Monthly Archives: June 2012

Bad day for swimming

Although my wife finds it a bit creepy, I enjoy visiting old cemeteries. You learn a lot about who the early settlers were. Sometimes you have to read between the lines, to find patterns in the lives and deaths. And sometimes read between the stones, to notice whole clans of people.

I noticed this tombstone while browsing through an old cemetery in Ottawa south:

What happened that two brothers drowned the same day? What would the family response be? 

The cemetery is right beside the Rideau River. Did the family live close to the river? Did the children learn to swim or not?

I grew up in the Maritimes, part of the first generation of kids that learned to swim as a matter of routine. For my grandfather, my uncles, and many of my cousins, who worked on the sea fishing, learning to swim would have been bizarre. The Ocean is that thing that kills you, it is not entertainment. It is a threat. Ergo, no swimming lessons. (And two uncles did drown, one as an adult when out fishing, one as a child when he fell off the dock and drowned in 3′ of water).

Here is the adjacent family tombstone:

Bridgehead

A great fuss is being made over the new Bridgehead coffee shop and factory that opened on Tuesday on Anderson Street at Preston. While I was there the CBC camera crew was there, then a reporter, and a steady stream of curious customers.

Certainly the exterior facelift of the old Bell stables building is welcome and, when finished, should be attractive. The Preston Street-side exterior won’t be renovated until the coffee shop expands out to that façade in a few years time, when they manifest their restuarant-bakery ambitions.

The first thing that struck me was seeing the usual advertising T-shirts being customized to one store. Here’s the owner, Tracey Clark, wearing hers:

Note the “Preston”. Just a few years ago, custom clothing became affordable to small businesses. Now, with digital technologies, it has become so affordable it can be customized to individual locations of a small business. Just up the street, the new Broadway resto-pub at 333 Preston has its truck wrapped in advertising specific to their newest location.

The inside of Bridgehead is funky and fun, in the way that modern public uses can be integrated with the bones and skeleton of an elderly building. A lot of the interior still isn’t finished: the glass railings for the stairway and balcony are missing, office walls are missing, the front air-lock entry can be just walked through in any direction since the glass hasn’t arrived. Even the skylights are temporary and unfinished.

Outside, the trim on the windows isn’t yet there; from the inside, there are gaps as big as four inches around the frames of the windows. Rather than off-putting, customers rushing to the latest Bridgehead seemed to feel a special part of the establishment by being there during the construction.

On our second visit, Wednesday, some equipment in the factory part of the vast open space, was operating for the entire time we were there. It was really noisy, drowning out the Muzak and making conversation difficult. Tracey Clark tells me that a sound engineer will be making noise abatement recommendations once all the interior walls are finally installed. I was surprised that the factory part of the building was so open to the retail area: I expected to find some sort of glass wall to separate the two for acoustic and sanitary reasons.

There will be a minimal number of tables outside the restaurant, as Bridgehead has very little property between the building and the street. To put out more tables would require “renting” the space from the City for thousands of dollars a month. This is yet another example of the City’s perverse way of encouraging street life.

Ironically, when the Bridgehead renovations began over a year ago, Anderson Street was looking rather sad. Now, many of the houses on the street are being renovated. Forget the house tenants – your’re renting location, just steps away from the java jolt shop !

Dismal, and better

Downtown, the new EDC building has a planter on the O’Connor side. It’s pretty dismal, if that isn’t too much of an oxymoron. Part of the problem may be that much of the planter is under the overhang of the building, so lacks water and maybe even enough light. The predicted problems were correctly identified by Urbsite last year: http://urbsite.blogspot.ca/2011/08/edcs-trees.html. It comes as no satisfaction to see the prediction come to non-fruition. Such careless architecture and finishing.

In contrast, they put a planter by the front door that looks pretty good; maybe you are supposed to forget about the rest of the exterior or the “roof garden”.

And over at the new Convention Centre, the same story. The curving glass facade directs water away from the base of the building, and guess where they put the pretty yellow plants?

Why do architects treat plants with such contempt?

I recall that the new government building replacing the Lorne Building between Slater-Albert at Elgin looks suspiciously like a remake of the EDC building. More dead plants on the way?

PC Buttered Cyclist in Chinatown

Spotted in Chinatown:

Sideguards on large trucks have very much been in the news lately. It’s not readily apparent from the photos that the guard angles in under the truck at the front end when it starts to taper to a point (just where the reflected light puts a bright spot in the pic below):

Thanks to Loblaws for at least trying them.

 

Owning the Podium

Much of Ottawa’s current discussion about high rises focusses on the podium, or base of the building. In theory, the wider larger base is all the pedestrian sees, and the thin elegant glass tower floats off into the sky after a generous set back.

Of course, this requires a fairly large lot or thin tower. What we increasingly see are small lot edifices, where either the tower is too fat for the base, or the podium effect is just sort of drawn onto the tower by a few horizontal bits of concrete trim. I stopped recently to look at the successfully done podium and tower condos at Richmond-Roosevelt, the western entrance to the Westboro commercial strip. For these buildings, the pedestrian view really is primarily of the podium. And the commercial spaces on the bottom floors really do enliven the streetscape. Podiums can work.

When the tower+podium design is not on a commercial mainstreet, it is common for neighbours and the city to demand that the podium consist of townhouse-type units. Supposedly these animate the street or courtyard level by the comings and goings of the residents and visitors. In fact, most times these apartments are also connected to the internal building corridors, and since the whole project is predicated on making corridors short with easy access to the garages and common facilities, these exterior doors become somewhat unused. Fake, in fact.

Unused ground level doors. When the internal corridor is more attractive to residents …

There is a major economic issue with these townhouse units. They are built out of concrete, just like the high rise above. This makes them very expensive per square foot, compared to freestanding townhouses. So the townhouse units on the Claridge podiums on LeBreton Flats got converted to one and two bedroom regular apartments.

Much was made of the Soho Champagne condo towers having a lively, townhouse base suitable and attractive for families. Alas that fantasy of little kids playing along the multi-user paths has also gone poof, as none of the townhouse units sold, and they have all been converted into one and two bedroom apartment condos, albeit with ground level “balconies” or patios. Now called “pathway suites” they are selling:

This set me to wondering if the condo developers really mind. Maybe they just want to sell the square feet of space. There is no point proposing a building that doesn’t get approved, nor of building a building if it doesn’t sell. So if the planners want them to put in townhouse units, draw them in. And keep in mind that they just may need to be changed to something else further down the line. And the neighbours who thought they won a big victory by insisting on townhouses, they may never notice.

Succumbing to cynicism, I expect condo promoters to market  their next project will have three bedroom family-sized apartments. This will mollify the NIMBYs somewhat. Get approval. Oops, they don’t sell. Reconfigure.

Somehow the planning promise of podiums is getting a bit nightmarish.

 

Cycle and Biped accomodation

On a recent trip to Boston, I saw this generous bike parking shelter, with card-controlled door:

And while on that same trip to Boston, I stayed in a hotel built on air rights over a commuter rail line and freeway. The hotel windows were thick, and sealed. Noise intrusion was minimal and I slept fine. For one night, OK; but I wouldn’t want to live above the freeway or rail line.

At the present time, there are no intentions of selling or leasing air rights over any of the Ottawa’s new LRT lines, as the additional construction cost doesn’t warrant competing for that land — yet. It would make it easier to build on the air rights some day if the two tracks were separated a few feet, to allow for building support pillars, but we don’t plan to do that, even in high value locations, or for lower-value buildings like garages.

Cut and paste on our streets

Living near a major road reconstruction project is always educational. Sometimes comical, sometimes depressing. Like most other amateur superintendents, the constant digging, filling, and redigging the same spots breeds a certain cynicism: “They must’ve left someone down there yesterday.”

In the first picture below, the new pavement on Somerset at Preston has been cut by the traffic department to install a traffic loop. That wire measures traffic behaviour so that light timing can be adjusted to vehicular traffic flow.

 

Notice that the loop crosses the lines painted for the cross walk. Alas, the painted cross walk was temporary, until the more substantial and more respected concrete cross walk could be installed. A large saw cuts the cross walk outline, the asphalt removed, and concrete poured. What happened to the traffic cable?

 

Coordination is remarkably time consuming, so maybe we are better off having each city department just install their stuff and resolve the conflicts afterwards. Here is a conflict just a block west of the intersection shown above. The squares of brick inset in the concrete sidewalk are just temporary, until the new 21′x 3′ tree planters come later this fall. The brick bits will be removed at that time, revealing the underground irrigation system for the trees in the planters. In the meantime, the sign guys decided this would be a great spot for one of the fifty or so signs they have decided we need on this one long block of Somerset.