It's been six months since we posted about Winnipeg; the last piece about the prairie capital was in high summer when the topic was the city's lovely Exchange District. The scene is much different now; -20 C is the norm and the frigid nights come early. There is a strange new addition to the Winnipeg streetscape as well; it is the sight of letter carriers trudging through the snow and ice under the moonlight, attempting to finish extra-long routes that are part of a new experiment called "Modern Post". Evidently eleven-hour shifts ...

No topic sees Ken Gray's "Bulldog" blog on the Citizen site live up to its name better than his dog-with-a-bone stubbornly relentless critique of the planned tunnel for a downtown LRT. Ken hates the idea of the tunnel; it's too expensive, he says, and the product of a dishonest decision-making process that started with Larry O'Brien's duplicity in canceling the previous plan for a much cheaper LRT - the O-Train. On weeks when other issues are on the back burner, it's usually a fair bet that Gray will return to the tunnel theme in ...

The Citizen published another installment of a wonderful feature yesterday. It's a historical walking tour of Elgin Street by Ottawa writer Phil Jenkins, and it's a very engaging piece, by equal parts informative, opinionated, funny -- just what we've come to expect of Jenkins over the years. It picks up at Sparks Street, where he left off last week. Working his way south to Lisgar, near the end of the piece he addresses himself to the provincial courthouse at Elgin and Laurier: Crossing over to the east side of Elgin, it is probably best to run past Fort Court, as it is known, unless your presence is required within. A ghastly building, from which one expects a puff of smoke to emerge every now and then when a traffic offender is incinerated. Surely this not what justice should look like. Reading that, I realized that I usually do walk past the the courthouse as quickly as possible, not giving it a second look - which actually takes some doing, as it takes up most of a city block.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="553" caption="Can it really be a year already?"][/caption] It seems last month, not last year, that we launched Spacing Ottawa with a party at the Cube Gallery on Hamilton. I'll never forget the date; ironically, that's because I hardly remember what happened. I had come down with a horrible once-in-a-decade  virus that same morning; I was croaking instead of talking and breaking out into random sweats and dizzy spells. I was so hopped-up on Robitussin DM that if it wasn't for this video I don't think I'd remember one conversation from the entire evening, but I do remember that I met a hundred or so people with elbow bumps instead of handshakes. With streaming nose and eyes, you'd have been crazy to take my hand even if I'd have offered it. But despite such an inauspicious start to my association with Spacing, I've had a fascinating year as editor of this blog. The best part has been getting to work with the many contributors to our pages; contributors whose interests span so many areas of expertise and who brim with enthusiasm for Ottawa's urban experience.

The controversy around of the city's plans to widen Bronson Avenue seems to naturally lead to discussion of the other arterial routes that cut north through Centretown. This weekend I heard a local architect talking about Metcalfe Avenue. His first point was that since, like its neighbour O'Connor, Metcalfe is a one-way street, there is very limited interest in creating pedestrian-scale  development. If offered a choice, pedestrians will nearly always opt for walking along a traditional two-way street, where lower traffic speeds make for a better mix of cars and people. And since cafes and ...

The internet was abuzz this week with the video from Ohio of a 275' smokestack  demolished with dynamite; it fell the wrong way, scaring a family that had gathered to watch the explosion from a vantage point in what they thought was the safe area. It put me in mind of the great Fred Dibnah, the English steeplejack that brought down 90 disused mill smokestacks in his career. In densely populated areas he would demolish the giant chimneys one brick at time, climbing up in the morning ...

We ran this video back in June not long after we learned of the City's plans to widen the already dangerous Bronson Avenue ever further. What do we mean by dangerous? The video is an unedited minute of rush hour, shot from the perspective of a pedestrian waiting to cross Bronson at Somerset. Except that, other than the masochist shooting the video, there are no pedestrians; foot traffic knows to avoid Bronson if at all possible. We think ...

The struggle to put Bronson Avenue on a road diet instead of rebuilding it with wider car lanes is ramping up, with a community meeting scheduled for this upcoming Wednesday at the McNabb Centre on Percy at 7.00 PM. You can plug in to the fight for pedestrian-friendly Bronson at rescuebronson.ca or follow their twitter feed at @rescuebronson; meanwhile for a succinct overview of what is at stake this post from the Dalhousie Community Association is great place to start. Also, over the weekend the ...