Peds on Weds: Don't crack me up

I get very irate by people parking on the sidewalks (and I have many photos of such transgressions, which I tag with "vanscaping"). A majority of the time, they are blocking off the entire sidewalk (or enough that a stroller or wheelchair couldn't get through), when if they had parked entirely on the road there would have still been plenty of space for cars to get past. A case in point is this van on Gilmour at O'Connor.

But another reason is that sidewalks are only reinforced where there is a curb depression--i.e. where it is expected that cars will drive over them (with some exceptions like sidewalks over a bridge). Otherwise, for the post part, they are straight-up poured concrete.

Back in the winter, Eric posted at West Side Action about cracked sidewalks on Preston, likely from trucks having driven and/or parked on the sidewalk. In the photo above, a contractor's van is parked on the sidewalk, and the van's right tires correspond rather conveniently with the cracks down the middle of the sidewalk.

Individually, people who park on the sidewalk think that they are doing no harm. But collectively, as many people vehicles are parked on the sidewalk over time, the sidewalk breaks down and needs expensive and time-consuming repair. In the meantime, they are harder to keep clear of snow, and water that seeps into the cracks worsens the problem during the annual freeze-thaw cycles.

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Courting behind the court

The Supreme Court of Canada is a spectacular building, with its iconic façade reproduced in photographs, paintings, and even LEGO.

But have you ever been behind it?

The Court sits on a castle-like stone wall that extends behind the building, out to the top of the cliff over the Ottawa River.

Rather than keeping visitors out, the area behind the courthouse is a spot where tourists can come to get a great vantage point of the Ottawa River, Gatineau, and the Parliament Buildings.

The semicircular wall surrounding this outcrop carries graffiti of visitors from years past. As in the castles of Europe, some of these etchings have become more bold with time. The most popular are couples' names, often circled with a heart. Here we see "Ken & Casey '74" and "Claudie G. Ginis, Greece Aug 27 '72". The capstones of the wall are covered with these names, with the highest concentration closest to the river.

Looking down from this wall, to the west, there is a secluded little park along the edge of the cliff.

This is accessed by a set of stairs across the driveway from the rear of the building. Continuing in the castle theme, the curving walls stone walls are built with narrow window openings to protect from intrusion. However, behind these walls is the Court's underground parking garage—a reminder that this building was built in the age of the automobile.

The view from this place is stunning. In the Winter, you can see the nighttime lights of Gatineau reflected in the ice sheet that covers the Ottawa River.

The Gatineau Tissue Mill, owned by Kruger products, is one of the last remaining facilities of this area, where a vast forest products industry used to extend across the Chaudiere and Victoria islands and through Lebreton Flats. According to an info sheet on the company's website, this plant produces some familiar paper products you see on supermarket shelves: Scotties®, White Swan® facial tissues, White Swan® Napkins and Cashmere® and White Swan® bathroom tissues.

Minto Park Sale 2012

Tomorrow is the annual Minto Park Sale, organized by Councillor Diane Holmes (disclaimer: I work in her office). This sale provides a chance to have a yard sale table for those who live in buildings without a yard. And it takes place in historic Minto Park, on Elgin Street.

This year, there will be over 70 tables, plus other events. Funds raised by table rentals will go to Women's Initiatives for Safer Environments (WISE). In addition, there will be a raffle for many prizes of gift certificates along Elgin Street.

As mentioned by CCCA president Jordan Charbonneau in his May 2012 message to CCCA members, the association will be holding its fourth annual barbecue in Minto Park during the event, raising funds for the CCCA and WISE. I will be returning in my role as grillmaster to serve up hotdogs and veggie dogs for two dollars apiece.

As usual, the CCCA's hard-working Trees and Greenspace Committee will be hosting its annual plant sale during the event, the proceeds of which go to the CCCA Tree Fund, dedicated to improving greenspace in Centretown.

New for this year is another CCCA fundraiser, an e-waste drop off site. Drop off your used electronics at the dumpster provided on Lewis Street next to the park for free, and the CCCA will receive funds from Ontario Environmental Stewardship according to the total weight of electronics collected. So haul out that old TV or computer monitor and clear out your closet of that old VCR and discman! A full list of accepted items is on the this event page.

There are also a number of other events, including a street sale on Waverley, the Elgin Street Book Sale, and a strawberry social at Knox Church:

None of this could happen without the contribution of volunteers. The CCCA will be needing volunteers to help with the electronics drop-off site and the BBQ, and also to help people fill out membership forms to join the CCCA (at a bargain price of $5/year!). Contact ccca@centretowncitizens.ca, or just show up.

Minto Park (named after the Governor General), is a great little heritage park with a fascinating history:

“Minto Park was created following a petition from residents of Lewis and Gilmour Street to
the City of Ottawa Board of Park Management. The City purchased the vacant land in 1898
from J.R. Booth and created Minto Square named after the newly arrived Governor General
Lord Minto. Minto Square was designed as an ornamental park with interlacing half circles,
trees and planting beds, to be enjoyed for its visual appeal rather than for active recreation.
The buildings facing Minto Park, constructed between 1892 and 1906, comprise a coherent
streetscape representing the changing architectural styles and building craftsmanship
popular in Ottawa at the turn of the century. Alexander Garvock, a builder, was one of the
first residents of Minto Park. He built two of the houses facing the park. The Church of Our
Father, now Eglise Unie St-Marc, at the southwest corner of the park, was designed in 1900
for the Unitarian church by the architectural firm of Arnoldi and Ewart. Minto Park’s
significant grouping of low scale residential buildings, exhibiting compatible stylistic
attributes and surrounding a planned square, form a special place in the historic
development of Ottawa” (from the City of Ottawa, quoted in this PDF)

So come celebrate the park, the neighbourhood, and the many activities and causes that make up this growing annual event.

See you on Saturday!

Peds on Weds: Zebra Stripes

Tonight is the next meeting of the new pedestrian advocacy group, Walk Ottawa, 7pm at City Hall (Honeywell Room). Rob Wilkinson, coordinator of the Safer Roads Ottawa program, will be there to talk about how his program will benefit pedestrians.

The May meeting was entirely consumed by a question-and-answer session about pedestrian crossing signals with two members of the City of Ottawa's traffic department. The level of detail of the questions went even beyond the epic blog post on how pedestrian push buttons operate I posted the day of the meeting: more than one person had stood at an intersection for many signal cycles and timed the duration of the signals in each direction.

Since that meeting, many of the road markings were repainted on Centretown's roads as part of the City's annual road maintenance. Among the lines repainted were the fat white lines demarcatingis pedestrian crossing at Gladstone and Elgin. The pattern is affectionately referred to as a "zebra crossing", for obvious reasons:

The theory behind zebra crossings is that they draw more attention to the crosswalk, highlighting for drivers that they are about to cross over a pedestrian space. This is important, because the crosswalk is where pedestrians and vehicles mingle most often, and it is also one of the least effective ways of protecting pedestrians.

Unlike the traffic engineers who came to the last meeting, Rob knows what he's getting himself into (he was also at last month's meeting). He's not an engineer; rather his background is in public health. That should bring a different perspective to road safety.

Come on out tonight and hear what he has to say!

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

Bronson Avenue in 3D

During the ongoing Bronson Avenue reconstruction, sometimes the equipment is left out in the middle of the street over the weekend. It's neat to walk up to the excavator buckets and see just how big they really are. Unfortunately, whenever I've taken photos of them, their size just doesn't quite come through.

I realized a 3D image would be an effective way of doing it, and the wiggle stereoscopy technique would work. By making an animated GIF of two images taken side-by-side, I'd be able to convey it.

Once I had the images, I realized I could do even better: make a true red-blue anaglyph in GIMP, with the guidance of this YouTube video. Get out your red and blue 3D glasses, it works!

Ironically, that's easier for me to post on the blog than an animated "wiggle" image, because Blogger doesn't let you host animated GIFs.

Here are the component images anyway. You can download them (or open them in separate tabs) and switch back and forth between them to get a similar effect:

Now that I know how to do this, I'll be taking a lot more pairs of photos to make 3D images, along with the HDR images!

(PS: Please leave a comment if you know where to get 3D glasses in Centretown...)

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Taking care of Bronson business

Construction continues on the Bronson Avenue reconstruction project, and it has been complicated by the large amount of underground services crammed into a relatively narrow road allowance (the street itself is wide, but unlike most streets Bronson takes up nearly the entire right-of-way). Utilities are stacked on top of each other, and the different crews have to wait until the work on the utility above theirs is done before they can move in.

The road closure is also being felt by the local businesses. Although the construction crews are making a point of frequenting the local restaurants on their lunches, it doesn't make up for the potential customers that have avoided Brsonson for the closure. At 422 Bronson Avenue is Centretown Resto Bar, on the west side of Bronson, at Florence. Their specialty is Halifax donair. I went in there for the first time a couple weeks ago, and discovered they have excellent egg rolls, too!

The auto-oriented businesses are particularly hard hit. Going from 20,000 vehicles a day passing in front of their store to a few dozen takes away a lot of potential customers. Speedy Auto Body at 540 Bronson, shown here, and Midas up the street at 450, both fall into this category.

While some places on Bronson are destination businesses that attract customers specifically to their store, like Auntie Loo's, most offer goods and services that you can get pretty much anywhere. Number 527 Bronson at Arlington, guarded in the photo below by two Colautti Construction excavators, hosts the third location of Papa Joe's Pizzeria, adding to the two locations out in Ottawa's far South end. Hopefully the signalized crossing going in at Bronson and Arlington will bring enough customers to Papa Joe's to keep the store from closing, like so many businesses at that location even before construction.

Unlike many other main streets that have undergone construction in Somerset Ward—most recently Bank, Preston and Somerset—Bronson doesn't have a Business Improvement Association. When those streets went under construction, people called them "war zones". In contrast, Bronson is being described as a "ghost town".

The underlying reason for this is likely that pedestrians have been trained to avoid Bronson whenever possible because of the heavy traffic. Even with the traffic removed, this lesson remains.

We can hope that a similar principle applies to some of the commuting motorists who have been forced temporarily to avoid Bronson or stop driving altogether (in favour of transit, walking and cycling), but we should also hope that the landscaping, wider sidewalks and pedestrian-level decorative ligthing will help to make Bronson a more attractive walking route, and make both the Avenue and the businesses along it healthier.

Hull in Lebreton Flats

This retaining wall on Albert Street near City Centre Avenue is comprised of 6x6 wooden beams that haven't done a perfect job of holding back the weight of the infill behind them. Some metal posts anchored into the ground are now holding them back.

The resulting look from the angle of the stacked beams gives the appearance of the hull of a ship in dry dock.

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384 Frank Street

Frank Street is well known for its grand houses, many of which span the entire block to Gladstone Avenue. It's also very pretty in the Golden Triangle. West of O'Connor, it's mostly apartment buildings of various sizes, vintages, and condition. But bucking the trend just behind the old Higgerty's Shoes building is this little house with a flagstone exterior.

Its star-shaped weathervane is a little hard to see in front of the new Central condos (formerly the Metropolitan Bible Church). It's also right across from the parking lot next to Centretown's only (thankfully!) big box store, Staples. Between the two, 384 Frank Street is much more pleasant to look at as you walk by!

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