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]

3D Thursday: 3D through the aqueduct, part 1 of 2

Today's 3D Thursday blog post is one I've been working on for a while. It's a two-part series—with lots of 3D content—on the aqueduct that runs through LeBreton Flats. URBSite did a great (2D) post on the history of the Fleet Street pumping station, which is the subject of part 2, coming next Thursday. Reminder: 3D photos are best viewed full screen with a dark backdrop.

The first image that comes to my mind at the thought of the word "aqueduct" is a high stone-arch wall dating from the Roman empire. But really, it's just any conduit that carries water, usually by gravity. In fact, as this Discovery Channel special shows, most of the Roman aqueducts were on, or under, the ground level.

Ottawa's aqueduct is in a channel and partially buried under what are technically considered bridges. In the 3D photo above, taken from atop the escarpment, you can see the bottom end of the aqueduct, where it leads to the historic Fleet Street water pumping station and Pooley's Bridge in the foreground, and you can sort of follow it backwards along the line of trees through LeBreton Flats, curving back to the Ottawa River behind the condos of 250 Lett Street on the right. I don't expect you to see all that from the vantage point of the photo above, though if you zoom in close (zoom gradually if you can so your eyes can adjust along the way) you can make out the parkway bridge over the aqueduct inlet.

Here's where it comes off the Ottawa River, first passing under a prefabricated steel bridge that carries the Ottawa River Pathway. Nepean Bay in the Ottawa River is at the left, and the water headed to the aqueduct flows toward the right.