Postcard: Billings Estate Museum,

We made our way to the Billings Estate Museum last week, an Ottawa historical site neither Christine nor I had previously visited (we weren’t entirely sure where it was before). Since we moved out of Centretown last fall, I’ve been curious about a number of aspects of our new neighbourhood, slowly making our way out to explore side-streets and parks, and a series of small pockets of city I knew little or nothing about. Our immediate part of Alta Vista Drive was originally one of a series of farmer’s fields before the advent of mid-1950s housing development. To the east, houses are slightly more recent, stepping into the early 1960s. A few blocks to the north-east, the houses along Orchard Avenue, for example, weren’t constructed until the late 1970s (what I would consider rather late for the area), and various neighbours apparently still have memory of a plethora of fruit trees. Christian McPherson, who owns a house on Orchard, recently discovered a lattice of tree-roots throughout his back yard.

We’d only been meaning for a couple of months to start taking advantage (in the tourist sense) of Christine’s maternity leave, and the three of us finally ventured the half an hour or so walk north along Alta Vista through Pleasant Park, over the Transitway towards Riverside, and up into the estate of old Braddish Billings (1762-1864) and his wife, Lamira Dow Billings (I’m curious to know if she, in fact, was related in any way of the Dow family who helped name Dow’s Great Swamp, later cleared out as Dow’s Lake). Curious, too, to see the occasional house around the transitway that seem to pre-date the other houses in the area (including the loveliest green house at the corner of Cavendish and Pleasant Park, with charming log fence), suggesting the 1940s, 1930s and even a house that appeared to be built closer to the end of the 19^th Century (among, of course, the more modern and expensive monolithic in-fills). Once closer, we saw that the estate sits on a fascinating rise, and there is a section of Cabot Street where one can even catch a glimpse of the Peace Tower, which suggests it must have been quite a view before the emergence of city.

Given my fascination with history, I thought the tour quite compelling, and learned a number of things I didn’t previously know, including the fact that American-born Braddish Billings was raised in Brockville, and later moved to the area to work for American-born Philemon Wright (1760 - 1839), the same Wright who established the first permanent settlement in the area (Wrightstown, Wright’s Village, Wrightsville; what eventually became Hull, Quebec). Interesting enough, Billings and Wright were both originally from neighbouring towns in Massachusetts, born two years apart in the towns of Ware and Woburn, respectably. Billings also managed to get the contract to provide food to the workers who built the Rideau Canal, long before being known as one of the city’s founding lumber barons, helping him establish himself enough to build his grand estate on the Rideau River, slightly east of where Billings Bridge and Billings Bridge Plaza now sit. The tour was pretty interesting, with a number of characters throughout the family worth paying attention to, some of whom were quite colourful. It was interesting to compare the story of Billings and his family, as well as see how his connects, with other tales of early Ottawa-area settlers and figures, including Colonel John By, Hamnett Pinhey, Ottawa lumber barons Booth and Eddy, and William Stewart (who invented Stewarton) [see my piece on such here].

According to Wikipedia (which appears to have far more information than The Billings Estate website actually has):

The Billings Estate National Historic Site is an Ottawa museum located 2100 Cabot St. in the former home of one of the region’s earliest settlers. The oldest wood framed house in Ottawa was built in 1827-9 by Massachusetts-born Braddish Billings. It became the home for the following four generations of the Billings family. It is Ottawa’s oldest surviving house, though the Bytown Museum building is older. Billings had moved to the area in 1812, and was the first settler in Gloucester Township.

Billings became prosperous in the timber trade, and built the large home that was named Park Hill. Billings later moved into agriculture, and the house became the centre of a large and prosperous farm providing produce for Bytown, with the farm linked to town by the Bytown and Prescott Railway.

The estate remained in the Billings family until 1975. Over time the property was slowly sold off to developers, and today the estate retains only a relatively small plot of land. In 1975 the house became a Billings Estate Museum which is today operated by the city of Ottawa. The house was included amongst other architecturally interesting and historically significant buildings in Doors Open Ottawa, held June 2 and 3, 2012.

The estate also includes a historic cemetery that contains graves dating back to 1820.

For whatever reason, one of the bedrooms in the house, decorated with an exhibit on World War I, reminded slightly of the Hemingway House in Key West [see my post on such here].

We were given our own personal tour of the house, and later wandered a bit on the grounds, before stopping for tea (my scones are better than theirs). High tea: not something I’d done before either, but I know something my mother would have appreciated. Rose sat on the lawn for a spell, brushing her palms through the grass before finally tearing out a series of small handfuls. After tea (during which Rose was amused and distracted by Christine's change purse), we picked out postcards and guide books, and Christine gifted Rose a small kerchief doll, which brought up peals of laughter from the wee babe. Before we left, we wandered the small cemetery, and Rose fell asleep on my chest, nestled deep in her snuggly. What else might our summer bring?

Ottawa’s Chinatown Gateway

Yesterday, the arch that we’ve seen slowly building up over Somerset Street West at Cambridge was finally unveiled in a ceremony that included John Baird, Ottawa Mayor Larry O’Brien, and the Chinese Ambassador to Canada, Lan Lijun. Said to be the most beautiful arch of its kind in Canada (alongside pre-existing arches in Edmonton, Montreal and Vancouver), it was built to celebrate the 40^th anniversary of Canada-China Diplomatic Relations, and called a “twin-city project between the Cities of Ottawa and Beijing.” My photos of the royal style arch simply don’t do it justice, and really needs to be seen to be believed, such as in late afternoon, as the setting sun breezes through the glazed tiles and layers of gold leaf. For further pictures, there was a blog created to showcase the construction, which took six months and included a dozen green-uniformed artisans from China’s Hunan province who arrived in April to construct the 12-metre arch. What will the other communities around Ottawa do in response? Is this why we’ve seen, over the past few weeks, that series of fifteen statues appearing along the stretch of Preston Street, or those white sculptures that have mysteriously grown up around Parkdale along Wellington Street West?

Ottawa: The Unknown City

About 100 feet east of Sussex between Clarence and Murray in the Byward Market, the Tin House Court sits in one of a series of courtyards that move parallel to Sussex Drive. Mere feet away from a stone fountain, the tin house front wall was fixed to the side wall of the former Leblanc and Lemay store (upper left in the photo), which, in their time, sold more clothes in their ready-made clothing shop than any other store in Bytown. Taken from a frame house in the 1860s that sat on Guiges Street and put on display a dozen years later, the original house was owned from 1904 to 1913 by Honoré Foisy, a plumber, tinsmith and roofer who clad his entire house in tin. Being economical and weather-resistant, the metal was in common use at the time, but Foisy and his family embellished the porch, pediment, parapet, gazebo and window and door frames in a tin imitation of stone and wood in hundreds of pieces of paper-thin tin.

http://unknownottawa.com/

Ottawa: The Unknown City

You might not know this, but the National Arts Centre - Centre national des Arts is built over the spot where the Russell Theatre opened on Elgin Street in 1897. The original Russell Theatre provided 1,500 seats, 10 private boxes and 4 loge boxes, becoming the centre of the serious arts in Ottawa, but was later destroyed by fire on April 7, 1901. Quickly rebuilt as the New Russell Opera House, it existed for nearly two decades more, providing a venue for visiting troupes from around the world, before the building was expropriated by the Federal District Commission to make way for Confederation Park (now Confederation Square). The New Russell Opera House had its last showing on April 14, 1928, despite an outcry from many prominent citizens, and the city's only legitimate theatre was finally destroyed. The current building is set slightly to the south of the previous, an idea set forth by then-Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson to establish a national centre for the performing arts. Despite the fact that his idea for a new theatre was almost universally dismissed, it was finally approved in 1963, opening May 31, 1969 as The National Arts Centre.

Among numerous other events over the decades, the first few years of the Ottawa International Writers Festival (which started back in 1997) also occurred in the National Arts Centre building, and I could tell you a whole bunch of extremely good stories involving, say, Dany Laferriere, Michael Hartnett, Clare Latremouille, jwcurry, Robert McLiam Wilson, Lynn Crosbie, Will Ferguson, Michael Turner, Dermot Healy, Patrick Watson and perhaps others, but some parts of festival remain at festival.

Built well before the Russell Theatre, there was Her Majesty's Theatre, built in Wellington Street between O'Connor and Bank in 1854; renamed The Prince of Wales in 1860 to commemorate his visit to Ottawa that year, in 1866 it returned to previous name. In 1863, the theatre folded and in 1870 the building became the home of The Times Printing and Publishing. The Family Theatre itself, on Queen Street east of Bank, began showing feature-length films in 1912.

I have never understood the government small-mindedness when it comes to refusing to pay for anything arts-related. Don’t they know that every single study says that a dollar spent on the arts returns ten-fold to the community? A billion dollars was spent in Ottawa by tourists in 2004; how many of those people do you think were coming to visit, say, Nortel?

http://unknownottawa.com/

Ottawa: The Unknown City

In case you didn’t know, the Cold War was invented at 511 Somerset Street West, in the apartment building beside the beer store. Don’t believe it? On September 5, 1945, Russian born Igor Gouzenko, posted to the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa in 1943 as a cypher clerk, defected by walking into the offices of The Ottawa Journal. He brought with him 109 carefully selected documents establishing conclusively the existence of a Soviet spy ring in North America. As a result of the defection of Igor Gouzenko, in February of the following year, a royal commission was appointed to investigate charges of Russian spying. The most harrowing part came when Gouzenko, with his wife and child, after convincing a neighbour that they couldn’t stay in their own apartment that night, witnessed the KGB as they broke down his door and ransacked the Gouzenko apartment, finding nothing. In 2003, a plaque for Gouzenko (who was quickly hidden with his family with a new identity by the Canadian government) was erected in Dundonald Park (informally known as “the beer park”) across from his former home. Gouzenko died in June 1982, still living under an assumed name in Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto. A film, The Iron Curtain (1948), was made based on his book of the same name, and he even appeared as himself (hooded) on an episode of the Canadian current affairs trivia program, Front Page Challenge, in February 1958.

One part of the Igor Gouzenko story that most miss is the fact that, when he tried to defect, no Canadian government officials actually seemed to care, including then-Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. It took Canadian spy and Winnipeg native William Stephenson, called "Intrepid" by Sir Winston Churchill during the Second World War (yes, that "Intrepid"), to see the importance of immediately securing Gouzenko and his family, and setting him up in safe locations around the country with a new identity. Known for originally setting up the infamous Camp X training centre for spies on the shores of Lake Ontario, William Stephenson was also the model for Ian Fleming's 007 spy, James Bond (they ended up being neighbours in Jamaica, after Stephenson had retired).

According to a recent book, Amy Knight's How the Cold War Began: The Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt for Soviet Spies (2005), Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King even tried to ignore Igor Gouzenko's defection (naively presuming Stalin couldn’t have known about or been involved in this intricate spy network), hoping for a quiet diplomatic solution instead, before eventually taking credit for his own bravery and quick thinking after the whole mess had been resolved. Unfortunately, all this did on the Soviet end was make them rethink their entire espionage network, therefore making them stronger, and more effective.

http://unknownottawa.com/

Ottawa: The Unknown City

It might not look like it once did, due to the construction, but this building has been home to a whole range of great art over the years, originally said to be a hardware store by some, and a grocery store by others, this building at the corner of Bank and Lisgar Street was built in the early 1900s currently houses the main location for the family business Wallack's Art Supplies. Opened in 1939 by Samuel Wallack (before he took over the business next door and expanded), his son, John moved the business into its current location in 1977, and now boasts eight locations around Ottawa, Gatineau and Kingston, as well as Wallack's Gallery (203 Bank Street) just down from the supplies. Just above Wallack's is Invisible Cinema (391 Lisgar Street, upstairs, 237-0769), a gallery space that doubles as a video and dvd film rental, including some of the best offbeat titles you can't usually find at the big chains. Their current space previously housed artist-run centre Gallery 101 during their 1980s heyday of artistic director Dennis Tourbin, with regular performances by avant-garde writers from across Canada and beyond, hosted by Ottawa's Experimental Writers Group (EWG; Rob Manery and Louis Cabri) under the name The Transparency Machine. Both have gone on to do further events in other cities, as Cabri headed to Philadelphia in 1994, where he hosted the reading/internet series Phillytalks, and Manery left in 1996 for Vancouver and the Kootenay School of Writing. Before Gallery 101, the space was used as a bookstore space owned/operated by the late Ottawa writer and photographer Richard Simmons (no, not that Richard Simmons), who was also a curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery in the 1960s; Simmons was not only known as the first curator of a public space to purchase work by Greg Curnoe, but he was also around for the beginnings of 3cent pulp (the pamphlet precursor to Arsenal Pulp Press), with the later version, Pulp Press, even publishing his novel, Sweet Marie. Back when it was still a gallery, it was where I started my "poetry 101" series around 1995 or so, what eventually developed into The Factory Reading Series in the next Gallery 101 location on Nepean Street, and since moved to the Ottawa Art Gallery, hosting readings (and even a launch of my former writing & visual art magazine, Missing Jacket) by Sheri-D Wilson, RM Vaughan, David Scrimshaw, Joe Blades, Grant Shipway, Dayv James-French, Jim Larwill, Sean Johnston, Catherine Jenkins, Christopher McPherson, David O'Meara, Tamara Fairchild, David Collins, Michelle Desberats and others.

The apartments on the second and third floors of the building are beautiful hardwood floor studios, have housed a number of writers and artists over the years (as well as filmmakers, a paleontologist and a stand up comic), both as living and working spaces, including the poet Michael Dennis, and artists of all sorts over the years, including former and current residents Dan Sharp, Jennifer Dickson, Jeff Wannacott, Richard Nigro, David Cation, David Cooper, Andrew Farrell and Adrian Göllner. I could even mention the short film that never got finished, a whole Sunday afternoon of Ralph Gethings' film shoot around 2002, the camera catching the action of two characters driving by in a car, and me as the devil, smoking a cigarette while standing on Lisgar Street, just outside the Bible shop…

http://www.ottawaartgallery.ca/factoryreadingseries/index-en.php

http://unknownottawa.com/

Ottawa: The Unknown City

There is a story of the late poet John Newlove still living in Vernon, British Columbia with his wife Susan in 1986, and being told by his doctor, if you keep drinking like this, you'll be dead in six months. He called his friend John Metcalf in Ottawa for help, who, through his wife Myrna, got him an interview at the Department of Official Languages, housed in one of the two office towers of L'Esplanade Laurier, at the corner of Laurier and Bank. Of course he showed up drunk off the plane, and Metcalf had to clean him up before the interview, which he managed to ace. Newlove worked there from 1986 just up to the point of his stroke in 2003, and Colin Morton's wife, the writer Mary Lee Bragg, has stories of cartoons that he liked from the New Yorker, that Newlove would fax to her office in another part of the same building.

I used to see him regularly get off the #2 bus at Bank and Gloucester, back when I wrote in the Dunkin' Donuts every day, as he would see me, nod and even wave his cane before he slowly made further way. He even came in once or twice to visit, but those moments were rare. Once he did, and my friend b stephen harding already visiting, asking John to explain Monty Python to him, a humour he has yet to comprehend. John paused, and told bruce to imagine a group of world war one soldiers in a trench about to go over the top, and one private had an umbrella instead of a rifle. When asked about this by his superior, the private replied, but sir, what if it rains?

http://www.chaudierebooks.com/books/argument.html

http://unknownottawa.com/

Ottawa: The Unknown City

I'm not entirely sure if the Grace Manor on Wellington Street West (just by Parkdale) is a senior's home or not, but it isn’t what it once was. In the 1990s, it was still the home of the Grace Hospital, known informally as Ottawa's baby hospital.

Back when I was someone else, I was born in that place, to a woman I still haven’t met, with a name that I still haven’t heard, knowing only the last initial as A, otherwise named Duncan Warren Andrew. What could it be? With my father apparently not on my birth certificate, I can only presume that the mysterious A. belonged to her, but I have yet to find out.

I used to walk by the Grace Hospital sometimes and wonder, what room was I born in, what floor? Were there records inside that would tell me, and if so, how could I get them? And then the whole building torn down and left open, a pit in the ground, before this new structure built.

And how do I manage to live, after my Glengarry years, bare a mile from the spot I was born?

http://unknownottawa.com/

Ottawa: The Unknown City

There were a number of places my mother's family lived when they arrived in Ottawa, after living in Kemptville and Brockville, that somehow, every time they moved out, the house was torn down for the sake of something else. The house at 189 Hawthorne Avenue was torn down to build the on-ramp for the 417 at Lees Avenue, and their later house in the Alta Vista area, originally called 1284 Kirk Drive when they arrived in the mid-1960s, soon turning into 1293 Ridgemont Avenue, was torn down after everyone finally vacated in the late 1990s, for the sake of the new owners building a smaller house on the same lot.

In between those addresses, my mother lived in a house at 233 Gilmour Street with her parents and various siblings, when she attended the Elgin Street School, and, until she dropped out, Lisgar Collegiate. What became the "squatter house" in the early 2000's was where my mother's best friend lived, back in the 1960s, and apparently Bouchey's Market has been there for generations, back to at least the 1940s, owned and operated by the same family?

When they finally vacated, the house was torn down for the sake of this, the public service building that looks like a giant oval ship. Wouldn’t you rather a family home in the same location?

http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2006/03/from-address-book-erasure-fragment-of.html

http://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2006/06/my-mother-alan-ladd-i-was-on-phone.html

http://unknownottawa.com/

The Ottawa launch of rob mclennan's Ottawa: The Unknown City (Arsenal Pulp Press)

Saturday, March 15 (the author's birthday!) 2008

2pm at Nicholas Hoare Books, 419 Sussex Drive, Ottawa

info: janice@arsenalpulp.com

from the Arsenal Pulp Press website:

Ottawa may be our capital city but it's also a place of contradictions―the official version offers numerous, beneficent historic sites, institutions, museums, and galleries, but there are other stories to be told. In this latest edition of Arsenal's Unknown City series of alternative city guides for both locals and tourists, Ottawa comes alive as a diverse, quirky town that may look like a government city on the surface but boasts a small-town charm. The book charts a course through the city's hidden landmarks, shopping, dining, and nightlife hot spots, as well as secret histories that will come as a surprise even to life-long locals.

Among the Unknown facts about Ottawa:
- A rumour persists that Queen Victoria chose Ottawa as Canada’s capital by playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey with a map of Canada
- When Oscar Wilde visited Ottawa in 1882, he met a young portrait painter named Frances Richards; she later moved to Europe and painted Wilde's portrait which allegedly became the inspiration for his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray
- In 1945, a clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa defected, bringing along with him hard evidence of a Soviet spy ring in North America, making him a prime target for the KGB; his story became the basis of the 1948 film The Iron Curtain
- The Rideau Canal was officially named the "longest skating rink in the world" by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2005

Witty and urbane, this Unknown City book takes readers on a beguiling journey through Ottawa's past, present, and future, warts and all.

But you have to go; it's his birthday...

another christmas in old glengarry

Very little blogging lately, since I’m full-time finishing Ottawa: The Unknown City for Arsenal Pulp Press [see my previous post on such here]; the book is scheduled for fall 2007, so I actually have to be finishing the thing in January or February. Anything you might know out there that I should be putting in?

Saw the coolest documentary last night, "the real intrepid,"about the Winnipeg native (yes!) who became the most important spy between Britain, Canada and the United States, working during the Second World War (Churchill code-named him "Intrepid"), saving Igor Gouzenko when no one else would, and finally retiring to the Bahamas, where his neighbour Ian Fleming used him as the basis and influence for the James Bond novels. What the hell? A guy from Winnipeg? Also saw our regular routine, my mother & I, of watching Jay Thomas knock (or try to; Dave actually got it this year) the meat ball off the Eiffel Tower at the top of David Letterman’s Christmas tree (after the Lone Ranger story & Paul’s bad Cher impression). It’s been at least five years now, watching that with my mother. This is probably the first year I remembered in advance.

I recently found my copy of the certificate from The Ottawa Citizen, proof that I survived the record snow-fall in Ottawa (etcetera) on March 21, 1971 (I was a year & a week old at the time). Apparely my mother’s father got a stack of them for us, since he was celebrating his 25th year as a line type operator & mechanic at the paper around then. I don’t remember the snow (but I do remember the ice we had a few years later for Christmas: 1974, maybe?), but I’ve had this thing around (obviously) for years (& haven’t even lost it yet). Working to find out more information from the newspaper on such; was there an equivalent from the ice storm? Also, apparently, my book needs more "wierd murders"and other such that you’d never find in newspapers or other more polite city-related materials; something the other books have that mine so far lacks. Suggestions?

I’m not entirely sure why Sina Queyras is talking about shutting down her blog, but I feel a loss at the idea. I would not like her to stop it; one of the few I read regularly & get plenty out of. But how to respond otherwise? & did you see this neat bit that a rawlings wrote, responding to a poem of mine?

Today dropped some copies of Clare’s novel at Second Time Around Books in Alexandria; hopefully we can get some sold that way. Apparently they’ve been selling a few of my poetry books since I was there last! What the?

Stephen Brockwell recently gave me a cd of a pile of photographs from our various trips over the past couple of years (I'll post some soon, when I'm not on my father's eastern Ontario dial-up), including of some of our (more polite, ahem) adventures in New York City with Clare Latremouille launching groundswell: the best of above/ground press 1993-2003 (why only the one photo from such?) [see my post from such here], Toronto in 2004 (the second of two combined ECW/Talon launches we were involved in), England & Wales in August/September of this year, & Prince George in early November. Why are so many of them blurry? I would be terrible at filming porn with this unsteady hand...

Before I left Ottawa, a visit briefly with Priscila Uppal & Chris Doda (Toronto); when I get back, Kate Van Dusen (Toronto) & possibly even Jason Wiens (Calgary). Hopefully back to regularly scheduled programming in a couple of weeks; going through the new Dennis Cooley, for example...

& then at the end of the day today, Kate & I saved Christmas again.