Off Bronson Avenue, at Nima’s Pastry and Cake Shop is Christie Street, which is short and almost silent except for the echo of the heavy traffic left behind.
Nima’s is checkered with inch-wide green and white tiles on its right wall. The letters “FM” are scrawled graffiti style in thick black marker on the side of the store, embodying the lived-in feeling that lingers along the street it belongs to.
Homes on Christie Street differ in shape and size; some have additions that don’t match the structure they belong to. On the handrail of a small house’s second-floor balcony, a long white canoe rests upside-down.
A neighbouring backyard is a mini makeshift junkyard with plastic sheeting covering a pile of objects and dozens of coat hangers dangling off horizontal, metal poles.
Three bicycles — one green, one red and one purple — rest against the porch of one side of a semi-detached house. Three empty pop cans litter its front yard. With its collection of bikes and boats, Christie Street has both the sense of anticipation for action to come, and that of action that ended a while ago.
The street was named for Dr. A. J. Christie, a physician who moved to Ottawa in 1827 to open one of the area’s first civilian medical practices.
By the 1840s, Christie had served residents through waves of malaria, typhus and cholera.
In 1836, he created the Bytown Gazette newspaper which reported throughout the two-year depression that followed.
Christie Street, narrow and short, resembles an old-fashioned neighbourhood, a reminder of the time in which Christie practiced.