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Wednesday 15 May 2019

Wellington West

If you hang around long enough and write some grouchy oped pieces, eventually you may get asked for an interview - that is, if the young writer is looking for a neighbourhood curmudgeon. That's what happened a couple of months ago, when I had a call from Taylor Blewettt, of the Ottawa Citizen. She had read my 2008 piece about Wellington Street.  It was called Losing a Useful Store.

My friend Christine and I sat down to talk with Ms. Blewett, about the current state of our main street, Wellington.  The area is called Wellington West but it's confusing. There is our Wellington Street and there's also Wellington St. downtown, where Parliament Hill is located. To add to the confusion, our Wellington Street changes names, to become Richmond Road. Anyhow, it was interesting to read Ms. Blewett's piece, with other opinions on what happens when an area becomes so desirable.

Click here to read Ms. Blewett's piece, which appeared in The Citizen on May 9th.

From January 15, 2008, here is my Losing a Useful Store:

When my husband and I moved back to Ottawa in the late '80s, we decided to come back to this end of town, now called Wellington West, because it was a lovely old-fashioned neighbourhood.
There were children, bikes and strollers all over, so we knew we were in the right place. We liked the fact that we were near the Transitway and within walking distance to shops all along Wellington Street and Richmond Road.

While many extol the virtues of this currently fashionable neighbourhood, some of us old-timers are mourning the loss of the way it was. If you think it's a great place now, you should have experienced it before it yuppified. It was just ordinary families walking and biking to small, local stores. That was before house prices went crazy, before people started tearing down perfectly fine houses to build mansions, before retailers convinced us that bigger stores were better for us, and before Wellington Street had all these exclusive baby stores selling infant undershirts for more money than we paid for a second-hand stroller.

At our main corner of Clarendon and Wellington, we had Carver's Drugstore, with a post office, a branch of the CIBC, a video store and for many years, Wellington News -- a great place for newspapers, magazines and cards. The drugstore is now blocks away, at the corner of Parkdale Avenue and Wellington Street. It's much larger and probably sells 50 different kinds of shampoo but I'd rather have the original, cramped store. There was a post office at that corner for as long as my mother can remember (and she just turned 80) but last year, when Wellington Street Cleaners moved to Hintonburg, the post office went with it. CIBC closed their tiny branch, making Carlingwood the closest branch for its loyal customers. The video store and Wellington News are also gone.

At Holland Avenue, we had some real frills: a Laura Secord Store, a Biway, a liquor store and our own movie place -- the Elmdale Theatre -- all gone now. Of course, pretty well all our old movie houses have disappeared, in favour of the flashy, multi-screen warehouses. This year we lost the liquor store. If you want to pick up a bottle of wine now, you've got to go west to the new, (huge, of course) LCBO, next to the Superstore -- the grocery store where you have to walk the distance of a city block to find milk.

I'm not a fan of big stores. I'd much rather go to our local Loeb, where I can find what I want and inevitably meet some of my neighbours. When I do go into big stores, I waste too much time looking for items and waiting in line.


Fortunately, we still have some of our long-term establishments that make life enjoyable: Ottawa Bagel, Herb and Spice, Home Hardware, Fresh Air Experience, John's Quick Lunch, Thyme and Again are but a few. Some of the newer places like the bakeries and restaurants, GCTC, Collected Works and World of Maps, are all great additions.

So, it's not that I'm against progress and new initiatives. I simply find that the loss of basic services to a neighbourhood is detrimental, both to the 'environment' and the community. Back in the '50s, before we had heard of the word environment, our neighbourhoods were actually fairly eco-friendly because we were able to satisfy most of our needs in our own geographical areas. Then came the suburbs, with their houses set up far from stores, necessitating all that driving to malls. Now, as some of our inner city neighbourhoods become more popular, causing retail rents to rise dramatically, many small businesses leave, forcing inhabitants of these traditional old areas to do what suburban dwellers do -- drive to access basic services like banks, post offices, pharmacies, hardware and grocery stores -- in big impersonal stores. With all that driving, we lose the friendly, community feeling that comes with running into the same people as you shop in a small geographical area. Isn't it ironic, that as the environmental movement is constantly encouraging us to buy local and drive less, some of us who moved to traditional neighbourhoods to do just that, are being forced to travel farther?

On my last trip to that Canadian Tire store, I asked a cashier about the new store. "You should see it!" she enthused. "It's so big, it has criss-cross escalators." Well, I don't give a darn about criss-cross escalators. I'll go to our tiny Home Hardware for as many of our hardware needs as they can provide. Unfortunately, they don't have an automotive section, so the next time I need to replace a windshield-wiper blade, I'll have to venture in, to the newest shrine to retail excess.

As I left the old store, I read, once again, the memorial plaque on the front of the store. It's dedicated to the late Trevor Smith , who worked there for 40 years. That's the kind of time it was, when you would shop at your neighbourhood store and see the same employees, people who knew you. That was back when my dad first took me there, when he was teaching us about cars and later sending us there, to pick up parts, downstairs, in the automotive section. There were no escalators, criss-cross or ordinary, just the stairs to the basement. It was another era.






Tuesday 14 May 2019

I'm Back

To anyone who has been checking this site, my humble apologies. In an ideal world, I would write regularly. I would also exercise regularly and even sit down and play the piano again. Ah, so many resolutions. My grandmother used to say that the way to hell is paved with good intentions.

Anyhow, lately we have been fortunate to have enjoyed a lovely holiday on the west coast. As well, we have been busy with family commitments.  In spite of all the busyness, I really do intend to make more time for writing. There is no shortage of news about Kenora Street - the drama continues.

I will end with an admission that I was wrong about the pot shop. Once in a while, I'll see a lineup of people on the sidewalk, but other than that, I haven't noticed any horrendous traffic because of it.