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Walk the Line, Part 4 follows Citizen reporter Matthew Pearson as he makes his way along the final part of the Confederation LRT route, and comes “home,” thinking about the future, and the past, of the capital.
If you stand at the edge of a cliff at the end of Queen Street, you can see the future.
It unfolds in a sweeping panoramic view of LeBreton Flats and the Ottawa River just beyond it.
The new Booth Street overpass. The LRT tunnel entrance. The LeBreton Flats lands. Zibi.
Even the rusty Prince of Wales Bridge off in the distance hints at the possibility this part of Ottawa will soon provide.
It’s a corner of the city I’m particularly fond of, having lived in Hintonburg until recently. If I squint, I can see my old condo building.
This part of the journey is personal.
Related
I walk west on Albert Street, crossing where westbound buses used to hang a right to pull onto the Transitway. The Confederation line curves gently to the south and rises out of the tunnel below that cliff I was just perched on.
At Booth Street, I stop to scan the construction site. I was here weeks ago for a photo op when the city showed off its drawings of Pimisi station, which is named in honour of the Algonquin people.
The sky-high rendering of the future Pimisi LRT station.
A warm June sun beat down on the drummers who welcomed dignitaries to the site of the future station, the first stop west of downtown. It will connect riders to the Canadian War Museum and those future housing and entertainment developments at LeBreton Flats and along the Ottawa River, and where some will transfer onto buses to Gatineau and the sprawling government offices there.
The symbolism of the naming gesture from a city that has also, in recent months, acknowledged that it sits on unceded Algonquin-Anishinabe territory is meaningful to Chief Kirby Whiteduck.
“To the Algonquins, it’s very important,” he said that day. “It’s very symbolic of an emerging relationship with the city, and also the other partners. We think it is on the path of reconciliation that’s been talked about so much recently.”
Chief Kirby Whiteduck, left, and Attorney General Yasir Naqvi, right, watch as Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson shakes the hand of Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi after unveiling the final station design for the future Pimisi Station. Jean Levac/Postmedia
“Pimisi” is the Algonquin word for eel, which holds a sacred significance as a source of spirituality, medicine and food stretching back thousands of years.
“The eel is very important to the Algonquins,” explained Whiteduck, who leads Pikwàkanagan First Nation, which is on Golden Lake.
People caught them, traded them and smoked them. Eels provided sustenance over the long winters and were an essential part of the economy until industry arrived and dams were built.
“The rivers were teeming with this type of fish before we put barriers along the way to stop them,” says Chief Jean Guy Whiteduck of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation.
He also welcomes the naming of the station, explaining that a committee of elders from Pikwàkanagan and Kitigan Zibi chose it.
But there are larger politics at play here. The station will deliver future residents to their homes at Windmill’s controversial Zibi development, as well as Chaudière Falls, which some would like to see restored to its natural splendour.
An early image of the Ring Dam at Chaudiere Falls on the Ottawa River.
There’s a question of consultation and whether Algonquins on both sides of the river have had their say.
The Algonquins’ ancestral territory stretches out to the Ottawa Valley and includes all of the rivers that flow into the Ottawa River from north and south. It was established long before the Ontario-Quebec provincial border bisected it.
Today, the Algonquin-Anishinabe community is spread across Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec on formal reserves, off-reserve communities and in towns and cities.
“There’s not only one community, the Algonquin community in Ontario,” explains Kitigan Zibi’s Whiteduck. “This land belongs to the Algonquin Nation, so they should have all been consulted properly and participated in the process.”
In the case of Zibi, Pikwàkanagan and an organization called the Algonquins of Ontario have embraced the project, while several other Algonquin groups and high-profile architect Douglas Cardinal have opposed it. Those in favour believe it’s a landmark opportunity for collaboration between Algonquins and a private company; those against it believe the islands in the Ottawa River around the falls make up a sacred indigenous site and should be protected from development.
My hope is that Pimisi station will remind all who pass through whose land we’re on.
Views of area from above.
Renderings of what the future holds, says Windmill. The Windmill Development Group, along with Dream Unlimited Corp.
Protesters gather outside the Zibi development site to protest against the development of Chaudiere island for Zibi condominium project in November. James Park/Postmedia
I cross Preston Street and continue on to Bayview station.
This is the crossroads, the place where the north-south Trillium and east-west Confederation lines will meet.
From Albert Street, I look north to where a Transitway bridge once stood. It came down recently and cranes are here to rebuild it. I’m reminded of something I read recently about this spot.
“It’s nice to see the LRT construction moving ahead visibly. The tunnel portions are exciting, but out of sight,” wrote Eric Darwin, a community activist who writes the West Side Action blog.
I picture all the construction hoarding and fences I’ve encountered along the line. While necessary for safety reasons, they ultimately keep the city’s largest infrastructure project at a distance from the people who truly own it.
When LRT construction is out in the open, as it is here and at several of the stations east of downtown, it becomes tangible. People stuck in traffic jams or fed up with all the construction can begin to imagine the long-term train that’s causing so much short-term pain.
Matthew Pearson walks the line.
“Until the buildings start to appear above ground as a station that’s visible from Albert or Scott street or from the Queensway, then it’s not real,” says Darwin, whose optimism about the new line is muted by some misgivings.
Sure, the price of land located close to it will increase, he says, and these areas may be intensified, but cars will continue to dominate the Ottawa landscape.
While people may ride the train to work every day, as they currently do the bus, many will switch into “car mode” at night and on weekends. “That influences the city in that it views our transit system primarily as a trip-to-work thing, as opposed to a new transportation spine that reshapes the city,” Darwin says.
Of course trains will come frequently during rush hour, but what about after hours, he wonders.
And as for the trains themselves, he fears loyal transit riders may be in for a rude awakening when they find themselves fighting for a place to sit. Each LRT vehicle will hold 300 people, but only have 120 seats (including flipouts).
I suppose it’s natural to have reservations about a project this huge. The question about whether the Confederation line will actually live up to its promise remains unanswered.
But what we make of this line will also depend largely on us — on what we do with it as citizens, riders, transit operators and developers. It’s up to all of us to give meaning to the defining project of our current and future city.
As Albert Street becomes Scott, I notice a slight ache in my feet. I’ve walked about 14 kilometres so far, all the way from the line’s eastern terminus at Blair station.
Across the road, I see signs of a protest past: “2500 buses a day. No way.”
People who live along here were seriously irked by the city’s plan to redirect buses onto Scott Street for a couple of years while the Transitway was converted to an LRT line.
They lined their porches with these hand-painted signs. Eventually, they were partially appeased. The city decided to redirect some of the buses elsewhere so the view out residents’ front windows wouldn’t be obstructed by a so-called wall of buses.
The most dire predictions never came true; the wall of buses never materialized. OC Transpo’s detour plan has worked better than many expected.
Maybe it’s an omen.
This way, folks.
At Hinchey Street, I cross over a mothballed stretch of Transitway, where workers down below are starting to strip off layers of asphalt to prepare a new surface for rail tracks.
I cross Parkdale and notice the rockface. What a massive — and prescient — undertaking it was to dig this trench in the first place. My aunt and uncle lived west of here in the early 1980s and told me once of how their house shook with each blast of rock.
Every step now brings me closer to Tunney’s Pasture, to the neighbourhood I recently left behind for a new life in Vanier.
This is where I lived when I fell out of love and wasn’t sure I’d ever fall back in; where I ran my first half-marathon, had my bike stolen and bought my first home. Where the charms of Wellington Village and the children playing street hockey on Julian Avenue never faded.
Neighbourhoods are more than just houses, shops, streets and parks; they are collections of stories. For years, this was where mine unfolded.
And this was my station. I used to catch the bus here on weekday mornings to head to work downtown, just another guy with his face in a smartphone.
The train that’s coming will connect all the neighbouhoods and nooks I’ve passed, all these collections of stories. And while so many neighbourhoods remain unreached by the line, it has the potential to bring the city together.
The line will become another artery, like the rivers, parkways and paths that came before it.
I arrive at Tunney’s Pasture and reflect on the territory I’ve covered in a day.
I think of a mall at the other end of the line. I think of a diner in the middle of nowhere.
I think of old Charles Hurdman and his many descendants; of the murky Rideau River.
I think of trains disappearing into a tunnel at the University of Ottawa; of the tunnel workers, whose stories I hope to hear someday.
I think of Pimisi; of how the train will slither through the city like the eels once so common in the river.
I think of changing trains at Bayview.
I think of Tunney’s Pasture. I think of home.
I think of all the people who will ride this line someday, including my own child, whose birth is just weeks away.
I think of all the places they will go; of the things they might see out the train window someday.
I’ve reached the end of the line or maybe, probably, this is just the beginning.
Related
查看原文...
•
If you stand at the edge of a cliff at the end of Queen Street, you can see the future.
It unfolds in a sweeping panoramic view of LeBreton Flats and the Ottawa River just beyond it.
The new Booth Street overpass. The LRT tunnel entrance. The LeBreton Flats lands. Zibi.
Even the rusty Prince of Wales Bridge off in the distance hints at the possibility this part of Ottawa will soon provide.
It’s a corner of the city I’m particularly fond of, having lived in Hintonburg until recently. If I squint, I can see my old condo building.
This part of the journey is personal.
Related
- Walk the Line, Part 1: The Citizen treks across the biggest infrastructure project in Ottawa history
- Walk the Line, Part 3: Imagining the Ottawa Underground
I walk west on Albert Street, crossing where westbound buses used to hang a right to pull onto the Transitway. The Confederation line curves gently to the south and rises out of the tunnel below that cliff I was just perched on.
•
Pimisi
Pimisi
At Booth Street, I stop to scan the construction site. I was here weeks ago for a photo op when the city showed off its drawings of Pimisi station, which is named in honour of the Algonquin people.
The sky-high rendering of the future Pimisi LRT station.
A warm June sun beat down on the drummers who welcomed dignitaries to the site of the future station, the first stop west of downtown. It will connect riders to the Canadian War Museum and those future housing and entertainment developments at LeBreton Flats and along the Ottawa River, and where some will transfer onto buses to Gatineau and the sprawling government offices there.
The symbolism of the naming gesture from a city that has also, in recent months, acknowledged that it sits on unceded Algonquin-Anishinabe territory is meaningful to Chief Kirby Whiteduck.
“To the Algonquins, it’s very important,” he said that day. “It’s very symbolic of an emerging relationship with the city, and also the other partners. We think it is on the path of reconciliation that’s been talked about so much recently.”
Chief Kirby Whiteduck, left, and Attorney General Yasir Naqvi, right, watch as Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson shakes the hand of Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi after unveiling the final station design for the future Pimisi Station. Jean Levac/Postmedia
“Pimisi” is the Algonquin word for eel, which holds a sacred significance as a source of spirituality, medicine and food stretching back thousands of years.
“The eel is very important to the Algonquins,” explained Whiteduck, who leads Pikwàkanagan First Nation, which is on Golden Lake.
People caught them, traded them and smoked them. Eels provided sustenance over the long winters and were an essential part of the economy until industry arrived and dams were built.
“The rivers were teeming with this type of fish before we put barriers along the way to stop them,” says Chief Jean Guy Whiteduck of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation.
He also welcomes the naming of the station, explaining that a committee of elders from Pikwàkanagan and Kitigan Zibi chose it.
But there are larger politics at play here. The station will deliver future residents to their homes at Windmill’s controversial Zibi development, as well as Chaudière Falls, which some would like to see restored to its natural splendour.
An early image of the Ring Dam at Chaudiere Falls on the Ottawa River.
There’s a question of consultation and whether Algonquins on both sides of the river have had their say.
The Algonquins’ ancestral territory stretches out to the Ottawa Valley and includes all of the rivers that flow into the Ottawa River from north and south. It was established long before the Ontario-Quebec provincial border bisected it.
Today, the Algonquin-Anishinabe community is spread across Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec on formal reserves, off-reserve communities and in towns and cities.
“There’s not only one community, the Algonquin community in Ontario,” explains Kitigan Zibi’s Whiteduck. “This land belongs to the Algonquin Nation, so they should have all been consulted properly and participated in the process.”
In the case of Zibi, Pikwàkanagan and an organization called the Algonquins of Ontario have embraced the project, while several other Algonquin groups and high-profile architect Douglas Cardinal have opposed it. Those in favour believe it’s a landmark opportunity for collaboration between Algonquins and a private company; those against it believe the islands in the Ottawa River around the falls make up a sacred indigenous site and should be protected from development.
My hope is that Pimisi station will remind all who pass through whose land we’re on.
Views of area from above.
Renderings of what the future holds, says Windmill. The Windmill Development Group, along with Dream Unlimited Corp.
Protesters gather outside the Zibi development site to protest against the development of Chaudiere island for Zibi condominium project in November. James Park/Postmedia
•
Bayview
Bayview
I cross Preston Street and continue on to Bayview station.
This is the crossroads, the place where the north-south Trillium and east-west Confederation lines will meet.
From Albert Street, I look north to where a Transitway bridge once stood. It came down recently and cranes are here to rebuild it. I’m reminded of something I read recently about this spot.
“It’s nice to see the LRT construction moving ahead visibly. The tunnel portions are exciting, but out of sight,” wrote Eric Darwin, a community activist who writes the West Side Action blog.
I picture all the construction hoarding and fences I’ve encountered along the line. While necessary for safety reasons, they ultimately keep the city’s largest infrastructure project at a distance from the people who truly own it.
When LRT construction is out in the open, as it is here and at several of the stations east of downtown, it becomes tangible. People stuck in traffic jams or fed up with all the construction can begin to imagine the long-term train that’s causing so much short-term pain.
Matthew Pearson walks the line.
“Until the buildings start to appear above ground as a station that’s visible from Albert or Scott street or from the Queensway, then it’s not real,” says Darwin, whose optimism about the new line is muted by some misgivings.
Sure, the price of land located close to it will increase, he says, and these areas may be intensified, but cars will continue to dominate the Ottawa landscape.
While people may ride the train to work every day, as they currently do the bus, many will switch into “car mode” at night and on weekends. “That influences the city in that it views our transit system primarily as a trip-to-work thing, as opposed to a new transportation spine that reshapes the city,” Darwin says.
Of course trains will come frequently during rush hour, but what about after hours, he wonders.
And as for the trains themselves, he fears loyal transit riders may be in for a rude awakening when they find themselves fighting for a place to sit. Each LRT vehicle will hold 300 people, but only have 120 seats (including flipouts).
I suppose it’s natural to have reservations about a project this huge. The question about whether the Confederation line will actually live up to its promise remains unanswered.
But what we make of this line will also depend largely on us — on what we do with it as citizens, riders, transit operators and developers. It’s up to all of us to give meaning to the defining project of our current and future city.
As Albert Street becomes Scott, I notice a slight ache in my feet. I’ve walked about 14 kilometres so far, all the way from the line’s eastern terminus at Blair station.
Across the road, I see signs of a protest past: “2500 buses a day. No way.”
People who live along here were seriously irked by the city’s plan to redirect buses onto Scott Street for a couple of years while the Transitway was converted to an LRT line.
They lined their porches with these hand-painted signs. Eventually, they were partially appeased. The city decided to redirect some of the buses elsewhere so the view out residents’ front windows wouldn’t be obstructed by a so-called wall of buses.
The most dire predictions never came true; the wall of buses never materialized. OC Transpo’s detour plan has worked better than many expected.
Maybe it’s an omen.
•
Tunney’s Pasture
Tunney’s Pasture
This way, folks.
At Hinchey Street, I cross over a mothballed stretch of Transitway, where workers down below are starting to strip off layers of asphalt to prepare a new surface for rail tracks.
I cross Parkdale and notice the rockface. What a massive — and prescient — undertaking it was to dig this trench in the first place. My aunt and uncle lived west of here in the early 1980s and told me once of how their house shook with each blast of rock.
Every step now brings me closer to Tunney’s Pasture, to the neighbourhood I recently left behind for a new life in Vanier.
This is where I lived when I fell out of love and wasn’t sure I’d ever fall back in; where I ran my first half-marathon, had my bike stolen and bought my first home. Where the charms of Wellington Village and the children playing street hockey on Julian Avenue never faded.
Neighbourhoods are more than just houses, shops, streets and parks; they are collections of stories. For years, this was where mine unfolded.
And this was my station. I used to catch the bus here on weekday mornings to head to work downtown, just another guy with his face in a smartphone.
The train that’s coming will connect all the neighbouhoods and nooks I’ve passed, all these collections of stories. And while so many neighbourhoods remain unreached by the line, it has the potential to bring the city together.
The line will become another artery, like the rivers, parkways and paths that came before it.
I arrive at Tunney’s Pasture and reflect on the territory I’ve covered in a day.
I think of a mall at the other end of the line. I think of a diner in the middle of nowhere.
I think of old Charles Hurdman and his many descendants; of the murky Rideau River.
I think of trains disappearing into a tunnel at the University of Ottawa; of the tunnel workers, whose stories I hope to hear someday.
I think of Pimisi; of how the train will slither through the city like the eels once so common in the river.
I think of changing trains at Bayview.
I think of Tunney’s Pasture. I think of home.
I think of all the people who will ride this line someday, including my own child, whose birth is just weeks away.
I think of all the places they will go; of the things they might see out the train window someday.
I’ve reached the end of the line or maybe, probably, this is just the beginning.
Related
- Walk the Line, Part 1: The Citizen treks across the biggest infrastructure project in Ottawa history
- Walk the Line, Part 3: Imagining the Ottawa Underground
查看原文...
