On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Since moving to Ottawa with my parents back in 1985, I occasionally used to use the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier here in Ottawa as an informal, outdoor confessional site. To air out my self-doubts, concerns, fears, grievances, hopes, etc.. Before certain fools used the National War Memorial as an outdoor urinal on the evening of Canada Day 2006.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/charge-dropped-for-man-who-urinated-on-national-war-memorial-1.670903

Because of that first instance, the honour guard from May to November that Cpl. Nathan Cirillo was killed as part of in 2014 was instituted. A friend of mine had the horrible luck to be there to witness that shooting when it happened.

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/first-person-at-the-war-memorial/

(Sidebar: that particular friend went on to run the local SF publisher Bundoran Press until its end early in Pandemic times.)

And now we're rolling up the Ottawa Siege, and dealing with consequences. Such as one documented by Evan Solomon:

https://twitter.com/EvanLSolomon/status/1495448514448527364

I cannot help but think that the honour guard is now going to be a year-round thing, and that my days of using the Tomb of the Unknown as an outdoor confessional during the winter months are about to end. It is a selfish thought, yes, and I own it as such.

The building to come, meant to host both the Main Branch of the Ottawa Public Library and the geneology resources of Library and Archives Canada in years to come, now has a name: Ādisōke.

Details in this Twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/opl_bpo/status/1423307279139549189

Turns out the Ottawa Historical Society has a YouTube channel!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIG6eYHxUCoHuFBXCKVgakQ/featured

History nerds, take a gander when you can...

I think that this particular change as proposed will be a good thing. Read for yourselves and let me know what you think, hm?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/rename-langevin-avenue-motion-1.5885779

The old name signage is in my files, of course:

The Ottawa Comic Jam, an informal gathering of cartoonists and animators - from amateur to professional - has been meeting at this restaurant on Somerset near Bronson for years. Maybe a decade, I think.

Now, this, an image taken by one Fanis Grammenos:



To the photographer, the building is a victim of "adaptation". I was a beneficiary of that adaptation, as a regular visitor/customer and a local artist trying to just...do art. Somehow.

But the Shanghai is capable of providing take-out and delivery service. Or, was. But there's still hope, and an explanation in some detail...at this weblog entry:

https://theshang.wordpress.com/2020/03/14/closed-until-further-notice-for-some-renos-as-we-ride-out-this-ongoing-health-crisis/

The first time I ever spotted any of their locations was when when I was passing through the Laurel/Loretta intersection on my way from somewhere else to another elsewhere. I think the Laurel Street site was their first ever.

Someone of you remember a more recent image of Blair Station's interior, one of the sites along the O-Train network where they've agreed to rent space from OC Transpo and/or the Rideau Transit Group, I think.

My stationary bike will either need re-welding, or retiring. One of the main spars(?) has had its welding to the base of the bike become partially unstuck. The bike is therefore now unstable for riding purposes. I may know someone within walking distance who might know how to handle the former...but for the time being, the bike has to sit unused here next to my workstation in the basement.

I'm going to have to get used to walking around the neighbourhood for my exercise again.

It might be workable to take a camera with me on occasion to get images of more of the local street name signage and track down the origins of their names. But I don't want to get into trouble with neighbours who don't know my history with street names. Especially now.

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.

One example of the more amusing names we've given our O-Train cars: