Ottawa Citizen columnist Kelly Egan has hit it out of the park, maybe even smashing the window of another condo. Here’s his column:
A fresh coat of paint rolls over the city
KELLY EGAN
We’ve heard loads about the demise of the Elmdale Tavern, which is odd in a city that, 10 years ago, didn’t know it had an Elmdale Tavern.
But that’s progress: it appraises the present, at market value, then adds money, borrowed at dirt interest rates. What worked since 1934 is over — the past gets you a nice story, maybe a bag of chips.
The turning over of the Elmdale into a fancy seafood restaurant is emblematic of what is happening to most of our prominent retail strips in the city — that is, “the places where people go.”
We are de-grunging the place. We are becoming, one of my mates put it, a city of soft hands. We are not only getting rid of taverns, we are getting rid of people who frequent taverns. Blessed are the poor; just don’t let them idle here.
Look at Vanier, once the mother ship for the bad and the ugly.
In 10 years, you’ll barely recognize Montreal Road.
As we speak, the finishing touches are being put on the Wabano Centre for Aboriginal Health, a $15-million building designed by architect Douglas Cardinal’s firm.
It has his trademark curves and swoops of stone around 25,000 square feet of space, an immediate signature building set to officially open in January, when it will serve more than 10,000 people annually, a hive day and night.
Close by, Place Vanier is set to break ground next spring on an empty lot.
At a cost of $35 million, the seven-storey, glass-dominated edifice is expected to house 500 office workers, with retail on the ground floor.
The BIA there, led by the irrepressible Suzanne Valiquet, has now expanded to 460 members, including a good chunk of Beechwood Avenue.
You know, indeed, this is not your father’s Vanier or Eastview or Janeville, when you see a shop, Zuffa Home, selling $2,000 sofas at 81 Montreal Road and the bingo hall talking about six-figure renovations.
Seriously. The strippers won’t know what hit them.
It is pretty much everywhere. Preston Street has undergone major change in the past 10 years, with more to come. Even the venerable Prescott caught the wave, with a fresh coat of respectable.
Of Wellington and Richmond, no more needs be said. In 15 years, it has gone from downtrodden to unrecognizably prosperous, where the poor stick out for the missing $80 yoga pants and last year’s Subaru.
Bank Street? Well, it soldiers on, but in a better uniform. Much of the upper end of the street has been rebuilt, condos have just been completed at the corner of Gladstone, and Lansdowne is marching toward its major transformation.
Rideau Street, too, will look sharply different in the next decade.
The Rideau Centre is eyeing a $250-million expansion. High-end Nordstrom may open by the spring of 2015, and the premier mall is growing eastward toward the old Ogilvy store.
Add in the new light-rail terminal, the completion of a couple of more housing towers, the Arts Court reno at $37 mil and change, and the picture begins to change. Grungy? What grungy?
Even the knot of social agencies in Lowertown is dispersing a little.
The Ottawa Withdrawal Management Centre, better known as the detox, has moved from Bruyère Street to eastern Montreal Road and Centre 454 is about to shift from Murray Street to its old home on King Edward Avenue.
It is difficult, in other words, to find a commercial stretch of main street that is not being “improved” in this city.
It is mostly to the good, one supposes.
But you do have to wonder how a little shop, whether a shoemaker, or a quirky art gallery, or a used book store or a vintage clothing peddlar or a barber or a greasy spoon, can ever make a start in a red-hot retail market where the competition has names like MEC, or LCBO, or Apple.
Find a niche, presumably. Find the Off in off-Broadway.
Taken together, though, one gets the impression of a city that never had much in the way of “slums” to begin with, further cleansing itself by flipping creepy taverns into hip live-music venues, then flipping that into a place that flips pan-seared halibut, or what-have-you.
You begin to wonder about authenticity. In that respect, thank goodness the Carleton Tavern is still there to remind us of what was, and why: working-class people, feeling at home, in a working-class neighbourhood.
As for signs of the grungy poor, we’re busy air-brushing them out of the family portrait.
