Rubble at Lansdowne Park

I'm still recovering from Bluesfest, and still easing back into my regular routine. From Monday to Thursday I slept every minute I wasn't at work, so catching up from the fallout of that meant blogging had to wait.

Another aspect of my routine is going to the Ottawa Farmer's Market at Lansdowne Park (admittedly, also not in Centretown. I'll get back to Centretown photos after this post). This summer, they're also open on Thursdays from 2pm-7pm.

In the extremely unlikely event you haven't heard already, the South side stands at Frank Clair Stadium were deemed unsafe a while back, and today was the day they decided to demolish it.

Last week at the water cooler, one of my colleagues was happy to hear this news: "Good. Back in the '70s they built this ugly thing overtop the South stands, so I'm glad to hear it's being demolished." I had to break the bad news that this monstrosity was being retained, and only the lower stands were being demolished.

The Citizen has a decent writeup and photo gallery of the demolition. The City of Ottawa has a video of the demolition, which lasts all of a few seconds, followed by the dust settling for a minute. It's quite interesting to see that the stands were built of a frame of concrete posts atop which were placed fairly loosely some large concrete blocks for the steps, which topple away like an upended box of matchsticks in the video.

Of course, while I was at the Farmer's Market this afternoon, I went over to see what I could see, which was more than I thought I would have been able to see, by going up the ramps on either end of the complex:

Yep. That's rubble alright! Here two backhoes were waiting for the 10-14 days of clearing up they've got ahead of them. You can see some engineers in the far background on the other side of the fence.


Here we can see the rubble and the upper South side stands, plus the canopy and lights above it. I think the concrete zigzag pattern is actually quite neat in the framework, though I wouldn't have one of these things installed in my backyard just for that feature. Is it just me, or is the nearmost pillar sorta crooked?


I was able to get this shot thanks to a conveniently-placed pile of disassembled metal scaffolding behind the South wall. Considering I was spending most of my attention balancing on top of the piece of railing, I'm fairly pleased at the photo.

Well, that's about it. Is anyone aware of any previous controlled implosion in Ottawa? It certainly isn't a very frequent occurence.