Centretown time capsule: August/September 2007

Happy Labour Day everyone!

For today's post, I want to do something a little different. I wanted to give a snapshot of what was happening in Centretown five years ago in August and September 2007. With a high proportion of renters, many Centretown residents—even those active in community affairs—weren't here five years ago (nor was this blog!). For the rest of us, it'll be a trip down memory lane.

The 2007 Labour Day parade, organized by the Ottawa and District Labour Council, ended as usual at McNabb Park for the annual festival with free hotdogs, corn on the cob, and other attractions (if you're reading this post shortly after it goes up, head out there now! They should be there from the end of the parade until 4:30pm). You might recognize this photo of the wading pool as one of the four at the bottom of the CCCA's 'promo cards':

September 2007 marked the official opening of the Corktown Footbridge on the 11th (the bridge opened to traffic the previous September). Municipal politicians and interpreters in 1830's period dress were there to cut the ribbon.

Online maps in the fourth dimension

One of the fun things about having an archive of hundreds of photos from each of many construction projects in Centretown is that you can use it to tell when a particular photo was taken by somebody else. I made a reference to it in this post about Tommy & Lefebvre's reconstruction, when I pointed out that if you look at the site in Google Street View from one street, it's at one point in the project, and from another street, the photos are from a few weeks on.

So it didn't take me long to figure out when Google's 45-degree aerial photos (click screenshot below) of Centretown were taken. My Mondrian construction photos were a bust, but this big hole on the next block of Bank Street...

...was a dead ringer for this scene, taken as little as a few hours apart, from July 7, 2008:

Microsoft Live ("Bing") Maps introduced this view earlier than Google did (and with more promotion of it), and lets you look from four different perpendicular directions. Microsoft uses photos that are a bit older, also from 2008, but from before Bank Street was dug up that year (click to go to the page on Bing Maps):