[URBAN NOTE] "How Ottawa got its groove on. No, seriously."

[rfmcdonald]

In MacLean's, Paul Wells writes about Ottawa's urban renaissance.

Much of what makes Ottawa annoying is on its way to being fixed. The city, I mean: if you’re annoyed by Ottawa as a set of ideas about how Canada should be governed, I can’t offer much hope. But as a place to live and visit, lately each year is better than the last.

Sparks Street had long been a forest of construction cranes. It’s looking good, its government buildings buffed and its private commerce more energetic. Parliament’s West Block, a dingy heap of stonemasonry when I moved to Ottawa, has been polished until it would make you proud. Soon a glass dome will cover its courtyard so MPs can debate there, while work crews renovate the stately Centre Block itself. Over the same period, senators will move across Wellington, to the long-abandoned train station, to do whatever it is they do.

Grotty Rideau Street is being repaved in stages. The big mall there is completing a quarter-billion-dollar improvement. Ground will be broken next week on a $110-million facelift for the National Arts Centre. Light rail stations are going up across the city. Any day now the mayor, Jim Watson, will visit the long-abandoned old U.S. Embassy, with three ministers from the Trudeau government, to brainstorm a new cultural vocation for an elegant old building that has been dormant for 16 years.

Taken together, it’s a modest renaissance for a modest city. There remains one big mess: a huge barren field only a few blocks west of Parliament. This is the grandly named LeBreton Flats. It was the industrial heart of dirty old Ottawa. For 40 years it has been nothing much. The ground is contaminated from the heavy industry that used to be situated there, and from the mountains of snow that city crews dumped there later.

In the last decade, civilization has begun creeping back. Results are mixed. A big and well-run Canadian War Museum opened in 2005. Condominium towers have gone up at the flats’ east end, but no business or pedestrian traffic enlivens the neighbourhood. Most of the field is still just field.

Even this is starting to change. More at MacLean's.