Roxanne Stasyszyn, Centretown News
Right now, Claridge Homes’ Tower 1 in LeBreton Flats is a single structure sticking out of a sea of undeveloped land, but it stands as a tangible symbol of a reviving community.
New residents began moving into the tower this summer.
Thirty units have become occupied since the first week of August, says Susan Hughes, a sale consultant for Claridge Homes’ LeBreton Flats development.
Residents of the units represent the first people to live on the National Capital Commission land since the 1962 expropriation of former residents.
Rob Murphy, who has a one-bedroom suite on the third floor of the building, is one of them.
“Overall, I’m pretty happy with it,” he said.
Neil Malhotra, vice-president of Claridge Homes, says construction on Tower 1 is on schedule and would be finished this December.
Still to be completed are the interiors of a few of the apartments and the landscaping.
While Claridge Homes looks ahead, the history of LeBreton Flats remains a topic of emotional power, even today.
“It’s pretty much safe to say that Ottawa started there,” says Phil Jenkins, author of An Acre of Time: The Enduring Value of Place, a book that explores the history of Canadian attitudes towards land, using an acre of land in LeBreton Flats as his case study.
One of the first buildings in Ottawa was Firth’s Tavern at LeBreton Flats, he says.
But in the 1960s the NCC was reviewing their land use in Ottawa, he said, and LeBreton Flats did not fit with its plans.
“The NCC then set out to prove that [the houses there] were slums, and knock them down,” says Jenkins.
“[Nearby] Lorne Avenue looks exactly like LeBreton Flats would have today and it is now a heritage conservation street. So there’s a little bit of irony there.”
For almost 50 years, struggles to clean up the contaminated land – polluted with chemicals from the industries previously in the area – and organize development stalled progress.
“It wasn’t just the NCC, that was the problem,” says Jenkins.
“Everything costs twice as much and takes twice as long as it’s supposed to . . . If three levels of government are involved, it costs eight times as much and takes eight times as long. There were three levels of government involved in LeBreton Flats,” the author adds.
There were oddities such as a sidewalk belonging to the city but the sewers underneath it belonging to the region.
It took a long time to sort out, he says, but eventually, in the late ‘90s, the NCC controlled the area.
Today, nearly 50 years after the expropriation, residents are coming back to live on the historic land once again.
Hughes said the response from new residents thus far has been “very positive.”
While workers in construction hats will be a common sight for new residents, Murphy said the location more than makes up for it.
But not everyone is so positive.
Jenkins says that the new development has revived many Ottawa residents’ emotion about the area.
“People take their city personally, they take their landscape and cityscape personally,” he says. “People are watching [Tower 1] going up and I think they are profoundly disappointed. They know that’s not a neighbourhood. That’s warehousing. That doesn’t look like a neighbourhood.”
Others, including Ottawa architecture critic Rhys Phillips, have also criticized the building.
“I had aspirations for a neighbourhood that was aware of its own history,” Jenkins says. “But that seems to be considered a sin by the NCC.”