bout de papier, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1984) — June 1984 // Juin 1984, p. 3
Allan Fotheringham, in Malice in Blunderland, called the world’s coldest capital “Earmuff and Armpit City” where all those swivel servants “bicycle, mentally as well as physically”. “Ennui-on-the-Rideau”, says Al, is “the only city in the world where rush hour starts at 3:30” ’, and “men wear three piece suits in July”
Which is by way of sounding a word of caution to anyone coming home from posting this summer. Be prepared to shift down a gear or two when you get off the creaking jet that brings you disbelieving into Uplands, and to Ottawa’s ordered calm.
Life is much more self-contained here than it is on post abroad. Don’t expect your neighbour to be quite as intrigued with far-away places as you may appear to be.
Be prepared to keep a firm grip on your wallet or your purse. Ottawa’s prices, while normal for Canada, are anything but normal for anyone who remembers them from, as we did, 1978. My salary crept up an auspicious 20 per cent between then and now, and I remember irrationally gloating about how much more that 20 per cent would permit us to live it up when we got back home. We could never convince ourselves that the cost of living in Canada would meanwhile be rising by 60 per cent and in fact we’d be 40 per cent poorer.
Prices really are amazing for elderly Ottawans such as I who remember when our stout Mayor Charlotte Whitton took over public transport and we all anticipated a drop in busfares from the current 4 cents a ride. Now they’re 90 cents. When I delivered the Citizen it was three cents, of which I kept a third; now it’s 30 cents and twice that on weekends. The ancestral home in the Glebe cost my father $5,200. I happened to meet the present owner of the house, who told me he’d bought it for $150,000 in 1981, and had just had a complete stranger walk in off the street and offer him $250,000 cash for it. No wonder Ottawa continues to have the lowest proportion of accommodation available for rent in Canada.
“You don’t begrudge the costs”
And yet, you don’t begrudge the costs when the town is changing for the better as rapidly as Ottawa. We may still be the only capital in the world with electricity and telephone wires down almost every street, while edifices like the old Daly Building (Chicago School of Architecture or not) and the new National Defence headquarters win Citizen prizes as leading eyesores. But, by gosh, at least one no longer needs to make pilgrimages to Montreal to buy essentials.
Who, for example, would have guessed a decade ago that the four short blocks of Bank in the Glebe between 1st and 5th avenues would now house nine bookshops, including two for rare volumes, six art shops, including one exclusively for decorative tiles, three antique shops including one for ancient arms and armour, two craft shops, five trendy fashion boutiques, two (count them, two) shops selling nothing but futons, three European style delicatessens, four health food shops and two shops for exotic pets like orangutans and gila monsters, not to mention the famous Mrs. Tiggywinkle’s and the less famous Mexicali Rosa’s.
“You don’t have to journey to Hull”
And speaking of Rosa’s, you don’t even have to journey to Hull to eat out. If you long for lusty fare, you can try Afgan, Croatian, Jamaican, Korean, Malaysian, Moroccan or Turkish restaurants, or even the incredible I.P. Looney’s.
And what of staid old Elgin Street, transformed into a little Columbus Avenue of Upper West Side, New York. Piazzas every half block, sidewalk cafés, guitars and mandolins, ideal sites to watch the purple haired punk rockers promenade. And the fabulous Penguin nightclub, where even Cabinet Ministers entertain their overseas visitors, replete with 1940’s Glenn Miller band gyrating left and right with the music.
Chinatown is similarly prospering. Mayor Dewar helped resettle fully 4000 Vietnamese Chinese in Ottawa in the early 1980’s and one obvious bonus for the citizenry has been a boom in high quality but reasonable price Chinese restaurants. Little Italy nearby is the only comparable competition:
The whole downtown core is gradually being reborn. Some say the new popularity of divorces – the rate has nearly doubled in the decade – means deserting the bourgeois suburban bungalow for the convenience and compactness of trendy new condos or refurbished older buildings downtown.
Some new buildings will really make you wonder if you’re still in Ottawa. The Rideau Centre puts us in the big city arcade league. The huge pits on Cartier Square, Nepean point, and opposite in Hull will in time respectively house the no-nonsense Ontario courthouse, the glass neo-gothic National Gallery, and the multi-contoured parabolas of the new Museum of Man.
There’s also greater sophistication in Ottawa’s acceptance of unorthodox names. It wasn’t too long ago that an Archibald Leach or a Frances Gumm would have felt obliged to changed their names to, say Cary Grant or Judy Garland. Who would have expected to find in 1984 Ottawa, gallant souls proudly bearing such names as Fred Snooks, Neddy Twiddy, or Euripides Fink, Joy Bangs, Ophelia Legg, and Anne Aass, I.O. Silver and Equus Horsey, Sizzlin Wok or T.J. Speakeasy, Socrates Scratch or Dweezle Zappa?
“Friendliness among the natives”
This new ability to be one’s own person in Ottawa is reflected by considerably greater friendliness among the natives. I pointed this out to a staunch Rockcliffe matron of long acquaintance. “I don’t see why Ottawa people are still considered to be stand-offish”. I told her. “Ottawans I’ve been meeting for the first time since I’ve been back have been universally welcoming, more than ready to go halfway to be a friend.”
“It is obvious”, said the matron stiffly, “that you have not been meeting the right people”.
But I’ll let a good farming couple in the far boggy suburbs of the city have the last word. We’d been driving round that backwater and got ourselves completely lost, when we spied a homely couple sitting in their rocking chairs on the front veranda of their farmhouse. I rolled down my car window and shouted out to them “I’d like to get back to Ottawa”
The couple turned toward each other, and I could see them talking langourously. Finally, the man turned back to me and called back simply:
“We’ve got no objection”.
At any rate welcome back to Ottawa, regarded by other diplomats as a very pleasant family city. A
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1984) — June 1984 // Juin 1984, p. 3. Read the rest of this issue →
