Wellington Street Part 5: Tinkering with traffic (1910s to 1940s)

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• Viaduct makes Wellington an artery for the 1910s
• Speeding and slowing traffic on Wellington in the '20s
• West End pedestrian woes in the '30s and '40s
• Toronto traffic consultant pays Ottawa a visit
• End of Part 5
• References

Let's continue with our journey exploring Wellington Street as the street was extended, renamed, and rerouted over its 200-year history. In today's post, we'll look at the many little clues that give us an idea of what traffic was like on Wellington Street from the 1910s to the mid 1940s.

During this time, Wellington street wasn't extended or curtailed, but traffic in the city got busier as more people drove automobiles and the City's response to this traffic problem had to mature to cope with it. To set the scene, here's LeBreton Flats from around 1930, with Wellington Street coming in from the left and winding up through to downtown:¹

Wellington Street Part 4: As the City grows, so does Wellington (1880-1912)

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• 1880 Renaming of George Street, Victoria Terrace, and Richmond Road
• Railway Crossings
• Great big fires
• 1908 Renaming of Richmond Road through Hintonburg
• Wellington Street Vidauct
• Wellington widening and paving through Hintonburg
• Clearing up the 'middle section' of Wellington
• 1912 Re-renaming of George Street and Victoria Terrace
• References

Before our foray into the east end of Wellington Street in the previous post, we were talking in Part 2 about the first roads in Ottawa and how the fledgling town's road network began to develop in the new neighbourhood that would one day be called LeBreton Flats.

In this post we'll look at the period from about 1880 to 1912, during which time rail lines cross over Wellington at grade, fires ravage the western part of the street, Ottawa absorbs various suburbs, and an excessive number of bylaws authorize the renaming, widening, and paving of Wellington Street. To set the scene, here's what it looked like to walk in the middle of Wellington Street in 1898:¹

Wellington Street Part 3: Wellington and Rideau's on again, off again, connection (1820s-1913)

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• The Fortress at Barrack Hill
• Wagon Trail to Sappers' Bridge
• Sparks Street Extension to the Canal
• Wellington Street extension to the Canal
• Dufferin Bridge restores Wellington-Rideau connection
• Postscript: Confusion Square
• References

In this blog series about 200 years of physical and nominal changes to Wellington Street, most of the action is West of Bank Street, particularly in LeBreton Flats. The previous post showed the earliest of these changes. Today we will examine the changes to the east end of Wellington Street in the 1800s, as it dabbled with connections to Rideau.

Wellington Street Part 2: The west end's Muddy Trails to street rails (1828-1870s)

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• Union Bridge across the Chaudière
• Pooley's Bridge and the Wellington link
• LeBreton Flats is laid out
• George Street and Victoria Terrace
• George and Wellington: intersection or continuation?
• References

In the previous post, we drew lines from the Dukes of Richmond and Wellington and connected them to the roads bearing their names in Ottawa via the Earl of Dalhousie and Colonel By. We ended with Colonel By establishing By Town and laying down Wellington and Rideau Streets in Upper Town and Lower Town, respectively.

Today we continue the saga of Ottawa's Wellington Street and start to look at its earliest connections with other roads and the names they've had. We'll be focusing on the western end of Wellington Street as it skirts around the edge of LeBreton Flats. (The full list of posts is in the Introductory post in this series, populated as each part is posted)

Wellington Street Part 1: Ottawa's earliest roads and their namesakes (1800-1826)

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• The first European settlers
• The earliest roads
• Eponyms of the earliest roads
• Establishing Wellington Street and Bytown
• References

To go beyond a simplified summary and conduct a thorough review of the history of changes to all the roads in Ottawa called "Wellington Street", we need to go back to Ottawa's earliest days as a settlement and where that all came from.

It's easy enough to say "Richmond Road was named after the Duke of Richmond and Wellington Street was named after the Duke of Wellington", but that doesn't answer the questions of who those people are and what relation they bore to Ottawa and to the people who built its first roads. So let's get into that.

¹

The many traces of Wellington Street - Introduction

You may already know that Ottawa has both a Wellington Street and a Wellington Street West, but it was not always so simple. A man standing at the corner of Scott and Bayview in the pre-smartphone days of the early 2000s asked me for help finding an address on Wellington Street, and I had to confess that I didn't know which of three Wellington Streets to direct him to!

I'm looking mostly at YOU Wellingtons. You are unnatural and should not both exist.

— Cassie 🚲🐈 (@cfulgham) August 15, 2016

I was reminded of this recently and got curious about when these various geometric and name changes took place. I already knew that the City of Ottawa renamed many streets, including two of the Wellingtons, following amalgamation in 2001, and a quick look at an aerial photo reveals clues to how various physical changes broke Wellington Street up. Dennis Van Staalduinen tried his best to explain it on a couple of Jane's Walks in 2012 and 2013, the notes of which he has posted on his website, and a follow-up map in 2016. I even covered the topic myself in a 2010 blog post!

But these were all snapshots; I wanted the whole story. I searched my own collection of books on LeBreton Flats, Ottawa, and the NCC, and found nothing describing the actual changes to Wellington Street. I searched the Web as well, but found only the most recent changes. It turns out that anybody who's written about LeBreton Flats has been more interested in the buildings, people, and land, than on the nomenclature and alignment of its primary artery! (I jest; this is entirely reasonable)

So I took a few trips to the Ottawa Room, bought a subscription to Newspapers.com, and collected a trove of information about Wellington Street, with many twists and turns along the way. Changing names and alignments is a Wellington Street tradition that goes back to the early 1800s and most recently this past September!

Over the past two months, I've painstakingly assembled this information into the following blog series to detail everything I can find out about Wellington Street—everything, that is, except for the buildings, people, and land! Depending on how you count it, Wellington Street was officially renamed between 7 and 21 times, and that doesn't even count all the times where it got physically disconnected or redirected! I've done my best to filter out the wrong information and provide sources for the rest; corrections are welcome by email, tweet, or comment (all comments are moderated).

The first part goes up tomorrow at noon, and the rest of the 10+ parts are in various stages of development and will be posted thereafter. The posts and the headings within them will be added to the bottom of this post as they are added. But first, a quick rundown of Wellington Street:

Confirmed: Fleet Street uses water to pump water

I'd like to correct the record.

On October 1 of this year, while attending a drop-in Open House about the City of Ottawa's plans to rehabilitate the Booth Street heritage bridge (more on that to come in a future blog post), a City representative mentioned offhandedly that the Fleet Street water pumping station had been converted to electric pumps "decades ago", like in the 1950s.

One of the LeBreton Flats residents in attendance, echoing the sentiment of many, expressed dismay that he'd been telling people for years that it was a water-powered water pumping station. I, myself, had made this claim in my 2012 blog post 3D Through the Aqueduct (part 2).

While still at the Open House, I did a quick Google search on my phone, and found only unsubstantiated claims. A City employee working on a project about one of the aqueduct's bridges is a pretty compelling authority. My next step was to send out a Tweet calling on the crowdsourcing power of Twitter to confirm or deny these electric claims.

One piece of 'new' information supplied by Ian Izzard of the City: the Fleet St Pumping station has been fully electric powered (not hydraulic from aqueduct) since the 1950s. Can anyone confirm this? @HeritageOttawa #ottcity #LeBretonFlats

— Charles A-M (@Centretowner) October 1, 2019

That yielded nothing conclusive. There was a City report describing the pumping station as water-powered, but that report was prepared by the Councillor's office, not the water department.

I eventually (Oct 17) emailed Councillor McKenney, who sent the request down the bureaucratic ladder, and the very next day I got this wonderfully clear and detailed response from Paul Montgomery of the City's water department. (Emphasis added, slightly edited).

Mr. Akben-Marchand,

There are five water turbine powered centrifugal pumps at the Fleet Street pumping station; all are still used and in service. A small amount of electrical power is required, for automated controls, lighting and such, but the primary sources of motive power for the station's installed pumps is water and, of course, gravity.

Many people incorrectly assume that we use the river, at Fleet Street, to drive generators which would then drive electric motors and, in turn, to drive pumps. Rather, we use water powered turbines to drive mechanical gear boxes / speed increases to then directly drive the installed pumps.

Approximately 20m³/s of Ottawa River water flows, through a headworks control gate structure located along the shore of Nepean Bay, through the covered Aqueduct below the former Ottawa Street, to the Fleet Street Pumping Station and then down through the turbines. The approximate head, across the turbines, is 27 feet.

Treated drinking water flows by gravity, through a large buried watermain from the Lemieux Island Water Treatment Plant, to supply the five pumps at Fleet. At full capacity, the Fleet Street pumping station can supply approximately 200ML/day to the City.

Thanks,

M. Paul Montgomery, P. Eng.
Plant Manager, Water Production - East
Water Services, PWES

That settles that! I publish it here for posterity, and for the next person who hears rumours of the plant's electrification!

By the way, that "200ML/day" refers to Megalitres per day, or 200,000,000 litres! I discussed the underground Ottawa Street aqueduct in this 2012 blog post.

LeBreton Flats updates/errata

On the topic of corrections and updates, here are some to some previous blog posts about LeBreton Flats:

• In the 2012 post, 3D Thursday: 3D through the aqueduct, part 2 of 2, I didn't know the purpose of the wooden bracing on the Fleet Street Pumping Station building. A CBC Ottawa News video from 2013 says that the City was doing repairs to cracks that developed on both the pumping station and Pooley's Bridge following blasting at the site of nearby condo development on Lett Street.
• The tree featured in the 2014 post, The Lonely Elm was cut down in Winter 2014-2015 (literally: the two nearest photos showing the tree present and absent were on 2014-12-21 and 2015-03-28). The price of progress for LRT and, it would seem from aerial photos, the Combined Sewage Storage Tunnel (CSST) access shaft.
• Also in the Lonely Tree post, I referred to a section of Wellington Street as "Old Wellington", which was incorrect. It would have just been "Wellington".

I actually have a number of LeBreton Flats related blog posts in various stages of development that I hope to publish soon, including the results of quite a bit of research about Wellington Streets.

[Look for more one-photo posts under the label Singles]

Chinatown double-flyover

I found this well-timed photo as I was catching up on sorting my significant backlog of photos. Looking up at the corner of Somerset Street West and Booth Street, the sky is divided by the traffic signal arms. In the left quadrant is a gull, and in the right quadrant is a low-flying Air Canada jet:

[Look for more one-photo posts under the label Singles]