Lots of Lots!

The (Ottawa) Evening Citizen,  28 April 1947

   The date of this ad  for the Rideau Gardens Annex (at the south end of "Old" Ottawa East) is noteworthy. In 1947, construction began on a new kind of suburb in Nassau County Long Island. It was called Levittown and it would be hailed as North America's prototype mass-produced, post-war suburb.  In a few short years, the Levittown model would make ads like the one above obsolete.

   Before Levittown, a subdivision was simply an area of surveyed land. The "subdivider" would clear (I did not say "pave") roads and (hopefully) arrange for electricity and ditches. Home-building, well-digging and septic-tanking fell to the buyer.  Berthiaume Realty's ad, with its cute little poem, is a snapshot of the old normal. The empty subdivision was already falling out of fashion, to be replaced by the massively more convenient, pre-built development.

   This neighbourhood abuts the south end of Main Street and features some striking mid-century suburban homes, including split-levels and bungalows with iconic car-ports.  The streets are quiet, the trees mature.  Most of the street-names shown here are still being used. Marlowe Crescent (at the top of the map) provides access to a pre-war enclave called Brantwood Place. Bullock Avenue no longer connects to Main Street and the latter has doubled in width.  Rideau Drive is now Rideau Garden Drive. And then there's the boulevard, actually a hydro corridor, bisecting the Annex...

   As we prepare to celebrate Canada's 150th birthday,  let's recall our Centennial year. Expo '67 had pavilions and monorails. Everybody had a Centennial Project. "I'm gonna be a maple tree." That horrid song ("Now we are twenty-million!") 1967 was also the year that France's war hero, General Charles de Gaulle, visited Canada.

   I remember the 24th of July as a perfect summer's day. I wanted to play outside but my mother insisted that my father and I stay home for a few minutes "to watch history being made."  De Gaulle was about to address the people of Montreal. The three of us sat in our basement rec-room, staring at the screen of a black & white Electrohome TV while, 100 miles away, a slow-motion train wreck unfolded for all of Canada to see.

   Seldom do the mighty fall so far so fast. With those four words, "Vive le Québec libre!" our jaws dropped as one. De Gaulle was hustled out of the country. The British press labeled him a buffoon.  The US smelled a plot to divide North America. Even the French government took pains to distance itself from the old man's gaucherie.

  Which brings us to this Ottawa Journal article, dated 26 July 1967, just two days after the morning in question. It's about that boulevard/ hydro corridor, the one that slashes the Rideau Gardens Annex in half...

Name Change Sought

   A  non-separatist, pro-Canadian Englishman feels badly enough these days. But what if he happens to live on a street called de Gaulle Boulevard?
   Gordon Hamilton, [of] 14 de Gaulle Bouldevard, would like to have the street name changed. And he’ll ask some 40 other residents on his street to petition the Street Name Committee at City Hall for a name change.
   “I’m anti-separatist and pro-Canada and not only English Canadians but a lot of French Canadians are against what General de Gaulle is saying” says the 22-year-old Mr. Hamilton, who is married and lives in a 1½ storey home on the short residential street near Riverdale Avenue in Rideau Gardens.
   Mr. Hamilton spoke to ten de Gaulle Boulevard residents and found that nine of them were willing to sign a petition to have the street named changed. He will set out Wednesday to get signatures from all residents.
   There is an extra little submission in the petition, requesting that de Gaulle  Boulevard might be given the new name of Centennial Boulevard.

 *     *     *

   I would be remiss if I were to leave anyone with the impression that Levittown NY was somehow the primary cause of the rise of the merchant builder and the pre-fab suburb. Levittown was a watershed moment, the signifier of an inevitable transition, spurred by population growth and made possible by emerging assembly-line approaches to building.

   War-time and post-war agencies (themselves born of Depression-era  policy) gave rise to our CMHC, as they did to corresponding American bodies. These offices set building standards and provided financing for affordable single-family homes at the very time when assistance and oversight was needed most. Yes Virginia, sometimes bureaucracies actually do work.

   Angella Hercules Stevenson has written a lucid introduction to the subject as it applied both here and in the United States. She discusses Levitton at some length, and cites Don Mills (Toronto) and Ottawa's own Manor Park as early examples of post-war development. You can read her work in pdf form here.