Ottawa is filled with an array of diverse streets — residential and business, quiet and loud — you name it. O'Connor Street captures all of this, starting as a bustling part of the downtown core and expanding south into a calm residential street in the Glebe.
Beginning at Parliament Hill, O’Connor cuts through the Sparks Street Mall — Ottawa’s historic pedestrian shopping district. Parked cars line the one-way street while tourists, city residents and downtown office workers roam the sidewalks.
Far to the south, it’s hard to miss the family of bronze mammoths with their trunks and tusks raised high in front of the Canadian Museum of Nature.
As O’Connor Street enters into the Glebe, it transforms from a busy city street to a quiet, residential road. With less traffic and fewer pedestrians, O’Connor now consists of older townhouses and newly built homes. It ends at Holmwood Avenue near a small playground with a few benches and slides — a world away from where the street began.
O’Connor Street was named by local politician and landowner Nicholas Sparks after his friend Daniel O’Connor, the first Irish Roman Catholic judge of the Supreme Court of Judicature for Ontario. To this day, Sparks and O’Connor streets intersect in the form of a cross to symbolize the hope for peace between Bytown’s Protestant and Catholic populations.
O’Connor was born in Massachusetts in 1824 and moved to Bytown three years later. At 19, he was forced to cut off his own limb after a tree fell across one of his legs while he was chopping timber on his father’s farm. The accident inspired him to put his energy into politics and he eventually became the first treasurer of the District of Dalhousie, later the region of Ottawa-Carleton. In 1874, he became Sir John A. Macdonald’s postmaster general and then secretary of state.