OTTAWA CITIZEN, By Bruce Deachman
It’s difficult to imagine what Ottawa would look like today had city planner Jacques Gréber never set foot here. We would most certainly not have the Greenbelt that rings the city, nor perhaps as many of the national museums, galleries and performance venues we now enjoy. Car traffic throughout downtown might have slowed to a crawl as scores of trains criss-crossed their way to and from Union Station on Rideau Street. The tall, gritty smokestacks of industry, meanwhile, might otherwise now be photo-bombing every tourist snapshot of the Peace Tower, chewing up our precious waterfront and blotting the skyline with their grey effluent clouds.
On the other hand, LeBreton Flats, left to its own devices, might well have evolved into an exciting and vibrant warehouse district similar to Toronto’s Distillery Historical District or Vancouver’s Yaletown, instead of being razed and left empty for 40 years, then handed over to developers to turn into mean towers of condominiums. Visitors arriving in the capital aboard VIA Rail cars might have debarked smack dab in the distinguished heart of the capital, rather than five kilometres away at an otherwise featureless site overlooking the Trans-Canada Highway. And itinerant ramblers mightn’t have had to cross four lanes of quasi-highway simply to sit along the riverbank to contemplate where in hell you could get a drink around here.
Alain Miguelez, 46, an urban planner with the City of Ottawa and a weekend historian, has wondered these things; how The Gréber Plan of 1950 — Ottawa’s official plan — fundamentally changed the face of Ottawa, and the lessons we can learn from its implementation. It fascinates him, and he’s hoping it will intrigue enough other people to help support a book he’s written on the subject.
At the heart of the book, titled Transforming Ottawa: Canada’s capital in the eyes of Jacques Gréber, are hundreds of photographs of street views of Ottawa from the late 1930s that Miguelez discovered at the National Archives more than a decade ago. At the time, Miguelez was doing research for his first book, A Theatre Near You, about movie houses in the Ottawa-Gatineau region.
The historic photos were commissioned by Gréber for his report. A Parisian best known for his 1917 plan for the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia and the 1937 Paris International Exposition, the latter for which he was head architect, Gréber was hired by then-prime minister Mackenzie King to create a city plan worthy of a national capital, on the sort of scale of a Washington or London.
Until then, Ottawa had grown like a weed, rather than a formal garden, a hodgepodge of factories and industrial, office and residential spaces sitting shoulder-to-shoulder. Almost 100 years after becoming Canada’s capital, the city still appeared very much a provincial town, and there was a growing sense that it was time to make it more noble, more majestic. ( Click here to watch A Capital Plan, a short NFB documentary about conditions in Ottawa immediately following the Second World War and the need to implement Gréber’s Plan. )
“That was every city then,” Miquelez says of the gritty mix of which Ottawa was comprised. “That was Montreal, that was Toronto, that was Hamilton, that was Sudbury. That was pretty much every town in Canada. It was everyone’s daily life back then, and it was jobs for people. Ottawa had factories and industry, and the fact that it was seen as a problem, and the fact that we were in for radical surgery as a result of that problem, was what they needed to sell. They had to sell people on an idea that was unusual in Canada back then — we’re going to spend a whole bunch of money to remake a city.”
Chief among Gréber’s concerns about Ottawa then was that there were too many rail lines, especially along the Rideau Canal as they approached Union Station, and too much downtown industry. His plan eventually saw Union Station closed and a new one built, in 1966, on Tremblay Road, which allowed Colonel By Drive to be built along the canal. But, according to Miguelez, the hope that those industries forced out of the downtown core and off the Ottawa River would relocate in the same direction as the station didn’t quite pan out, as many of them simply chose to relocate or consolidate elsewhere, effectively eliminating the city’s blue-collar sector.
“You’d never do that again,” says Miguelez. “You don’t touch the economic base of a city and give it a bodycheck of that nature and get away with it. But back then, you look at the grime, the smoke, the noise of trains and industry, and it was easy to say, ‘We need something new. We need something clean and green and safe.’ And greenery — grass, lawns, trees, parks — is something that’s easy to get a buy-in for.
“Who’s against nature? But as a result, we’ve now got nature separating streets and neighbourhoods from one another. We lost the intimacy of the pedestrian scale.”
The Gréber Plan also saw Ottawa’s streetcars eliminated — Gréber felt the overhead wires were unsightly — and the establishment of the Greenbelt around the city, intended to slow urban growth. Much of Gréber’s planning was done with the belief that the region’s population — then 273,000 — would never exceed a half million, a mark it surpassed in just over 15 years.
As a result, Miguelez sees where the plan has not held. The trains coming downtown could have finished their journeys in underground tunnels, he says, and streetcar wires could have been put in the road, as other cities have done. Much of the green space that was created actually makes Ottawa less livable, he contends. “Look at all the green space in Confederation Heights (surrounding Heron Road and Riverside Drive). It’s a lot of land with a lot of open space that nobody uses for anything. It’s green, it looks good, but the only enjoyment you have of it is through your windshield as you speed by in your car at 80 km/h. So it extends the distance of the city and makes it impossible to walk. It introduces a barrier that forces you to use a car.” The Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway, meanwhile, makes it difficult for pedestrians to access the Ottawa River except for at a few sites.
And Gréber’s design, very much geared to the nascent automobile age that followed the Second World War, compartmentalized and separated offices, industry and residential areas, leading to an unnatural city where these groups no longer mixed, says Miguelez.
Yet he lauds many of the plan’s aesthetics, including the height restrictions that insist the silhouette of the Parliament Buildings is always prominent. “Gréber also made some commentary that we would repeat today, such as that the national capital needs good national museums and a national theatre, hence the NAC was born.”
In Transforming Ottawa, Miguelez shows the Ottawa that Gréber saw when he first came here in 1937. Some of the street scenes look remarkably familiar. Most don’t. In his accompanying text, Miguelez explains how, for better or worse, the Gréber Plan really set Ottawa’s skeleton in place for centuries to come; how, in his mind, it works and where it fails, and what we might consider as the city continues to grow. It doesn’t pretend to have the answers, just some of the questions we should ask.
“I’m hoping that it leaves people with a healthy dose of information about how the city’s growth in the past 65 years came from a set of ideas that may be outmoded, and maybe we need to revisit what our core ideas are before we continue this discussion about how this city should grow.”
We should still have the ambition that Gréber displayed, he adds. “Ottawa should be the top city in the country. We are the window to the world. We should look dignified and sharp and noble. But we can be a fun, active, urban place, too. But how to get there is more complex now. There is no oracle to show the way, and we should be mistrustful of anyone trying to do that. We have to take stock of everything we have, and, really, the right question is how can we have it all and be smart about it, and what are the trade-offs?
“The Ottawa of 300,000 people is not the Ottawa of a million-and-a-half. The Ottawa of a million-and-a-half has a few issues to solve.”
The book will be released in time for Christmas, and Miguelez is attempting to raise $20,000 for its publication through crowdfunding site Indiegogo. With his July 24 deadline looming, he’s about halfway there.
Additionally, those interested can attend a fundraising talk, which includes a slide show, being held at Laurier Social House from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, July 8.
The Indiegogo address is www.indiegogo.com/projects/transforming-ottawa#/story.