This week in Ottawa:
Friday is the last day to enter to win two passes to Capital Vélo Fest’s Tour la nuit, and you can find details on how to enter to win a Household Membership from the Canada Science and Technology Museums Corporation on my contest page. Good luck!
Have a great week!
Every neighborhood has one. A few have several. The rare really lucky neighborhood may have many.
I’m talking about guerilla gardeners. People who go out and plant — usually with their own plants — bare spots in the City.
It’s a tough love situation, since in many cases the plants won’t be getting ongoing care or watering, there being a general shortage of taps on city boulevards.
In Dalhousie, Ida has been responsible for two great gardens on Somerset and the Plant Rec Complex garden at Preston/Somerset. Stephanie and others did the Chaudiere Park gardens.
Other gardeners have done their bits, planting trees, bulbs, hostas, lillies and other plants in unloved bits of the city. We have been lucky to get an occasional bit of financial support from the Chinatown BIA and the Preston BIA.
In just 90 minutes, Catherine (fellow DCA board member) and I created three such plantings. We met at the CCOC building in the neighborhood that has a generous patch of lillies in the front (I think original sourced from Councillor Holmes’s backyard). We thinned out the bed with some generous digging (we had prior permission). When done, it was hard to find the donor spots; after a rain, no one will be able to tell where plants were removed.
On our way to the planting sites on Booth, we passed the Fanto site for UNO townhouses. The old homes were about to be demolished. With permission, we removed some hostas and heucheras from those front yards.
Over on Booth, the City put in three bulb outs last year, each with a tree. The curb will protect the root area and plants. The tree is planted in structural soil (dirt that looks like gravel) and generously mulched. Here’s two of the planters:
The mulched beds look rather bare, and will eventually get weedy. In five minutes, the weeds were gone, and a trench dug through the mulch around the perimeter.
A rescued hosta ”Fanto’s Splendid” holds the point of honour.
In went the lillies. Note, we teased them apart to get many stems. We tried to get the roots right at the structural soil level; then backfilled with mulch.
This lady stopped for directions, and to share some garden lore:
Another guy stopped to ask if we were planting coconut trees. If they were tropicals, I told him, I’d be planting pineapples. Satisfied, he wandered off.
When done, 3 planted beds, and the promise of thunder showers to water them in. Parked in front a restaurant and other businesses, the plants are unlikely to ever get watered, but with any luck, a number will survive vandalism and drought and give us green planters along a busy street.
Within 90 minutes of setting out, I was back home washing my shopping bags. And some west side streets are a little bit greener, a little bit more livable.
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| Not the truck that passed me, though it's about as close. I got this image from www.ibiketo.ca - from a post with a great video showing good and bad driving and cycling. |
A big crowd of neighbours were out watching the flames still shooting from the roof, likely motivated by the power outage and Summer-like weather at sunset. Police closed off Kent Street and Arlington Avenue in the two blocks in either direction on both streets. Here a firefighter is near the top of Ladder 13, which is extended between 511 Kent and the next house up.
Unfortunately, I suppose you could say, I've been to the scene of many fires in Centretown over the last few years. And while Twitter is known for fast response, I've often gotten there before anyone's tweeted an explanation of what's going on, just by listening for and following the sirens. 
In addition to the many other fire vehicles from many stations, and the Fire Chief's black Dodge Charger, Somerset Ward's own Ladder 11 was on the scene, working at the back of the house on the Arlington side.
As it turned out, this detour made me late for a DCA planning committee meeting on Preston Street, and on my way to the meeting I passed by Fire Station No 2, home of Ladder 11:
The Citizen has more photos of the fire.
Hope everyone had a good Mother’s Day and enjoyed Bikefest. We have an exciting show lined up for you this Tuesday with three interview. At 7:30 Mike will be speaking with Elizabeth Creary about the upcoming Craig Cardiff show/fundraiser taking place on Saturday the 19th. At 8:05 Mike will speak with Dave Gallson about the Defeat Depression walk on May 27th at Vincent Massey Park. Finally, at 8:30 Mike will be speaking with Andrew Caddell about about his new book of interviews with key officials in multilateral organizations. As per usual we air from 7-9am on CKCU 93.1FM in Ottawa and www.ckcufm.com for everyone else.
Conservative government to allow slaughterhouses to process already dead animals.
IPO for Facebook could be values at an obscene amount of money.
Obama comes out in favour of gay marriage…thank you Joe Biden.
Conservative’s send massive budget bill to House of Commons committee despite NDP’s best efforts.
Bizarre BC hand-gliding tragedy continues to be in the news.
While I wouldn't go so far as to claim they deserve official heritage status, the railings do have some history to them. They formed the backdrop of a couple scenes in the Rolling Stone's music video for Streets of Love, filmed in Ottawa. The bridge is around 1:15 to 1:40. Interspersed in the video with scenes shot live at Zaphod's are other Centretown landmarks such as the former Stinson & Son at 435 Gladstone (1:45 and 2:11) and Domestic Foods, the corner store just down the block from me, at Gladstone and Percy (1:50 to 1:57):
They're mounted on arched brackets with the connecting bolts alternating sides on the brackets. The streetlights are mounted on round protrusions on the outside of the platform, though this one was gone years ago.
The ends of the railing are protected by, though not attached to, large concrete blocks. These blocks are also used where there is a gap in the railing, such as at Takaki in the photo above. Here, next to Musca, a little metal fence bridges the gap between this concrete block and the building:
The railing's age itself creates a bit of controversy. The City's engineers like to work with standard railing designs which have been crash-tested and rated, but this railing predates such standardization. Actually surviving crashes (not to mention the huge concrete planters with trees in them adding further protection from stray cars and trucks) doesn't qualify it for equivalency, it is merely grandfathered. 
Eric Darwin shared his own frustrated rant about this discussion in this post on his blog:I cannot convince you, gentle reader, because you would never believe me, how many hours of design committee meetings were spent on that %*^!! railing. It can’t be changed or modified, the City claimed, in dismissing what we wanted. It would be too expensive to change. Then, ah ha! almost a million buck budget line appears to install a new railing, because the City decides it wants it. Hours are spent consulting on the picket design, the aesthetics, whether to paint it black or leave it galvanized… only to find at the last minute that the budget was being cut, and the new railing is out, and old one back. And the things we wanted, but couldn’t get because the railing couldn’t be modified … well, they seem to be back on track to being installed, using the old railing.Ironically, the railing that would have been installed in this one's place would have been very similar to the one on Heron Road featured in this article about children being able to easily climb up it.
As mentioned in Part 12, this isn't so much "a bridge" but a viaduct and a series of bridges (and now a tunnel too). In addition to the bridge over the O-Train tracks in the far end of this photo, there used to be a second bridge under Somerset a bit east of that. This is now bricked off with the large blocks of a lighter colour behind the ramp up to City Centre:
This is confirmed by a closeup of a 1926 map showing two separate tracks running under Somerset Street:
Which would have been this set of tracks shown in a Gréber Report photo, looking North off the Somerset Street bridge. The tracks under the O-Train bridge were shown in a similar shot in Part 11 (note the Wellington Street bridge in the background for comparison)
There is also another bridge, running under what used to be called Champagne Avenue [North] but was renamed City Centre Avenue in 2005 as part of the post-amalgamation audit of duplicate street names. 
Interestingly, the North and the South parts of Champagne Avenue (the latter of which in Hintonburg has kept the name) were both given the name despite never being contiguous, not even when they were laid out in the 1870s (shown here as "First Ave"): 
Legally, the section under this bridge is part of the City's right-of-way for Champagne Avenue, which extends all the way south to Gladstone. But practically, it is an access route for 1010 Somerset and the gigantic warehouse also known as the Oak Street Complex, a Federal building that itself extends from Somerset to Gladstone. Many people cut through the entryway at 1010 Somerset, and many more did so when the bridge was closed, leading to the installation of a series of speed bumps:
The expansion joints for this little bridge were replaced during the Somerset rehabilitation. They follow the profile of the road and sidewalk:
The rebar of the sidewalk was exposed and lifted to allow new conduits to be laid for the utilities directly underneath, slipping under the new expansion joints, which follow the much wider profile of the new sidewalk. 989 Somerset, the antique store, is also in view:
It's a tricky business to install expansion joints, which I hadn't realized until I saw it. The joints are set into concrete, but until the concrete is poured, they're essentially floating. There was a little jig to ensure they were aligned properly.
Finally, the concrete is poured, the asphalt is set, and the lane and bicycle markings are down. The section over the bridge is finished—railings and all!
All that's left is the decorations, such as the lamp designs, street furniture, and public art. 
And all of those will be covered in the series finale, Part 15!
Last year I blogged about a new bicycle festival that took place in June - Capital Vélo Fest. I’m pleased to say that last year’s event was such a great success, this year’s festival has been expanded to a full weekend of fun!
Capital Vélo Fest 2012 will take place on Saturday, June 2nd and Sunday, June 3rd, and will include a Bicycle Rodeo and Tour la nuit, a nighttime ride under the stars on closed off streets. Dick Louch, the driving force behind Capital Vélo Fest (or should I say, cycling force? :) has once again provided Frugal Fun Ottawa with two passes for Tour la nuit to give away. If you’d like to enter to win both passes (so that you can participate with a friend), just leave a comment below telling my why you’d like the passes. I’ll use random.org to choose a winner on Friday, May 18th at 7 pm. Please leave an email address that you check frequently – if I don’t hear from the winner by Sunday at noon I’ll have to move on to someone else.
Good luck!
I live in a row house. The woman who owns the next house in the row is an investment advisor. She rents the place out to one group of kids after another, each of which generally moves out within a year to make way for yet another group. It’s an endless succession of hot-headed young drunks and thumping bass lines.
One thing they all seem to have in common is they can’t remember garbage day is Thursday. Instead of throwing out a bag of garbage every Thursday, they throw out nothing for weeks, and then they throw out a mountain of garbage on a random day.
But that’s another blog post. This one’s about the all-night parties.
GC and I are often sound asleep before the party even begins, and we’re pretty good at sleeping through them. Sure, we’ll wake up and drift in and out of sleep and our dreams will be full of parties and bad music, and occasionally we’ll wake all the way up and curse the young people and the investment advisor who rents to them. But generally we’re okay unless the party turns ugly and people start tumbling out onto the street and screaming obscenities, which hasn’t happened yet with this current group.
What HAS happened with this group is that instead of partying in their living room like normal people, they party in the master bedroom. Right on the other side of my bedroom wall. Mere inches away from our heads. With their pounding bass lines and raucous laughter, they party late into the night and through the wee hours, and are sometimes still going strong when I get up for work.
I am impressed by their stamina. They party four, five, six nights a week. Even at my peak, I couldn’t have maintained that pace for more than a week or two.
I tell myself that this is penance for my own youthful partying that kept my weary old neighbours from peaceful sleep. It’s just the cycle of life, repeating itself. Karma is not necessarily swift or severe, or even certain, but I expect these young neighbours of mine will get their just desserts in about 30 years or so, once they’re firmly ensconced in a world of mortgages, alarm clocks and chronic fatigue.
One night last week GC and I were both awakened by the neighbours arriving home at closing time, followed by the music blasting through the bedroom wall. (Speaking of which, why is it that those with the worst taste in music have such a penchant for volume?)
“Turn on the radio,” I suggested.
“Good idea,” said GC. “We’ll counter-blast them with CBC.”
Ha ha.
Saturday night GC had finally had enough. At 2:45 he put on his clothes and marched out the door.
Now, if you know GC at all, you know he is a gentleman and a really nice guy. It is not in his nature to confront anybody and complain about their behaviour. So he must have been pretty pissed off to do this.
He hammered on their door and leaned on their doorbell, but of course they couldn’t hear him over their music. Finally, in a little space between songs, they heard him and one of them ran downstairs to see who in the world might be pounding on their door at such an ungodly hour.
GC came back five minutes later, saying “His name’s Tyler, and he’s a nice kid. He apologized and said he didn’t know he was disturbing us and he won’t do it anymore. We shook hands.”
And everything was blissfully quiet. So quiet, in fact, GC had to turn on the radio and do a crossword puzzle in order to fall back asleep.
Sometimes streetscaping projects by the City use lots of bricks or other paving blocks to enhance the sidewalk experience. Other times they use good ole’ concrete.
I have mixed feelings about both. The biggest advantage of concrete is that it begs to be trowelled off level. No matter how crude the installation, or unskilled or careless the crew, the finished walk is usually usable. In other words, it’s a forgiving substance.
Pavers look nice, but because each one is small they are subject to being laid with an uneven surface. Pavers have the advantage of being removable and relayable after disruption.
When pavers first came out, the City realized that each project was using pieces of a different pattern, which made repairs hard to do since the manufacturers continually introduce new paver designs and retire the old. So they spec’d everything had to be done with plain old brick shapes. But for the last few years it has been “anything goes” once again, but they vary the paver pattern every half block, so that when a new design in introduced during a repair it is less noticeable. Sort of like repairing grandma’s patchwork quilt. Somerset, Richmond Road, Preston … all have multiple paver designs over their main streets.
I’m critical of the crosswalks used along Wellington/Richmond, as they are black pavers that don’t stand out of the asphalt road. White crosswalk lines have to be repainted. Along Preston, light pavers were used, with “brighter” white stones to mark the crosswalk lines without repainting.
Crosswalks can only be so wide, according to city practice, but along Preston an additional brick band outside the crosswalk lines makes the crosswalks seem much more generous. Clever.
When the crosswalk crosses the busy main streets (rather than crossing the quieter side streets) the city switches to all-concrete crosswalks. We first tried these out on the Bank Street reconstruction 30 years ago, and repairs were disastrously poor. For Somerset going through Chinatown, I look forward to seeing new two-toned concrete sidewalks going in shortly. They’ll be a concrete version of the zebra crosswalks.
But back to maintenance: Bridgehead is building their new coffee shop and roastery at Anderson/Preston in a heritage building. New sewer work necessitated cutting through the Preston crosswalks. The crews relaid the crosswalk pavers, but mixed the “white edgers” in at random with the rest, and “lost” all the angled cut zones along the curb. Presumably these contractors will be rushing back as construction winds up to fix the crosswalk properly.
To the casual observer, the placement of the very large ped lighting fixtures along Preston may be annoying. They hop from inner to outer boulevard, from left side to right side of the sidewalk. Sometimes on decorative metal posts, sometimes bolted to wooden utility “telephone” poles.
More careful observation shows that that they are grouped in rows, designed to line up, creating a pedestrian corridor. That pattern is reinforced by the trees along the street. A back curb serves to protect the plantings from feet, plows and other intrusions. The columnar fruit trees along Preston were in full bloom last week:
I met a landscape architect while walking the street. We stopped to discuss the blooming trees. I asked if this is the sort of show other cities got every year, if they were in a milder climate, such as St Catherine’s or even Toronto. In which case, we’re pretty short changed by our severe climate.
Yup, he told me, other cities get this majesty of blooms every year. But, some colder cities also get a lot more blooms than Ottawa does. They put more effort into larger root beds of top soil, provide summertime watering, even for mature trees, and thus coax more show from healthier trees.
Even measured in tree blooms, it seems, Ottawa is a high tax / low results city.
Keeping bus riders walking through the mall is one of the city’s objectives: “My understanding is there’s discussions with the Rideau Centre, and discussions on maintaining through-flow of people on foot through there,” [Councillor] Fleury said.The City's goal should be to make transferring easy and quick for passengers, not help business for Rideau Centre. Rideau Centre has an LRT station and doesn't require assistance in directing people into their mall. As for transferring, passengers hate it and is one of the reasons why some don't use public transit at all. If passengers get off a bus on Mackenzie King Bridge and have to walk through the length of the mall to transfer onto the underground LRT, then travel time will be lost, accessibility doesn't sound promising and it will be complicated for those not familiar with the mall. Also, does this proposed route configuration imply that time-based proof-of-payment transfers will continue to exist? Otherwise, Rideau Centre will have to be declared as a paid-fare zone, which is completely out of the question. As well, with frequent fare increases, it's highly likely that the downtown area will be a fare-free zone.
From time to time I think my life has gotten a bit staid. Like, in a rut.
So I took an invite to head off to the NAC on Wednesday for a wine tasting of Prince Edward County wines. Now you should know that my wine drinking preferences run to warehouse do-it-yourself wineries where great Merlot comes through at $4/bottle. And I recall being to Prince Edward County once, to stay overnight at an overpriced lakeside “cottage” that did not leave me impressed. So PEC wasn’t high on my “must do” bucket list. But I was open to change my mind.
There was a dozen wineries present. Attendees went around the tables chatting to the vintners and sloshing back slurping sipping various wines. I had never done some comparative taste testing before, but found it easy to mark in my little score pad which ones I liked and which ones I didn’t. I wasn’t rating them on degrees of “oak” or “hints of raspberry” or anything like that. Just a simple yes/no. Alas, no one told me to do the white first, or else I could overpower my taste buds. So I started with red, then went to rose. I loved the Lighthall Rose. Alas, it is rather more expensive than what I am used to paying at the warehouse winery.
I talked to several vineyard guys about how big their vineyards were. I’ve been several times to Napa and Sonoma, always on other-people’s-money (OPM is by far the best way to go anywhere) where they are huge. But in the Loire Valley I cycled to a number of wine tastings and loaded my saddle bags with great stuff from tiny wineries with vineyards of barely a few hectares (that trip was on my own money, but I assure you as a consequence it was cheap).
In Prince Edward, I discovered vineyards range from 18 acres to 65 acres (as determined by my small sample size), with 20,000 grape vines to 100,000. And some plant roses at the end of each row. Supposedly this is an indicator plant for aphids. One vintner at the show assured me they were red roses so they knew they were red grapes, and white roses for white wine. Did I look that tipsey gullible?
Closson Chase winery in PEC. This image says a lot about changes in our society. Church: communion wine, threats of eternal terror, dropping attendance; winery: repurposing of a heritage building, happy wine, terroir. [photo taken from a PEC map, ergo the crease up the middle].
None of the vintners is big enough to get listed at the LCBO. So they sell at the gate, or through trade shows such as the one Wednesday night. It was possible to give orders directly to the event promoter, Savvy Company, who then picks up the bottles from the various wineries and delivers the case(s) to you. Mix and match.
Between sips of wine, the vintners larded me up with the geological and geographical trivia of the county, which constitutes the “terroir” or particular soil conditions that influence the grape taste. And I was very surprised to learn from one vintner that a rose could be made mostly of mineral water with a dash of red wine.
Who knows, it generated enough curiosity in me that I may just manage to get down to the county sometime this summer. On the May 26 Victoria Day weekend there is a Terroir Wine Festival as well. An oenophilic delight.
I did happen to know that there is a large-ish cheese company in PEC — the Black River Cheese Company, but only because I know the manager there who used to promote Swiss Cheeses here in Canada. Apparently there are a lot more makers. Not everyone and their sister retires to make wines, lots of other people become artisan cheese makers. It is good to know what early retiring civil servants do with their pension time. So there is a Great Canadian Cheese festival in Picton on June 1-3. And yes, they have Tutored Tastings, with cheese sommeliers.
But before that, twenty-eight wineries from Niagara-on-the-Lake are coming to the NAC on May 30th for another tasting event; again the promoter is Savvy Company. And if that isn’t enough, they are offering a wine-focussed tour of Australia with your own sommelier as guide, for a mere $15,000 pp. The wife and I are looking for a sponsor! Volunteers anyone?
Meanwhile, down in my basement, in the far corner, beyond the kitty litter tray, there might be warehouse Valpolicella that is ready …
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