by Lost Ottawa | May 16, 2020 | Plaza, Tour
No better place to start a postcard tour of Ottawa than the centre of town. Here’s a postcard that shows how it was imagined that the centre of the city would look in 1913, when what I will call the Plaza Project was finished. I say “imagined”...
by Lost Ottawa | May 16, 2020 | Plaza, Tour
Our previous postcard showed what the Plaza was expected to be like in 1913. This one shows more of what it was actually like in the years 1905 to 1912, before the Plaza Project was completed. We have Sappers’ Bridge on the left, leading to Sparks Street....
by Lost Ottawa | May 16, 2020 | Tour
Here’s the third stop on our postcard tour, where we can look at the Plaza from the Rideau canal, circa 1905, and get a different view of the physical configuration of the centre of town before the Chateau Laurier and Union Station were built. On the right we can see...
by Lost Ottawa | May 16, 2020 | Plaza, Tour
Looking down the Rideau Canal towards the Old Post Office sometime between 1904 and 1913. This postcard gives us a great look at the Old Post Office as it was rebuilt after a fire in February, 1904. People were as desperate to get their mail from the Post Office as we...
by Lost Ottawa | May 16, 2020 | Plaza, Tour
As with the Bird’s Eye view of the Plaza, the J. Valentine company was so eager to publish a postcard of Ottawa’s new central station in 1908 that it couldn’t wait for the real thing. So it used this drawing of what the station was supposed to look like when it was...
by Lost Ottawa | May 16, 2020 | Tour
This is a tour of Ottawa, so you wouldn’t think we would be talking much about the ancient Romans. It was, however, quite common a century ago to think about the purpose of a building, search backwards in time for a building with a similar purpose, then borrow its...
