A century of Centretown

Alexandre Laquerre

Alexandre Laquerre

Contrasting then and now, the photos of a block of apartments on Elgin Street are part of a website designed to show how downtown Ottawa has changed over the years.

With a simple drag of a mouse, you can see what an intersection in Centretown looked like in 1920 and, at the same time, what it looks like today.

“Ottawa Passé & Présent” (Ottawa Past & Present) is the brainchild of 33-year-old Alexandre Laquerre, an engineer at Fibics Inc., who has made Ottawa his home since 2006.

It’s an interactive blog that juxtaposes what specific areas in downtown Ottawa look like now with how the exact location looked like as far back as 90 years ago.

“Ottawa has a lot of footprints of what it used to look like – it makes the whole thing even more interesting,” Laquerre says. “Not many cities in Canada are like that.”

The fascination to find out what places looked like before, say, a building was demolished, began with the redevelopments in his hometown.

“In Quebec City, they did terrible things with the downtown core. I think they sort of did the same thing in Ottawa,” he says. “I always wondered, ‘what was there before?’”\

When he moved to Ottawa, he brought that question with him.

Laquerre started the project with the launch of his website in October and has recently posted a host of current and archival pictures of Centretown, bringing his tally to more than 180 past-and-present photos of intersections, buildings and streets in the downtown area.

The juxtaposition allows users to virtually scroll through time over superimposed images from the past and present, making for a surreal visual experience.

The website also includes an interactive map pinned with all the areas that Laquerre has compared.

But for him, the project is more than just comparing what parts of the city look like now to what they did many years ago.

“I want people to be aware, that at some point, someone made the decision that this street should be widened or that building should be torn down. And to me, I think it was not the right decision,” Laquerre says.

He says that downtown Ottawa is in a poorer state today than what it was 50 years ago because of unfortunate planning and a lack of vision.

One section of Laquerre’s blog reads: “The Gréber Plan and the NCC transformed Ottawa for the worst. One building at a time.”

Led by Frenchman Jacques Gréber, the NCC announced a plan in 1946 to make Ottawa a world-class capital. A product of this controversial plan was the razing of LeBreton Flats, a decision that Laquerre says just didn’t make sense.

“I was shocked when I realized it was a complete neighbourhood and they’re going to tear it down just to make room for government buildings which never happened,” he says.

Laquerre says he believes the NCC has focussed too much on green spaces and has failed in making downtown Ottawa a more vibrant place in which to live.

“I think that the people in charge at the NCC don’t have a good sense of what the city should be,” he says, adding the apartments (where William Lyon Mackenzie King once lived) that stood where Confederation Park is today should not have been demolished.

Armed with a camera and pictures from the past from Library and Archives Canada, Laquerre hit the streets to show how things were, in his opinion, better back in the day.

“The main goal is to take the exact same picture as the one I have from the archives,” he says.

Laquerre says despite it being a challenge, he picked up some tricks on the way to making his snapshots as similar as possible to the older ones. 

 “The hardest things this is when there’s nothing (in the shot) to relate to,” Laquerre says.

“Any buildings or landmarks that were there in 1930 don’t exist anymore, so you kind of have to guesstimate where the photographer was.”

Laquerre’s creative initiative has earned him plaudits from Heritage Ottawa, which says that the project is more than just a tool to study history.

“This is a splendid way to help modern Ottawans connect with their built past, by seeing it alongside the built present,” says Leslie Maitland, president of Heritage Ottawa.
“Through the modern image, one can readily imagine stepping back in time to the same location, but in the past.”

With more than a thousand pictures from Library and Archives Canada still waiting to be juxtaposed, Laquerre says he will continue chipping away at what he calls is a “work in progress.”

Laquerre’s website is at: http://www.alexandrelaquerre.com/.