Postcard Tour of the Plaza
The Plaza was such a striking place and so distinctively Ottawa, there are dozens and dozens of postcards of the place, and we can use them to see what the centre of Ottawa was like at the height of the Edwardian Era, when it was transformed by the building of Union Station and the Chateau Laurier.
Please note that you can navigate the tour in various ways.You can look down the page and enjoy the pictures. You can click on any pic and see the full text, then move forwards or backwards from there. I recommend clicking on the first “Bird’s Eye” move forward from there.
We’ll be posting individual stops on the tour over the next several days, so check back often to see more. The whole tour will be up by next Friday.
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The Centre of Ottawa Imagined, circa 1910
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" because the J. Valentine...
The Old Post Office
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. Dufferin...
Looking up to the Plaza
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...
Looking down to the Plaza
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...
Union Station Imagined
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...
The Waiting Hall of Union Station
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...
The Chateau Laurier Imagined
Now that we've looked at Union Station, let's turn our attention to the Chateau Laurier across the street. Here we have another one of those pictures of how things would look when they were finished in 1912, but drawn some years earlier. Like the other early drawings...
Entrance to the Chateau Laurier
A doorman awaits the arrival of guests under the portico of the Chateau Laurier in a postcard dated to 1914, the end of what is often called the Long Nineteenth Century brought out by World War One. I really like this picture. The composition is so dramatic. It’s one...
The Lost Triangle
We’re on the last day of our tour of the Plaza in downtown Ottawa. We’ll end with two postcards, one now and one later, that show how the Plaza looked when what we’ve been calling the “Plaza Project” was finished. I’m not sure where the photographer who took the...
A Final Look
Here we are at the last stop on our postcard tour of what we’ve been calling the Plaza, and which people of Ottawa called Connaught Plaza, Connaught Place, or even Connaught Place Plaza after it was finished in 1913. I like this particular image. It’s accurate in the...