Weekend Photo Binge

This past weekend, I made a list of all the current and future construction sites in and near Centretown, and visited almost all of them to take photos. In addition to the photos that I took, my camera decided to take a couple on its own while I was parking my bike on Somerset Street West.

This one shows 989 Somerset Street West, which has had a few iterations of similar stores, currently an antique store.

My list had over 30 sites to visit, and there were others I snapped along the way, about 800 inall. This blurry image nicely represents how lately I've been spending more time in the bike saddle taking photos than actually reviewing and sorting, compiling and posting them.

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

Accessible Upgrades at City Hall

Over at OpenFile, there's a thread on accessibility; specifically, spaces that aren't designed with all users in mind. This comment reminded me of a recent renovation to Ottawa City Hall's information desk in the rotunda, seen here during an art exhibit in mid-June:

For reference, here's a December 2009 file photo showing what the info desk used to look like:

In May, I saw workers installing a countertop. Once I clued in to the gap cut into the counter, I realized it was to allow wheelchair users to communicate with the person behind the desk.

Since I'm a tall person (I took some of these photos from the second floor--I'm not that tall!), this accessibility obstacle hadn't occurred to me until I saw them fixing it.

It's good to see it occurred to someone. And it didn't require a whole new desk, either. Just some small modifications.

Wooden inuksuit on Flora

A couple months ago, I snapped these two sidewalk dwellers on Flora. A cute and creative way to get rid of scrap wood!

This isn't the first time. Back in 2008, someone had made an inuksuk from displaced paving stones.

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Colonel By Day in Ottawa

Here's a photo from April of the Rideau Canal locks at the Ottawa River. In the background are the Bytown Museum (housed in the oldest building in Ottawa), the Canadian Museum of Civilization behind it on the other side of the river, and the Alexandra Bridge connecting Ottawa and Gatineau. Walking across the uppermost lock is a wedding party.

You can celebrate too today: in Ottawa, the first Monday in August is Colonel By Day. There are events going on at the Bytown Museum, and at Confederation Park. It's named for Coloney John By, who was the engineer in charge of the construction of the canal in the 1820s-1830s. Bytown, later renamed Ottawa, was named after him.

Not visible in this photo, but at the bottom of the locks, is a stone Celtic Cross monument honouring the (mostly Irish) workers and their families (as many as a thousand) who died in the construction of the Rideau Canal.

The Corktown Footbridge is also named to honour the many Irish immigrants who built the bridge. They lived in an encampment along the canal which they called "Corktown," named for County Cork in Ireland, where many of them were from. I was on the naming committee for the bridge, and one of the striking aspects of the name is that it isn't named for a single powerful individual, but the everyday people who were just as instrumental for the accomplishment of great projects (it also balances the nationalities of the Laurier and Mackenzie-King bridges crossing the canal in downtown Ottawa). The Corktown Bridge restored some of this balance that was lost when the Sappers and Miners Bridges were merged and renamed the Plaza Bridge.

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Pigeons

This pair of pigeons at a house on Flora were almost posing for a painting, mirroring each other's position on the third-floor windowsill. Though I think the symmetry was a coincidence.

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Bixiiiii

This photo is from back in April, on the bidirectional pathway along Mackenzie Avenue toward the Alexandra Bridge. I took it on my foray up to Nepean Point. This was very shortly after the launch of the Capital Bixi program: I saw five people on Bixis coming along, and managed to catch them all in the same shot on my first (and only) try:

Parliament Hill is in the background, but I had neglected to consider its appearance in the photo.

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Follow the yellow line

Sorry for the absence. I was busy running the bicycle parking at Bluesfest 2011, which is a 100-hour-a-week volunteer gig. You'll be happy to hear that I've got over two weeks of posts pre-scheduled, so there won't be another gap for at least as long!

Most of the time, when a pathway in the national capital region splits, the yellow line will follow the direction where the pathway continues in whatever direction. For example, if you're trying to navigate the pathways under the Portage Bridge to get westward from behind the Parliament buildings, following the yellow line will help you get back to the pathway along the Ottawa River.

Many cyclists don't realize this, but they do get it at an unconscious level. Take here for example:

This is just under the Laurier bridge heading North toward the convention centre and Byward Market, on the pathway that runs along Colonel By Drive. This is a notoriously difficult place to navigate because it's not clear at all how to get from here to the other side of Rideau/Sussex.

Unfortunately, when I stopped to watch for a bit, I saw most cyclists followed the yellow line up to the abutment of the Laurier Bridge, which led them to a dead end and a hard curb along Colonel By Drive. They, as I had done just before them, ended up going down the steep cobbled footings of the bridge to get back to the pathway along the Rideau Canal and continue toward Union Station.

Unfortunately, even if this line gets fixed (which it might, there was still some construction going on when I took this photo in May 2011), there's not much place for people to go once they pass the bridge, it's still every cyclist to him- or herself to navigate Colonel By, Sussex, and the rest.

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Happy Canada Day from Ottawa! #ottbike

Happy Canada Day! Here's a photo of my bike decked out in red and white Christmas lights at Capital Vélo Fest.

Mine was one of the many HPVOoO bikes on the June 4, 2011 night ride. There are more photos linked from the HPVOoO 2011 events Gallery and on the Capital Vélo Fest website

I'll be busy at the Bluesfest Bicycle Parking for Citizens for Safe Cycling the next couple weeks, so I might miss a few posts. See previous posts with the Bluesfest label.

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