by Robert Smythe
With two public open houses held last month, the City of Ottawa launched its latest Centretown Heritage Study — the first major examination of the neighbourhood’s built heritage in over 20 years. It’s a piece of unfinished business from 2013, when the City’s planning staff rejected the Centretown Community Design Plan’s draft proposal to scrap the vagaries of the current heritage conservation district, which only extends from Elgin to Kent Streets, for more focused protection of concentrated clusters of historic buildings.
The Centretown Heritage Study will produce an updated inventory of heritage resources in the whole area between the Rideau Canal and Bronson Avenue.
The project intends to establish design guidelines for new construction in the existing heritage conservation districts and will look at creating additional districts, particularly in the blocks surrounding Dundonald Park and in the Golden Triangle district east of Elgin Street. It is expected to be completed in 2020.
Forty-five years ago, a band of motivated residents came together to form the Centretown Citizens Planning Committee (CCPC), a process that resulted in one of Canada’s most revolutionary (for its time) neighbourhood plans. Their concerns were primarily focused on stabilizing and strengthening Centretown as a residential area. This meant preserving existing housing and ending the widespread demolition and block-busting that threatened to destroy the community. They also recognized the importance of Centretown’s historic buildings in establishing the community’s identity.
Heritage preservation had just emerged as a cause to be fought and defended. The City of Ottawa was taking tentative steps to include it in the development of community plans and the provincial government was formulating the Ontario Heritage Act, which was intended to provide legal protection for historic buildings.
Pioneering heritage zones
The CCPC’s goal was “not to just identify a small scattering of Centretown’s heritage buildings” but “to select whole blocks or areas which had maintained their historic and architectural character.” For this, they would create a new planning tool in the City’s zoning bylaw — detailed heritage zones for residential, commercial and public uses. In these areas, the heritage zoning enacted permitted heights, massing, rooflines and window openings that exactly matched the existing buildings. In the days before heritage designation, this would be a disincentive to demolish because nothing bigger could be built.
Windshield surveys
The heritage zones were based on a reference list of building addresses gathered through street by street “windshield surveys” — a cursory appraisal that assigned rankings. In 1975, the heritage working group produced Heritage Centretown, a small pamphlet which would be the first guidebook to the neighbourhood’s architectural history.
After functioning for more than two decades as an integral part of the City of Ottawa’s comprehensive zoning bylaw and its Official Plan, all of the heritage-prefixed zoning classifications in Centretown were inexplicably cancelled by the City’s planning department in 1998.
The strategy had been quite successful in the heritage residential zones, primarily a three-block-thick doughnut around Dundonald Park, where there had been no demolitions and plenty of historic building restoration. It now appears that the City has realized the error of its ways and is now prepared to reinstate a heritage status here.
Those heritage commercial zones — three sections of Somerset Street and a block of MacLaren and Gilmour Streets near Bank — had been a mixed success, although Somerset Village from Bank to O’Connor is a hangover from this.
The Centretown Plan’s heritage policies had many serious omissions. Minto Park, and all of the buildings fronting onto it, were left without any protection, but this was later rectified by a citizens’ initiative to have the park designated as a heritage conservation district, which is still in effect. As well, they left out Bank Street’s historic commercial architecture, which was to be sacrificed to high-rise development. But it too is now part of a heritage district.
Looking back, and taken as a whole, we can be grateful for the foresight of the Centretown Citizens Planning Committee in laying the foundation for heritage planning and preservation.
The Centretown Citizens 1975 Heritage Centretown booklet, which was introduced by this nostalgic quotation from a poem by Arthur Bourinot:
“And now to revert
to those old days
on Cooper Street
with its wooden sidewalks
and often rotten planks
and the German bands
played in the evenings
under the corner lights
with pennies thrown
on the drum for thanks…
and the bicycle coasting
down Metcalfe Street,
the only paved road…”