Months ago on a very cold day I went and took pictures of the old Ottawa Hydro HQ building designed by W.C. Beattie and I talked about a couple of my favourite substations which he also designed.
I recently visited Substation #4 on King Edward to get some pictures of my own. Although if you look at old pictures, you might be sad about some of the alterations, I think it’s still very nice.
And I also took some pictures of some street sculptures that I thought were quite good:
I’m old enough to remember when King Edward really was an avenue, with huge trees down the boulevard. I wonder if they were elms; they disappeared in the late 1960s. I lived in the old part of New Edinburgh, near Sussex Dr., and we would drive down King Edward, and then cross the beautiful old Minto bridges (inspiration for knitting maybe?) to our place on Stanley. Then along came the Macdonald/Cartier bridge and King Edward’s transformation into an on-ramp. The Vanier Parkway was originally intended to link up with the bridge by an arterial along the Rideau behind historic Stanley Ave., but the neighbourhood put an end to that. It was all an example of a lack of long-term urban planning!