By Jolson Lim
In the 1960s, roads and highways were a much more important part of the urban-planning principle than public transportation. Ease of access by car into city centres defined urban progress. Planners attempted to ease traffic congestion, which was growing more problematic with ever increasing car-ownership rates.
In September 1965, the Ottawa-Hull Area Transportation (OHAT) study was published. The study recommended millions be spent on highway construction in Ottawa, with a top price pegged as high as $1 billion. The plans included a King Edward Freeway to connect the soon-to- be-completed Queensway with the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge to Hull. The means proposed for this connection was a six-lane sunken highway running north-south along Nelson Street and Henderson Avenue parallel to King Edward Avenue and skirting the east side of the University of Ottawa campus. This freeway would essentially carve Lowertown and Sandy Hill in two.
the proposed King Edward Freeway. Ottawa Journal, Sept 9, 1965.
The OHAT study was lauded by politicians and transportation bureaucrats at the time. Mayor Don Reid was quoted in the Ottawa Journal saying the city “must not allow this report to gather dust in desk drawers as so many do.”
The planning for the King Edward Freeway coincided with Ottawa’s largest and Canada’s second-largest urban-renewal project just getting underway in Lowertown. Entire city blocks were being expropriated, and new housing, with new winding roads connecting to main arteries, was replacing old residential buildings built around square blocks.
The plan for the King Edward Freeway was integrated into the urban-renewal scheme for Lowertown. The land between the proposed six-lane highway on Nelson Street and King Edward Avenue, still a leafy two-lane avenue with a treed median, would be set aside for municipal office buildings. Existing buildings such as the Champagne Baths and 189 Laurier Ave. East, then a historic upscale apartment which is now the Angolan embassy, were to be demolished in the process.
By 1968, residents in Lowertown and Sandy Hill were sharply criticizing the freeway plan. A neighbourhood study was demanded. In March of that year, amidst growing community opposition and the prospect of reduced funding for the project from the province, City Council decided the construction of the Freeway would be too costly.
Community activists and local politicians said Lowertown and Sandy Hill had dodged a bullet. However, it didn’t end there. If community groups have learned anything over the years, it is that planners seldom give up that easily. There might not be enough funding at the moment, but the freeway was still there on paper.
Criticism of the freeway plan in Lowertown fused with complaints about urban renewal. In 1969, residents and businesses brought their complaints to the Ontario Municipal Board. Momentum for cancelling the freeway picked up in September 1970 when another arterial road, the Vanier Parkway, was approved by City Council. Anti-freeway groups and leaders saw it as an alternate route connecting Hull with the Queensway that would cause fewer homes to be demolished and fewer communities uprooted.
In February 1971, National Capital Commission chairman Douglas Fullerton said that the plan for the freeway was “a monster conceived in sin and born out of OHAT.” Nevertheless, mayors Ken Fogarty and Pierre Benoit, alongside most regional and city planners, continued to support the plan, and the route was still recommended for construction by Council that year.
In 1973, meetings between Sandy Hill residents and the city produced compromise ideas, one of which was a six-lane King Edward-Henderson arterial road, which planners saw as having a more natural alignment connecting the crossing to Hull and the Queensway. The two other options that arose around that time were a grass-covered tunnel freeway, and an alternate route on Nicholas and Waller streets, around Sandy Hill.
City Council and Regional Council eventually supported the Nicholas-Waller route to Rideau Street. The tunnel idea was rejected as inadequate to reduce congestion and not worth its cost. After the Vanier Parkway was stopped from entering New Edinburgh and connecting with the Macdonald-Cartier Bridge, the default for heavy traffic became a widened King Edward Avenue, north of Rideau.
Problems with heavy traffic downtown continue to worsen and serious debate about what to do persists. Although Lowertown and Sandy Hill were spared devastation from the freeway, the legacy of inappropriate and inadequate highway construction continues to define much of Ottawa’s current local politics.
Jolson Lim was a Lowertown Community Association Canada Summer Jobs’ student in 2016.