Gordon Walker has helped revitalize Somerset Street with new signs identifying the Chinatown district.
Gordon Walker has witnessed Ottawa’s Chinatown change and grow for 26 years, and during that time he fell in love with the area. That’s why he says he devotes his time to the Somerset Street Chinatown Business Improvement Area as Vice-Chair.
Since he started work with the BIA, he has initiated and contributed to projects that have lifted the area out of what he calls its “decline” and helped breathe life back into Somerset Street.
His life on Somerset started at Kelly Funeral Home when he moved into the apartment the home provided for one of its employees. Walker was on call 24 hours a day, and loved his job so much he would get extra work done in his spare time.
“I initially spent five years living here and I was at a very impressionable age,” he says. “I loved the area, I loved the people, and I loved to shop and hang out at the shops and restaurants on the street.”
He adds that he never once locked his apartment door in the five years he lived on the street, something quite unheard of for the neighbourhood today.
Since then, Walker has gotten married and started a family, but continues to act as the director of the funeral home. Kelly Funeral Homes has six locations, and Walker says many of his colleagues started at the Somerset Street location and chose to move on to the other homes in the suburbs.
“This building has been an anchor on the street for over 50 years, and I’m very proud of the area,” he says. “I chose to be here and I chose to stay here.”
About two years ago, Walker says Chinatown was declining, struggling with a messy street and a bad reputation. This is when he was approached to join the BIA and help revitalize the area.
“The BIA was struggling with a little bit of an identity crisis,” he says. “They were shifting gears, and they were looking for someone to help turn things around.”
Walker decided he was up to the task of helping the community that he had loved and worked in for much of his life, so he started attending meetings. The first thing he noticed was that the group was not well organized and was not addressing all the different viewpoints of the members. This, he says, made it difficult to get just about anything done.
Walker wasted no time starting projects to strike life back into the street.
“We started by looking at the street and said ‘what can we do to make it more identifiable’,” he says. Walker noticed that there were no street signs that showed the area as a distinct cultural area of the city. In particular, he remembers that the signs identifying the area read “Somerset Heights.”
So, Walker decided a change was in need. He took the initiative to make arrangements with the city to create a new street sign that would identify the area as Chinatown or an Asian village. Six months after the project was started, the yellow banners with red dragons identifying the street as Chinatown adorned the red lamp posts that line the street.
“The city did a marvelous job with the signs,” he says. “Since then, I think the whole team has a renewed energy.”
Fellow board members at the BIA acknowledge that Walker’s initiatives have been a leading force in fostering the growth of the community. Executive Director Grace Xin says the street signs were a very successful initiative.
“He took on the project and delivered!” she says.
Since then, Walker has taken on numerous other ventures to help bring the community to the potential he thinks it has. He says it became evident that the next step was to clean up the street after community members provided feedback that the image of the area was dirty and unsafe.
“I have to agree that at the time there was a lot of general debris along the road,” he says. “There were also a lot of pan handlers and street prostitutes that weren’t giving the area a good image.”
So, Walker said they joined the Clean the Capital initiative and decided to clean up Chinatown. With a new executive director and new enthusiastic board members, the BIA started contacting the media, making flyers, and getting the community involved. They got the Ottawa Police to help with the cleanup, as well as students from the Richard Pfaff Alternative school and other residents and businesses.
“For anyone who has lived in the area for a few years I think they would notice that there is a big difference and a greater effort to keep the area and the street clean,” he says.
Fellow board member Ken Yip says that Walker demonstrates that he really cares about the wellbeing of the neighbourhood.
“The garbage clean-up campaign was a good example,” he says. “He took a leadership role to organize store owners to participate and held a BBQ lunch after.”
To combat the trash problem, Walker also helped ensure that store and restaurant owners understood the city bylaws pertaining to garbage. He says rules were not being enforced in Chinatown because the bylaws had not been translated into languages that many owners could understand.
“The city of Ottawa has finally just acknowledged that there’s a language issue here,” he says. “So, in the last six months, the garbage bylaws have been translated into Chinese and Vietnamese. I couldn’t believe this hadn’t already been done!”
Now, he says bylaw enforcement officers can start charging irresponsible owners for not taking out their garbage in a timely manner, or for not keeping their garbage in proper receptacles, something which will hopefully help keep the street cleaner.
“Gordon is very culturally sensitive,” says Xin. “He understands the issues facing the community and he is there to encourage people to overcome differences and achieve a common goal.”
As Walker discusses upcoming initiatives, he seems excited and proud. He is now focusing on projects to ensure that Chinatown is encompassing all of their diverse cultures. The BIA hired a consulting company to give the area ideas on rebranding. The consultant’s report said there should be a renaming of the area to something which includes the phrase “an Asian village” to give emphasis to the fact that the area is home to all different Asian groups, and Walker says the BIA will act on this soon.
Most importantly, Walker would like to see residents take pride in their neighbourhood.
“Why do people have so much pride when they say, oh, I live in the Glebe, or when they say I own a little café in Westboro?” he says. “I think that it would be a fabulous thing for Chinatown if we had the same degree of pride in our community.”
But he acknowledges that this kind of pride can’t be built in a day.
“The sense of accomplishment of this community has unbelievable potential, but it can’t be done overnight. You have to have buy-in from the residents, the shop keepers and the owners, and that takes time,” he says.
Nonetheless, he sees a bright future for the BIA’s role in building a community environment in Chinatown.
“We as a group have been more proactive in the last year than I would imagine the BIA was for quite some time,” he says. “The Asian community has embraced this street and I think they’re here to stay for a long time.”