By Victoria Puchko and Yelena Yang
Have you ever wondered what Ottawa’s Lowertown was like back in the 1940s? The novel Angel Square by Brian Doyle definitely explains every aspect of life at that time in our nation’s capital. When reading this story, it’s easy to dive into the adventurous life of a young boy named Tommy. Every day, he has to pass through Anglesea Square, better known to Tommy and his friends as “Angel Square.”
The book revealed three main schools located on Angel Square, each on a different side. One of them was York Street School, which was where most of the Jewish population went. On the second side was St. Brigit’s of the Bleeding Thorns, where all the Irish Catholics went. (Brian Doyle decided to use his creative license and created the name of the school himself. The actual name of this school was Ste. Anne’s and it was a girls’ school.) On the third side of Angel Square was the school of Brother Brébeuf, where all the French Canadians went.
Tommy was not a part of any of the religious groups and he attended York Street School. Unfortunately, people back then were extremely prejudiced and Tommy had to fight with kids from other schools in order to get to school and back home safely several times each day. Life seemed to go fairly well for him until one day his best friend Sammy’s father was assaulted during his night shift as a guard in the nearby car barns. The reason for his assault was unsurprisingly racist: it was because he was Jewish.
In just a flash, Tommy’s life took a huge twist. He decided to figure out who the assaulter was, no matter what, with the help of his two friends, Gerald Hickey and Coco Laframboise. They worked collaboratively in order to solve the mystery and to ensure that it was safe for Sammy and his father to return to Lowertown after his father was released from hospital.
On our walk, we found out that a lot of things have changed in Lowertown since the 1940s. Angel Square, which is now called Jules Morin Park, is still valued by people in the community. Over time, the open public space was planned so people of all ages could assemble. Along the pathways, there are weathervanes topped with images of significance related to the Square’s history and the different cultures that helped build it.
Lowertown still has many houses that people use today. The houses on Papineau Street that were featured in the novel were removed during a time when the city was improving the infrastructure. A small group of the original houses on Heney Street are still there as reminders of the period covered in the book. York Street School is still in use, although the schools that Brian Doyle based the Irish-Catholic and French-Canadian schools on in the novel are not there anymore. The main difference, and the greatest accomplishment, is that the people who make up the diverse Lowertown community welcome people from all backgrounds.
This article reflects the thoughts of two girls in a Grade 6 class at Elmwood School–Victoria Puchko and Yelena Yan–after reading about and then doing a walking tour to locations identified in the book Angel Square, written by Brian Doyle.