Incoherency Manifest: Why is Ottawa Laid Out like That?

Government is inherently ‘showy’. The easiest way for a nation to show off its wealth has been, since even before the idea of a nation-state itself existed, a display of excess in monumental form. The pharaohs created the great pyramids, the French created the great palaces of Versailles and even the Americans planned and created the District of Columbia principally as a piece of art in and of itself. When you examine our city, there are multiple easy examples that come to mind of monuments to ourselves littered around everywhere, with there being quite simply too many statues and monuments in the city centre it's not even worth giving an example. But what you are less likely to have noticed was the city itself, refined from a disorganized mess no less than a 100 years ago, specifically to be opulent. This central plan for our city has now largely given us the city we are used to, at least centrally, with well defined neighborhoods and districts as artifacts of its execution, where being one side of a street was determined by a Frenchman who never even visited Ottawa in his lifetime.

To get less wordy and more grounded, I am referring to the Greber plan. Not the baby food of a similar name, but an urban design plan created in 1946 and finalized in 1950 named after its author Jacques Greber as an example of the city beautiful movement. When the war was beginning to reach an obvious conclusion for the folks and politicians back at home in the 40s, a discussion started everywhere of “what next?”. William Lyon Mackenzie King, the war time prime minister who loved his mother and believed he could in fact talk to her spiritually beyond the grave, was one of many eyes who saw Ottawa for what it was at the time, a giant government-y mess. And not government-y in a sense of financial overruns, corruption or more important ideas, but instead that the necessities of organization for the war had turned Ottawa from a relatively small city that housed the seat of government and little else into a network of temporary structures in every greenspace and empty plot of land available. With the end of the war insight, Mackenzie King and others fought to remedy and clean up the city with a centralized plan instituted under the new Federal District Commission (which would later evolve into the National Capital Commission) and settled on Greber as its principal designer. Greber is best known however not for the plan of his namesakes, but the master plan for two other projects, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, a central road artery with huge views and tree coverings that bisects the centre of Philadelphia, and his master plan for the 1937 Paris Expo which quite famously pitted the Nazi and Soviet literally and physically against each other, facing directly opposite one another at the heart of the expo. These two projects, and to a much much lesser extent, the Greber plan here, are examples of the city beautiful movement, a design idea of how cities should be constructed and arranged, popular near the turn of the 19th and 20th century with the most notable example by far being the National Mall in Washington D.C. Not a normal mall as you or I know it, but the famous green open stretch of parks flanked by grandiose government offices and more notably, museums along its length.

City beautiful as a movement is on its own, fascinating as hell, that designers took such a sudden shift to planning centrally is in my mind, one of the most important design change ups in the 20th century, but what makes the Greber plan equally fascinating is that it really isn't a good example of a city beautiful design. One of the primary elements of the city beautiful movement is that it is a progressive social philosophy that we could today associate with a sense of walkable or dense living cities. By having your city pretty and planned out, it is more likely that a city's inhabitants will actually go out to experience it directly or at least integrate it into their life more generally. In the eastern US, some of the most desirable places to live are in these areas that have been influenced by the movement as a whole, notably hip cool young and awesome sauce neighborhoods in generally left leaning progressive cities of Portland, Oregon and Denver, Colorado among others of course. These neighbourhoods incorporate huge green spaces in their downtowns and bring down temperatures and generally just improve the living conditions around them. The Greber plan, on the other hand, does not really incorporate any of these principals. One of the primary goals of the Greber plan was the Greenbelt initiative, I am not going to be someone who disagrees with the Greenbelt in the slightest, especially given the urban sprawl that central Ottawa and eventually the entirety of the NCC after the 2001 amalgamation of the exterior towns such as Kanata and others. It’s odd though as a contrast to typical design ideas that Greber himself was fond of, the plan did not propose specific parks in the central city but instead a barrier around the city itself. The urban greenery that was proposed, and swiftly, half assed no less, was the highways/parkways along the canals and river. If you’ve ever wondered as to why the NCC somehow is in possession of a UNESCO heritage site in the form of the Rideau Canal locks, this is part of why. The canal originally was flanked on the southern edge by a large amount of rail lines that ran into Ottawa’s original train station, the former Union Station at 2 Rideau street, which you may better know as the current Senate of Canada Building across from the Chateau Laurier. Greber’s plan proposed that the several rail lines that came from both Gatineau, Cornwall and other southern routes should be rerouted to a new station out of the downtown core (what is now Trainyards Ottawa Station) as a means to reduce a large amount of smog pollution from the steam locomotives as well as a preventative measure against the increasing sewage and waste produced in part by these trains into the canal. The removal of these lines also meant the removal of the associated Rideau rail yard and depot which was so incredibly large, that now the vast majority of its space is taken up by only two buildings. The Rideau Centre mall and the Shaw Centre conference centre. These buildings were also in part, a desired side effect for Greber in that the creation of communal spaces aligned with new green areas. 

This begins to explain our question of why the hell is the city laid out so oddly, but there are still many principal elements left unanswered. Have you ever noticed the robust nature of some of Ottawa’s neighborhoods as compared to other Canadian cities such as Toronto where they tend to blend  together? Let’s examine the neighborhoods themselves, how is Centretown so different to the Glebe for example? 

Glebe and Centretown once again fall prey to a French bastard, Greber. If you’ve also thought the 417 is a massive eyesore and oddly placed, it is. 417 used to be a rail line owned by Canadian National and was exchanged by the NCC for land in what is now the Walkley yard further south as a way for rail freight to bisect the city. The two neighborhoods existed as two opposites before Greber came along, south of the 417 was predominantly white poor workers, hence the prolific and beautiful workers cottages that are everywhere in the Glebe. This was opposed to Centretown (and distinctly not Downtown) was more aligned to white collar workers for the federal government. The original Queensway was made and created as to be a flat road that allowed for easier integration of the two neighborhoods, but realistically this never was the case as the people who used the Queens had only begun to use it for longer distance commuting s a part of the TransCanada Highway as a whole along with the start of white flight to the suburbs in the west end (Kanata, Sittsville etc), the neighborhoods as a result never truly integrated and we can still see this today, both in wealth, architecture and if nothing else rent (even if the Glebe has become more popular and Centretown has become poorer). This was only compounded to no one's surprise when the 417’s construction entered ‘phase 2’ where the road was elevated and fully completed by 1975 sealing the fate of the area.

“What about Old Ottawa South?!” I hear you cry. We shall not forget the neighborhood that our nondifferentiable school occupies! Old Ottawa South also exists in a similar vein as the Glebe, in that it  was originally (at least on the lower bounds towards the river) generally poorer, but I think if anything what is worth noting, it is the location of Carleton itself. If you look into records of the time, what is now the library quad of Carleton was largely just a big annoying hill. The O-Train line that now runs along campus was, to no one's surprise, also a previous rail line and as such generally made the land to the west of the rails along with west of Bronson generally undesirable. Compound this with being on what was at the time, largely an undeveloped neighborhood still with the exception of minor shops along Bank Street (and even then closer to Sunnyside than the river) and as such was perfect for the then Carleton College (notably in my research, the first private and non religious college in Ontario) to purchase the land in the early 1950s.

Overall, Ottawa’s general layout is so fascinating, at least to me, because there is nothing like it in Canada. There exists no other city that had such fundamental reorganization top to bottom geographically in its lifetime, and by far the largest in the country to ever follow on through on a central urban plan and renewal project, shaping quite literally the bounds of where we live, and where we study. We owe so many parts of Ottawa, the good or the bad (I would fucking kill for a streetcar again fuck you Greber you piece of shit) to one french bastard who lived long before any of us, but who’s work here, its construction and refinement still exist in living memory for some. 

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