John By's answer to the homeless problem
By Ron Corbett, Ottawa Sun
First posted: Saturday, August 22, 2015 05:03 PM EDT | Updated: Saturday, August 22, 2015 06:55 PM EDT
This is part 2 of Ron Corbett's summer series, The Dream of Bytown
I am standing at the corner of Cumberland Avenue and Rideau Street and I can just make out the eastern wall of the Salvation Army shelter on George Street, a block away.
There are people milling beside the shelter.
There is a wonky intersection there -- traffic changing from one-way to two-way -- and cars have backed up and ground to a halt.
Cumberland and Rideau would have been the southeast corner of the land given to John By in September 1826. Cumberland Avenue would have been a concession line, separating concessions C and D.
Almost immediately upon receiving this land, people moved next door to John By.
Reports of the day say it happened, -- the appearance of a large squatters' village -- almost overnight.
The Rideau Canal was the largest infrastructure project ever undertaken in British North America up to that time and people came looking for work. People who had travelled up river from Montreal and then camped out on the Cumberland line, hoping to find work.
Desperate people. Arriving by the boatload.
John By would have seen the campfires of the squatters' village as he looked down from the bluffs of what is today Parliament Hill.
It would have been mid-autumn of 1826. Winter only a few weeks away.
I cross Rideau Street and make my way toward the Salvation Army shelter, wondering if John By had been expecting the squatters. Is that why he was so decisive in dealing with the problem?
Or was he just afraid of winter?
When I reach the shelter I see there are more people on the street than I had realized. From Rideau Street I had seen only a fraction of the crowd gathered by the Salvation Army.
Looking down George Street now I see people stretching for a full city block, spilling into a parking lot next to the shelter, into a laneway next to the parking lot, sleeping on the sidewalks.
It is a modern-day squatters' village.
****
"There would have been several squatters' villages when John By was here," says Bruce Elliott, flipping through a book as he looks for a map.
"There would have been people living along the concession line, and on Letter O, which was just north of the land By was given.
"There would have been Corkstown, along the Rideau Canal, and another on the (Lebreton) Flats, by Richmond Landing."
Elliott is a history professor at Carleton University and the author of A City Beyond: A history of Nepean, birthplace of Canada's Capital, 1792-1990. It is a meticulously researched book that uses original source material Elliott discovered in many cases.
It is because of his work that we know the old township of Nepean (which became the city of Ottawa) had all of six homesteads when John By arrived in 1826.
"Not much here at the time," he says with professorial understatement, while continuing to look for his map.
"That's why the squatters' camps rather stood out."
Elliott is fascinated by the squatters camps and sometimes takes walking tours with his students, trying to find traces of the old camps in Lowertown. Or trying to imagine what it would have been like, to live in such a camp.
Some camps would have been little more than caves, dug into the banks of the Rideau Canal. Others would have resembled small villages.
"Here it is," he says finally, and I find myself looking at an 1847 map from his book, showing a squatters' camp on Letter O, what is today the northern tip of Lowertown.
Overtop the map has been dropped to the grid of a proposed sub-division. The grid is pretty much how the area looks today.
"Look at how many people were living there," says Elliott.
"All those houses would have been squatters. There were stables and stores as well. There was even a school."
Elliott discovered the map in a registry office more than 25 years ago. You can still hear the amazement in his voice, as he looks at what John By allowed the squatters to build.
***
The Salvation Army shelter is one of three in the area, the other two being the Ottawa Mission and the Shepherds of Good Hope.
All three shelters are directly on, or within a block, of the old Cumberland concession line.
This is not an accident. Or happenstance. It is history we have forgotten. The shelters in Ottawa have all been built where the old squatters' camps once stood.
"Homelessness is a problem that seems to concentrate in this area, and I don't think that will ever change," says Peter Tilley, executive director of the Ottawa Mission.
"We have tried to de-centralize it, but we have had only limited success, in my opinion.
"There is a pull to this area that I don't think you can fight. Most of the support services are here. The community contacts are here. And historically, this is always where the homeless have come in Ottawa." Going back, it appears, to day two.
The Ottawa Mission does not go back that far, but it was established more than a century ago -- in 1906 -- and it has never been in jeopardy of closing its doors.
The other two shelters are just as busy.
If history teaches us, as Tilley argues, that the Market and Lowertown will always be the destination for the homeless in Ottawa, do three bustling shelters in the area also tell us the problem is never going away?
"I think it's time for some new approaches, I certainly think that," says Tilley.
"There needs to be more personal responsibility, I think. We have used rent supplements recently, with great success, to re-integrate some of our long-term clients, "I don't think you can wait for government to kick in a lot of money. Give people the chance to live independently, to live in dignity, and you can usually get good outcomes."
***
In some ways it is unfair, to suggest that John By's solution to the homeless problem in 1826 can be tried in Ottawa today.
I take a look down George Street and realize that. John By did not have to deal with crack cocaine, for one.
But it is still interesting to note that By's solution is rather in vogue today.
He encouraged home ownership, for one. He did not like "warehousing" indigent people, or leaving them to fend for themselves.
And people should work. This was also something he believed in.
If John By thought the scores of people arriving in Ottawa had no intention of working -- would not contribute to the new village, or to the grand undertaking about to begin -- he would have left Lowertown as the uninhabited cedar bog he found it.
People needed to work as much as they needed a home. The relationship was so intrinsic, By would have had trouble imagining one without the other.
I'm thinking about this as I make my way down George Street. Although there is a large crowd on the street, it is not homogenous.
Standing nearest the front doors of the Salvation Army shelter are the timid and uncertain. Men who neither talk nor move. Who seem almost shell-shocked.
Next to them are old men in wheelchairs and young men who pace in tight circles, not wanting to take up too much space on the sidewalk, not wanting to push boundaries.
After that the crowd gets louder and more boisterous, an almost kinetic force that seems to build the further you get from the front doors.
There are drug deals happening in the parking lot next to the shelter. Behind a parked van I see a young woman sticking a needle in her arm. Three men are lighting crack pipes while leaning against a chain link fence on the other side of the parking lot, where the Honest Lawyer pub used to be.
It is mid-afternoon. Tuesday.
It may be unfair to compare John By's solution of 1826 to the homeless problem of today.
Although it is fair comment to say he never would have let the Byward Market get like this.
And I walk away wondering when that changed.
[email protected]
http://www.ottawasun.com/2015/08/22/john...ys-answer-to-the-homeless-problemoneplan
Prev
Linear Mode
