Jane's Walk Ottawa 2014 this weekend

This weekend (May 3-4, 2014) is the annual Jane's Walk Ottawa series of free urbanist walking tours, and as with last year, I'm publishing a list of walks in Somerset Ward.

I mentioned two of the walks I went on last year in my blog posts The Lonely Elm (Dennis van Staalduinen's walk on Wellington Street, who this year is giving a walk in Champlain Park) and The stones don't fall far from the hill (Quentin Gall's talk on Ottawa's Building and Monument Stones), both of which seem to have been one-offs.

Here's the rundown of Jane's Walks in Centretown for this year:

Chinatown's other panda

On Monday, I posted about a panda-based artwork in Chinatown. However, there is another painted panda on a Chinatown storefront which has become iconic of Chinatown:

This is in the entryway of the vacant storefront that had previously been Manphat Grocery, at the corner of Somerset and Booth. Here's the rest of the window:

As with the other panda, this was done as part of the storefront mural project that runs throughout Chinatown.

The storefront of 800 Somerset Street West wasn't particularly attractive, even before the store closed down in 2008. The Booth Street wall was painted with a mural to brighten it up:

After the store closed, it was papered up from the inside. For a number of years it made the corner pretty dead, and it has only been used for storage for one of the nearby businesses. I've heard it speculated that this unsightly building contributed to the failure of the Chi Developments' 288 Booth condo project diagonally across the street, which was an attempt by an amateur developer to rebuild on the lot left vacant by a fire took in August 2007.

In early June, the mural was still in its early stages. White flowers on their own represent death, which—while perhaps reflective of the level of activity of this space—doesn't contribute to the goals of livening up the street with murals.

With a few blue and bright pink flowers as highlights, the mural has been a welcome splash of colour since it was finished (and retouched after a graffiti attack).

The flowers are just scenery; the real surprise is when you're walking down the sidewalk and the panda pops out at you!

I encourage you to head down to Chinatown to check out the artwork on the many doors, walls and storefronts on Somerset Street between Bay Street and Preston Street. Leigh and Karen from Highjinx have added seasonal decorations to many of the store windows, and the Somerset Chinatown BIA has installed red and white Christmas lights to many of the buildings.

A great place for a Christmas lunch or dinner for your office, family and friends!

3D Thursday: Nuit Blanche Ottawa Gatineau #nbog13

I took a number of photos during this year's rainy-but-well-attended Nuit Blanche Ottawa+Gatineau on September 21/22, but only two 3D photos. I no longer have two cameras and it's hard to take a pair of stills with moving people in the shot.

Both of the 3D photos I took were in the Market. This tree was nicely done up on George Street, I think by the O-Town [Yarn-]Bombers:

Source photos for the 3D image: Left, Right

You can see the two exposures by closing one eye, then the other. I think between exposures, a couple of the lights were turned off in the condo building in the background.

With brightly-coloured things like this, the colour shots don't work quite as well because red objects only appear in one eye and blue objects only appear in the other. Here's the same photo again with the colours removed before converting the layers to red and cyan:

The next one is a photographic sculpture by Susy Oliviera at SAW Gallery, called Have Everything and Die. The wall behind was red, so I didn't even bother trying to do the 3D conversion in colour (but I've left the colour in the source photos below).

This sculpture is ideal for photographing in 3D, because a regular photo doesn't capture the essence of it. It's a bunch of pieces of photo moulded together into a kind of sculpture (she had another, photographed on Peter Simpson's Big Beat blog here), but instead of the face put convex (with the nose pointing out), it's concave (with the cheeks and nose going inward):

Source photos for the 3D image: Left, Right

That's a pretty important part of the piece that you don't get with a regular photo of the sculpture.

But a really neat thing about the 3D photos is if you flip your 3D glasses around (i.e. the red filter on your right eye instead of your left eye), it looks convex! This is a neat twist on the old paper dragon illusion or the rotating mask illusion.


While I'm talking about Nuit Blanche 2013, I should mention that I happened to be in Toronto this October to see Ai Weiwei's Forever Bicycles sculpture, which was installed outside Toronto City Hall for their Nuit Blanche. The colour-changing lighting scheme prevented me from taking any photos in 3D (since I'd need to take two photos in succession), but it's still really neat:

The description says that it's made up of 3,144 bicycles, and the title is a play on the name of China's largest bicycle brand, Yong Jiu, which translates as "forever".

They're not real bicycles, but rather a steel representation of bicycle frames. But the wheels are real bicycle wheels and they all spin freely!

It's possible I'm just imagining it, but from a distance, it looks like the shape of the sculpture is a pair of giant bicycles heading each other off on Nathan Phillips Square:

Truly mesmerising! A shame I couldn't get this shot in 3D!

[Tune in on Thursdays at noon for a new 3D image. View the 3D label for other posts with 3D images. 3D FAQ]

Panda prints in Chinatown

In the alleyway between the Chinese restaurant, Ju Xiang Juan, and the Somerset travel agency, is one of the Chinatown murals. This one is of a panda, though not the panda mural that has become iconic of Ottawa's Chinatown (that's a blog post for another day... maybe tomorrow):

(note: I've tweaked the above photo with Photoshop's lens distortion utility. What a versatile and useful tool!)

The mural on the side of the travel agency building is a colourful stencil print of a panda in bright colours. But look closer: those dots are themselves little pandas, each a set of three looking left, centre, and right. Each row of pandas is standing on the edge of a piece of the building's otherwise drab beige siding:

The other side of the alley had a certain je ne sais quoi to it that also caught my eye. The rough brick has an authentic quality to it, obviously having seen many iterations of graffiti, painting over, and sandblasting away. The mural project on Somerset had a dual purpose of livening up the place and deterring graffiti.

You can't see these types of angles while walking by on the sidewalk. If the panda prints hadn't drawn me in to the alley, I wouldn't have caught this view either!

3D Thursdays: Bruce Garner's Bear on Sparks Street

[Note: I've created a new page on the blog with FAQs about 3D photos. Click the link in the banner at the top of the page.]

A familiar sight on Sparks Street is Bruce Garner's scuplture "Territorial Prerogative" at the intersection of Elgin and Sparks. I often see tourists taking their photos with the large bronze grizzly bear as I head to the post office.

Recently, it has come to light that the sculpture could be moving to make way for a new monument to commemorate the Stanley cup. This has triggered some additional attention to the sculpture, and the late Garner's work in general. [Edit May 2013: there is now a follow-up tour of additional Garner works]

Well, get out your red-and-blue 3D glasses*, because I've got three dazzling photos of the statue for your viewing pleasure. Looking west down Sparks Street:

[Tune in on Thursdays at noon for a new 3D image. View the 3D label for other posts with 3D images]

Source photos for the 3D image: Left, Right

Looking north-ish (up Elgin toward Wellington, with the post office in the background):

Source photos for the 3D image: Left, Right

And with the south-side buildings on Sparks in the background:

Source photos for the 3D image: Left, Right

The sculpture was installed as one of a series of pieces highlighting fountains on either end of each block of Sparks Street. The fountain at this sculpture was de-activated years ago.

Also long since removed are are a pair of accompanying pieces, depicting a bear cub chasing a fish (as seen in the photo on this website.

(* If you don't have 3D glasses, you can pick them up for a couple dollars at the Comic Book Shoppe on Bank near Lisgar. Or flag me down; I usually keep a spare pair on me to give away.)

[Tune in on Thursdays at noon for a new 3D image. View the 3D label for other posts with 3D images. 3D FAQ]

Painting on the Mackenzie-King Bridge

You might have heard earlier this month about Patrick Mills painting every day in March on the Mackenzie-King Bridge. I made a point of going to visit him shortly after that story broke, chatted with him a bit, and of course took a photo:

He has a blog where he keeps track of his regular progress.

A couple days after reading about his work, I recognized one of them staring me in the face as I walked out of the office on the second floor of City Hall (between the elevator bank near the Laurier entrance and the rotunda):

This had just recently been installed, as part of the recent trend to spill out the City's art collection on the otherwise unused wall space.

Patrick is painting every day in March, of which there aren't too many left. So if you want to check him out in person, don't wait too long!

3D Thursday: Bronson Avenue artwork chosen

The artwork for the Bronson Avenue reconstruction project has been selected. Instead of having a series of smaller artpieces along the sidewalk, like Bank (Centretown), Bank (Glebe), Preston, Somerset, King Edward, and perhaps most (in)famously, Wellington Steet West, Bronson Avenue's art budget was pooled to create two larger installations.

There was an open house earlier in November where members of the public could provide feedback to the review panel, and around that time Lana blogged about the locations: on top of the entrance at the Bronson Centre, and along the fence at McNabb.

Tim desClouds' wonderful piece, Sit for a While, In the Garden, and Watch the Parade, will run along Bronson Avenue near Gladstone where the Lawn Bowling club is now. It includes a giant layered tree on a fence with cutout figurines. The fence pickets will be bent to create seating inside the fence itself.

Tim is the person who did the chairs along Bank Street in the Glebe, and he actually submitted a piece for the other Bronson artpiece location along similar lines.

I actually did a second version of the 3D photo with different adjustments. It's difficult at such close range to get everything in 'focus'. If you like, you can download the source photos and try yourself (search YouTube for tutorials to make 3D pictures)

Source photos for the 3D images: Left, Right

For reference, the fence would replace the old one on the right here, a bit further back from the curb (this photo was taken on Sunday):

For the other artpiece location, Andrew O'Malley's piece, Community Channel, was selected. It involves a number of aluminium and acrylic figures on top of the Bronson Centre's entrance which, for the first few months at least, will be illuminated in changing colours.

I say "for the first few months" because light-based artwork doesn't last long and there is never any money for its maintenance—the sound-based piece at City Hall's Laurier entrance has been broken for a decade and won't be fixed anytime soon.


The other submissions—all moot now—were summarized at the time by Eric Darwin on West Side Action and by the Ottawa Citizen.
[Tune in on Thursdays at noon for a new 3D image. View the 3D label for other posts with 3D images]

Peds on Weds: Bench with a view?

The next Walk Ottawa meeting is this coming Monday, November 19, 2012 at 7pm at City Hall in the Honeywell Room. There is much to discuss since a Steering Committee was appointed at the September meeting. If you missed the group's October tour of the City's Traffic Operations Division building, you can relive the experience from a three part blog tour posted after a similar tour of the building in 2009.

Today's pedestrian content involves a curious discovery I made while having lunch this past summer at Burgers on Main. When Somerset Street was rebuilt between Elgin and Kent around 2006, the streetscaping in Somerset Village (the block of old houses-turned-restaurants on Somerset between O'Connor and Bank) included this bench:

The bench seems rather deliberately placed in front of that grey box, which doesn't make for very good viewing (nor does the partially-demolished Somerset House). However there is a lock on the box and it looks like there are doors that open. Maybe there is some sort of video screen inside intended as a forgotten piece of public art?

[Tune in on Wednesdays at noon for a new pedestrian-themed blog post. View the Pedestrians label for previous Peds on Weds posts]
[Look for more one-photo posts under the label Singles]

Somerset Street Reconstruction Part 15: Finale - decorations and art

After a couple of months and 15 posts, we have come to the final part in the 15-part series documenting the reconstruction of Somerset Street West from the O-Train tracks, to Preston Street, and onward up into Chinatown to Booth Street.

This final post looks at the decorative and artistic elements of the reconstruction, including the four different street lamp designs, the public art component, and a few other artistic flourishes. This is over and above the previous posts that looked at the design of the sidewalks through Chinatown and the trees and bike racks.

The artistic theme is fitting, since the annual Chinatown Remixed art festival, which displays artwork in many establishments along Somerset Street from May 12 to June 12. I'll start off with some guerilla art that was installed on a street post sometime late last year. Flattened food and drink cans were attached to the post, effectively plating it in pop-art metal:

Getting back to the officially-sanctioned art, here are the old Chinatown lanterns that were installed 15-25 years ago with federal funding. At certain points, like in front of the Wah Shing store at Rochester here, these three-lantern posts were used:

All the lanterns between Booth and Preston will be replaced with the new design that debuted at the Chinatown Gateway Arch, minus the spotlights shown here on the ones surrounding the arch:

Transforming Ottawa's pedestrian landscape

Today is Wednesday, and tonight Ottawa's nascent pedestrian advocacy group will have its second meeting. Notes from the previous meeting are posted on the Ottawa Walking Problems website. The group has recycled the name "Ottawalk" with the blessing of the members of the group of the same name that expired in 2001.

I figured a pedestrian-themed photo would be fitting for Peds on Weds. Here is a pedestrian desire line at the Ottawa Police headquarters at 474 Elgin Street:

Near the corner of Elgin and Argyle, pedestrians cut through the courtyard (next to the "Transformer Site" public art installation), hop the planter bed, and continue along the much quieter street. I wouldn't be surprised if many of them continue diagonally across the Museum of Nature's parking lot as well.

As with the item I highlighted in the post announcing the previous meeting, this is more of a nuisance than an real problem. Not all pedestrian problems can be so easily dismissed, and many nuisances in a single trip can discourage people from walking. The Ottawa Walking Problems is a good place to track the longer term problems, and the City's recently released ServiceOttawa.ca website allows you to directly report more acute issues, like icy sidewalks or malfunctioning traffic signals.

If you're interested in the walking group, contact Councillor Diane Holmes at diane.holmes@ottawa.ca, or feel free to come to the meeting tonight at 7pm in the Colonel By room at City Hall. (I should note that, while this is my personal blog, I also work on pedestrian issues--including the group--for Councillor Holmes)

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

Cozy Oscar

It's cold outside, but the statue of Oscar Peterson, unveiled by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on June 30, 2010, has a warm knit cozy around the prop.

Jazz music plays from speakers above the statue at the corner of Elgin and Albert, and it's popular for people to have pictures taken of themselves sitting next to Oscar on the bench. A great piece of interactive public art, right outside the National Arts Centre!

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

Kent Street blue trees

A nice little splash of colour to brighten up the winter, at the Ottawa Chinese Community Service Centre, 397 Kent Street, at Florence (formerly First United Church of Ottawa).

The centre has hosted candidates meetings in the 2011 federal and provincial elections, and celebrated the 100th anniversary of the building on December 10, 2011 with an exhibition of the history of the building.

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

Centretown midnight sun

In the last few weeks, there has been a lot of filming going on in Centretown. This house at the corner of Elgin and McLeod was being used as a set back in December.

Unfortunately, when you work so close to the solstice at our latitude, you have to bring your own sunlight to shoot film for a full day!

Sorry for the lack of posts. Posting should be more regular when I'm done preparing a big series I've been working on for over a year!

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

The miniature street sweeper

Back in October when the Occupy Ottawa protest was still well-established in Confederation Park, I went by a couple of times to see what there was to see. Someone with a generator, bucket, and various tools was at the NCC's miniature bronze map of downtown Ottawa-Gatineau. The more tourist-oriented streets appear to be brass, and this person was cleaning them with a Dremel and various abrasive sponges.

I didn't realize she wasn't with the protesters, as a gasoline generator and water jugs was the kind of thing the protesters would have with them. But it turns out she works for the firm of the original artist, which was hired by the NCC to do some cleaning and updating some features on the map (like adding the new Convention Centre and removing the Capital Infocentre).

I chatted with her briefly, but unfortunately it's been too long for me to remember any noteworthy details.

Click on the photos to view full-size. I think it's a neat throwback to the scale models used by Jacques Gréber to illustrate his plans for the capital (Such as #151 and others listed here)

Skateboard Lane

Someone spray-painted this in the Laurier Segregated Bike Lane.

I knew the cycling lobby was getting ahead, but the skateboarders too now? (Uphill, no less) The pedestrians really ought to catch up soon!

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

Sidewalk shadows and Pedestrian Degradations

While the bike racks on Bank Street see a lot of use for cyclists, there were mixed responses to the City's one-percent-for-art policy went to street furniture instead of standalone art.

Thanks to sunlight, these racks take on a second life casting shadow images on the sidewalk. And even though it's only fleeting art, it will never wear off the pavement like paint or inlaid pavers would.

It brings up an interesting issue. They tried widening the sidewalks on Bank Street in the '70s (they even closed off some cross streets, like Lewis), but the space reclaimed from the roads was filled in with trees and rock gardens. So when it was brought back to the state that preceded the 2006-2010 reconstruction, it was a no-man's-land that could be used to relieve traffic, not a space stolen from pedestrians to feed the traffic monster.

This is one of the problems faced by the percent-for-art programme in downtown road reconstruction projects. By adding art to the streetscape, you take away walking space that is often quite scarce. Many other items, like garbage bins and newspaper boxes, already compete for sidewalk space, and efforts to moderate their collective impact have not gone far. One reaction is to incorporate the artwork into these inevitable fixtures, like the bike racks on Bank, or the streetlamp art proposed for Somerset Street West.

Pedestrians aren't entirely forgotten; they are thrown the occasional bone. There are many good things said in the Ottawa Pedestrian Plan, and in addition to the Plan itself, some sidewalks get repaired or improved as part of multimillion-dollar road reconstruction projects (like those on Bank, Preston, and Somerset). But this won't address most pedestrian problems in a reasonable timeframe. Just like the trend in cycling (until very recently), the City doesn't put much money toward pedestrian-specific repairs to fill in the missing links that aren't part of these major reconstruction projects. With all the new condos residents moving in downtown—most not owning a car—the pedestrian network needs to be able to support and attract people who use their feet.

Degredations

Then there are the things that don't even stay the same. Fences were recently installed along the sidewalks on Albert and Slater, redirecting pedestrians' natural flow (a problem faced by suburbs also). When the Laurier Segregated Bike Lane was installed this summer, pedestrians lost their dedicated advance signal at Bank Street (and pedestrians outnumber all other modes at that intersection) and the new left-turn arrow at Elgin for motorists coming off the Laurier bridge puts a convoy of vehicles in the path of pedestrians trying to cross. More recently, the NCC blocked off a pathway connecting Preston and Lebreton Flats residents to the Ottawa River.

Now that I'm working in Councillor Holmes' office, these pedestrian facility degradations are one of the things I'll be looking at. And while I know of some of them in Centretown, your help is needed to identify other degradations across the city.

So pedestrian advocates, please tell me: where has it gotten harder to walk recently in Ottawa?

Leave a comment in the box below, or e-mail me at centretown.ottawa at gmail dot com.

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