The new issue of Kitchissippi Times is out this week, and in it is my monthly column "Early Days". For this month's article, my starting point was a question-slash-mystery that I've been asked about many times over the years... why are the streets in Wellington Village in alphabetical order from E to K? And why are they not quite in order? And why did it start with E? And who are Edina, Geneva and Helena?
Little did I know that investigating this story would actually coincide with another mystery I'd been researching... the unexplained development I had noticed in aerial photos of the 1920s around the Royal Ottawa Hospital property.
The headline of this article (and I even use it here for this blog post) calls it Wellington Village, but really the area in question is kind of sandwiched between Wellington Village and Carlington, adjacent to the Civic Hospital area. It literally is only home now a few houses off Island Park Drive south of the Queensway, Kitchissippi United Church, the Hydro station, and the Royal Ottawa campus. But back in the 1910s/1920s, there were big plans for this land... and serious plans at that; to the point that the City paid to install a sewer system underneath a network of streets in anticipation of the housing development to come. But it never did.
The article talks about those original plans, how things changed, and connects the dots on the street name in Wellington Village. Check it out at:
https://kitchissippi.com/2019/08/06/the-wellington-village-neighbourhood-that-never-was/
Here are a few photos/maps that relate to the article that you won't see on the Kitchissippi Times website:
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| 1914 map of Ottawa showing the original proposed streets |
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1920 aerial photo of the area. That's Carling going left to right
along the bottom of the photo, and the original Lady Grey
Hospital buildings in the middle (with chicken coops visible
to its left). The GTR railway tracks (now the Queensway) go
along the top, with a siding for the Booth woodyards coming
off of it along roughly the route Merivale takes north of Carling
to Island Park Drive today. This is a "before" photo of the
lost neighbourhood, before the sewers go in. |
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June 1925 aerial of roughly the same area. The streets now
appear visible because of the installation of the sewers! |
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Ottawa Citizen February 15, 1910. A rare photo in the
paper for that time, showing the Lady Grey at opening. |
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Ottawa Citizen February 18, 1930. The Hydro sub-station
on Carling at it's opening! |
