring new wartime prime minister).

Also high on the list of contenders: Empire, Confederation, Capital, Marlborough, The Lion and Dunkirk. “So long as they don’t call that new hotel the Bluebird or the Pussywillow or anything quaint or kittenish, we shall be satisfied,” the Ottawa Journal teased as the city, even in the throes of a world war, battled over a hotel’s name.

King had spent time wondering what the place should be called. “I would like to give it a name,” he wrote in his diary that July. “Cannot think of one unless it were ‘Queen Elizabeth’ ” — an idea meant to honour the wife of George VI and mother of Princess Elizabeth, the future queen.

But she was not, in the end, granted the honour. Nor were Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, or Ottawa Valley pioneer Philemon Wright, though each had their champions as the name game played out through the spring, summer and fall of 1940.

Finally, at a city meeting on Nov. 12, 1940, Ottawa alderman Hamnett Pinhey Hill, Jr. submitted that “Lord Elgin” should be chosen. Hill’s proposal was embraced unanimously.

The precise reasons given by Ald. Hill for his sponsorship of the name were not recorded. But Hill, the son of Ottawa’s leading local historian (H.P. “Hammy” Hill, a longtime friend of King’s) and a descendant of one of 19th-century Ottawa’s most prominent families, might also have been aware of something else: a historic encounter between Lord Elgin and his own great-grandfather — the pioneer physician and civic leader Dr. Hamnett Hill — on a banner day in Bytown nearly 100 years earlier.

In July 1853, Dr. Hill had personally welcomed the Governor General on his first visit to the future Ottawa — an event long remembered for propelling the city’s bid to become Canada’s capital.



Laying the cornerstone: “The Hand of God in the affairs of men”

It’s a rare private enterprise in Canada that can claim to have had a sitting prime minister lay its cornerstone. But in the case of The Lord Elgin, so much a product of Mackenzie King’s broad vision for the national capital as well as his direct influence on the project’s planning and architecture, the PM’s presence at the historic occasion might have been expected.

And on the bitterly cold afternoon of Feb. 27, 1941, the prime minister was chauffeured to the Elgin Street construction site and, on a raised platform in front of a sizeable crowd, he accepted an ornate silver trowel from Jack Udd.

A specially prepared block of limestone was then lowered into place at the northeast edge of the building’s footprint. The cornerstone, set about hip-height atop a few previously laid rows of the hotel’s outer wall, was engraved simply: “THE LORD ELGIN A.D. 1941.”

Inside the stone was a hollowed-out space where an assortment of “coins of the realm,” copies of the day’s newspapers and one other document — an elaborately lettered scroll prepared at Ottawa alderman Chester Pickering’s request — were placed as a time capsule for some future generation to discover.

Inscribed on the scroll was a message that captured the awful dread of that moment in history, when the threat of a German invasion of the British Isles still loomed, but even moreso the Allied spirit of resilience, courage and confidence: “We who are living today have faith there’ll always be an England — Democracy will always prevail.”

King, writing in his diary, commented on the scroll’s promise to future Canadians: “It is, I believe, a true bit of prophecy.”

In his public remarks, King spoke eloquently about the life of Lord Elgin and his links to “the struggle for freedom a century ago” — the achievement of Responsible Government.

King had also congratulated “the working man” toiling to erect the great hotel and paid special tribute to a 49-year-old Ottawa labourer, Charles Corbett, who had died that month from a tragic fall at the building site.

In his diary, the prime minister reflected further on the day’s rich symbolism, including the new hotel’s intriguing connections to his rebel grandfather, William Lyon Mackenzie — granted amnesty by Lord Elgin in 1849 after spending 10 years in exile in the U.S.

King, his mind seized by the multi-layered meaning of the moment, also observed that the cornerstone and much of the rest of the hotel’s limestone façade had been shipped from the famous quarries at Queenston, Ont., the Niagara-area town where his grandfather had established a radical newspaper in 1824 to begin his battle against Upper Canada’s old oligarchs.

“There have been numerous things today to confirm my belief that there is no such thing as co-incidence in some of the happenings but rather that they are part of a real plan … the Hand of God in the affairs of men.”

Excerpted with permission from The Lord Elgin Hotel: Mackenzie King’s Capital Vision and the Birth of a Landmark, by Carleton University journalism professor Randy Boswell, former senior writer with the Citizen and Postmedia News. Published by The Lord Elgin Hotel on the occasion of its 75th anniversary (1941-2016).

http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ottawas-hotel-with-no-name-the-lord-elgin-turns-75

[waterloowarrior]

GeoOttawa now has 1928 aerial imagery of Ottawa... fascinating to see our industrial past and some of the old road configurations (Dow's Lake, Island Park under Construction, pre-Colonel By)
http://maps.ottawa.ca/geoottawa/

[lrt's friend]

This is great stuff. I was recently given a air photo compilation from the 1920s. When I first saw this a few days ago, I thought it was the same work, but it isn't. The air photo compilation I have is significantly different. Nevertheless, this gives us great context on what Ottawa came from 90 years ago.

[drawarc]

Transitway, 1983:

https://kitchissippi.com/2015/09/17/making-transit-history-at-tunneys-pasture-again/

Lees Station, 1984:






https://twitter.com/OC_Transpo/status/740906813038731264

[mykl]

COOL! Thank you!

[drawarc]

No problem, love digging up old pics and sharing here.

[acottawa]

Super weird 1940s NFB film about planning in Ottawa.
https://www.nfb.ca/film/capital_plan/

[McC]

Darwin: 1871 Railway turntable uncovered on LeBreton Flats
http://www.westsideaction.com/1875-roundhouse-uncovered/

[Uhuniau]

Wow! That turntable excavation is amaze!

[rocketphish]

Capital Facts: Ottawa's first public transportation fatality

The Ottawa Citizen
Published on: January 15, 2017 | Last Updated: February 2, 2017 10:54 AM EST



In celebration of Canada’s 150th birthday, the Citizen is rolling out one fact each day for 150 days until July 1, highlighting the odd, the fascinating and the important bits of Ottawa history you might not know about.

The first public transportation fatality in Ottawa occurred at the intersection of Sparks and Metcalfe streets on Dec. 18, 1891 when, at 10:30 p.m., Ira Morgan missed his hold when attempting to board a streetcar, and instead swung around to the front of the car where he fell onto the road. The tram drove over Morgan twice: first after his initial fall, and a second time when, responding to shouts from pedestrians, the motorman reversed the car. The collision broke Morgan’s ribs and spine. He died in hospital at 3:15 the following morning.

— Bruce Deachman

http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/capital-facts-ottawas-first-public-transportation-fatality

[McC]

that cannot be a picture of Sparks and Metcalfe.

Where would that even be, so wide and empty? Way out west out towards Britannia?

[Norman Bates]

Looks like Byron Richmond road area.

[McC]

Richmond Road being the goat trail to the left, and Byron Ave not even existing yet*?

(*I only see one road in the picture)