By Liz MacKenzie
Dalhousie Street’s connections to the francophone community have always been strong. Financial and cultural institutions served a population that faced discrimination from existing organizations. The Union du Canada, Ottawa’s first French-Canadian mutual-aid society, operated for a hundred and fifty years on the site of 325 Dalhousie, where the Andaz Hotel now dominates the corner. The Caisse Populaire Notre Dame and Banque Canadienne Nationale provided reasonable mortgage rates and payment plans during the tough years of the 1920s and 30s.
The Monument Nationale, built in 1906 at the corner of Dalhousie and George, where the Courtyard by Marriott now stands, was the site of lectures, theatre, musicals, and rallies for francophone causes. In 1948, Le Droit, a newspaper for franco-Ontarians, opened new offices at 365 Dalhousie. The Institut Canadien Francais, the oldest French-language organization in the city, moved to the corner of York and Dalhousie in 1956, shortly after its 100th anniversary.
Merchants, mostly French, but also Italian, Jewish and Chinese, sustained the community and the community sustained them. Rita Morel, born on Dalhousie Street in 1911, reminisced for a December 2001 Ottawa Citizen article. She fondly recalls the childrens’ delight at seeing huge workhorses being led to the smithy for shoeing. She remembers Robitaille’s windows filled with religious objects, Roussel’s drugstore where emergency drugs were dispensed at any time of the day or night, sometimes by Mr. Roussel roused from bed and still in his pyjamas. Memorable too were Duford’s paint and wallpaper store and “les demoiselles Gondin” where neighbourhood kids went for slates, pencils and copy books each September.
Tantalizing aromas wafted through the street: the delights of Mama Mandia’s home-made ice cream, the aroma from Gravelle’s bakery, Mr. Mallette’s nose-twitching pork and beans, and soap and starch from The Chinese Laundry. Then there was Ti-Jos Girard’s barber shop, where the smells of shaving soap and Bay Rum emanated while T-Jos entertained his customers with arias sung in his fine tenor, even trimming the children who sat on a board on the arms of his barber’s chair.
Everyone’s needs were satisfied – there was a milliner, Mr. Castonguay’s photo studio, Torontow’s hardware store, Larcoque’s Merchant Tailor shop and Larocque’s dry goods store
Life was never dull… never quiet … the Basilica’s bells rang, the cries of the rag man, the umbrella mender, the sissors-and-knife sharpener, and the hurdy-gurdy with its green parrot screeching filled the street. There were bands and choirs and the boom of the noon-day gun.
Such were the delights of Lowertown’s vibrant main street. It was gutted, like so many main streets with the opening of supermarkets and the malls – in Lowertown the Rideau Centre. The mom-and-pop stores just couldn’t compete, owners aged, shoppers dwindled and the stores fell vacant. Specialty stores and start-up entrepreneurs are now adding new life, but it will take work by the property owners, the city, the BIA and our patronage to re-energize our beloved Dalhousie Street with commercial enterprises that serve and enhance our community.
Dalhousie Street’s past continues to be documented by the community, primarily through the volunteer work of the Heritage Committee of the Lowertown Community Association.