The ByWard Market is both beautiful and broken
Curious to see how the Market changes throughout the day and night, Bruce Deachman wandered its streets and alleyways for 24 consecutive hours.
By Bruce Deachman, Ottawa Citizen
Published Aug 05, 2025 | Last updated 1 day ago
On a recent sweltering Friday afternoon, Carolyn Woods sat at a table outside La Bottega Nicastro grocery store on George Street, sipping from a bottle of cold apricot juice and engaging in one of her favourite hobbies: people-watching in the ByWard Market.
“There’s something different every day,” she explained.
As if to prove the point, a woman, perhaps in her 70s, zipped by on a Segway as we spoke.
Woods has lived in the Market for about 15 years, and at least twice a week simply sits and takes in the scenery.
Across the street, on the spit of real estate known as the ByWard Market Plaza, tourists, residents, the homeless and others co-mingled. Folks sat in the sun, noshed on BeaverTails, drank coffee, examined the tchotchkes and t-shirts they’d bought, checked their phones, awaited friends or simply, like Woods, watched others.
If she had stayed long enough, Woods would have seen Philippe Burke and Anna Krytsyna out on an evening date together. If she’d stayed REALLY late, she would’ve heard DJ Louv playing mixes through a 240-watt portable speaker while his dog, Magical Beans, magically slept beside him. If she stayed until 1:30 a.m., she might have caught the Afrobeats pounding from Clarence Street’s clubs. If she’d stayed even later, past the last calls and into the pre-dawn stillness, Woods would have seen the Market nearly abandoned — save for a garbage truck, a few souls sleeping rough on benches and sidewalks, and maybe Baba making his rounds in a white van, righting and recharging e-scooters. She might have noticed the seagulls circling overhead, fighting over the night’s leftovers, or Paul Albert, a former photographer, now homeless, collecting empty bottles and a discarded crumpled lottery ticket — worth checking, he said; you never know. And if she’d stayed so late that it became early again, she’d have seen the Market coming back to life: bakers arriving for their shifts at Le Moulin de Provence, trucks delivering supplies to restaurants, residents walking dogs, vendors setting up stalls, shoppers appearing, and perhaps someone else taking Woods’s place outside La Bottega, juice in hand, with time to kill.
Woods didn’t stay too long when we met. But I did.
Curious to see how the Market changes throughout the day and night, I wandered its streets and alleyways for 24 consecutive hours — from 11 a.m. on a Friday to 11 a.m. Saturday. The Market is, after all, a place as multi-faceted as the city itself — different things to different people at different times of the day and night. At times, it’s messy and a little unruly, as it’s been for almost 200 years. That’s both part of its charm and its problem. I wanted to learn what people who live, work and wander there thought about the place: why they were there, whether the Market needs “fixing” and, if so, what those fixes might be.
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https://ottawacitizen.com/news/byward-market-24-hours
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