Getting back to a theme discussed before: backing down from dreams is a thing that Ottawa seems to do a lot of.
There’s a bit of evidence for that theory that most people are likely to ignore in their daily travels throughout Centretown. If you’ve ever looked at the north-facing side of the eastern tower of the World Exchange Plaza, you might have seen it without noticing yourself. Inside the shopping-mall portion, the first three floors before they closed up the six-screen movie theatre on the third to refit it into office space, it’s slightly more difficult to ignore.
There’s this staircase on the north side that goes up from the food court on level two. The space that it leads to serves as a greenhouse now, but it was originally built to be the vestibule connecting the World Exchange to the Sparks Street Mall. There was, in the original plan, an enclosed, elevated walkway that would allow foot traffic between the World Exchange and Sparks Street. If there’s imagery of that aspect of the plan online and viewable by the public at the moment, I’ll be pleasantly surprised.
I don’t know why that part of the plan went by the wayside, but the vestibule – with then-functional doors – was part of the finished building. The walkway never happened.
There’s similar stories across the city. The five-screen theatre that was supposed to be the third floor of the last real expansion of the main building at Place d’Orléans Mall, for one. The unbuilt portions of Moshe Safdie’s original design for the expansion of what used to be Ottawa City Hall and is now the Diefenbaker Building at the north end of New Edinburgh and Lowertown. The freeway network imagined by Jacques Gréber and company that we now see still only pieces of, aside from the Queensway. Probably more than that missing from this particular narrative.
Since we already have two books in a series entitled
Unbuilt Toronto, thanks to author and historian Mark Osbaldeston, we can begin to imagine the contents of such a book focused on the dreamed-of-and-still-unmade ideas for Ottawa. We need such a book, just as we need a proper historical atlas of the region. There are at least three different models we could consider for that book that come to my mind, and all three of them need more time and either ink or bandwidth than we have time for right now to explain and debate properly.
Hopefully, in my next writings on the subject, I can revisit those three models of historical atlas properly. Preferable, the books that I’m thinking of will be in hand as well. Especially in the case of an in-person discussion.
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