Okay, first: go look at
John Lorinc's opinion and history primer on a street in Toronto about to be renamed because the namesake was a 19th Century pro-slavery fool.(I'm writing here on my
own blog. I'll call pro-slavery people - dead or alive - fools as it suits me.
Because it suits me. As for the Spacing Ottawa wordmark, I want to promote
Spacing's published work here along with my other motives.)
So...why do I care about the street-name debate?
For one thing, I've done those street name essays for Spacing's Ottawa blog off and on.
For another, there's a side street in Ottawa's Vanier district - formerly the town of Eastview and before that, the villages of Clandeboye, Janeville and Clarkstown. That side street is
also named for Henry Dundas. It's a single-block connector running between Selkirk Street (formerly "John Street") to the north and McArthur Street to the south, just south of the old Eastview Mall now undergoing severe renovations.
It is interesting to note from the fire insurance maps of 1902, later updated in 1912, that "Dundas Street" was
not its original name.
In fact, that name was "Napoleon".
There's another street in the northern reaches of Lowertown that used to share
that name, also renamed, twice. First to Church, and then to Guigues as an extension of another street named after the first bishop of Bytown (now Ottawa). I smell a bit of Orange Lodge-related history-purging in that first renaming, but right now I don't have the time to go digging. The public library and city archives are difficult to access at the moment, too.
(Going to try to add maps to this later on, I promise! Both excerpted from those aforementioned fire insurance maps, themselves sourced from Library and Archives Canada.)
I'm guessing - uncertain for now - that Napoleon Street in the former Janeville section of what's now Vanier was renamed once Eastview was created out of the three former villages mentioned a moment ago.
Napoleon
did make his way back onto street name signage in Ottawa as presently constituted. No worries about that. But, yet again, it was as the name of a side street. That side street feeds from St. Joseph Boulevard into the upper level of the southern parking spaces of Place d'Orléans Mall.
He only reshaped the maps of continental Europe over the course of half a century, and this is the respect he gets in a city his nation accidentally helped found on Algonquin lands? Maybe that obscurity
is the justice he deserves. Many will argue that point, I'm sure.
As for the Dundas Street of Vanier? This isn't the first name it's had. It doesn't have to be the one it's stuck with for all time.
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