The Spaces In Between

Camera: Pentax Spotmatic, f1.4 50mm Super Takumar lens. City Centre Avenue and Albert Street, Ottawa, ON.

The one thing that has always struck me about mid-20th Century urban planning and traffic planning is the sheer contempt that they held for the inner city. Shown here is the place where Wellington Street once ran across the train tracks. Obviously, it was easier in the 1960s to have a new bridge that connected with a road designed to move cars (Scott Street), rather than one that connected the main street of the western inner city neighbourhoods with downtown, so the bridge that was here was torn down and not replaced. The cars moved faster, but so did the urban decay, once those neighbourhoods were disconnected from the grid, so to speak.

Comments

[Otto K.]

tell me about it. I'm not sure if our downtown will ever recover as a livable space.

[SD (Aspherical)]

Nice shot, it looks like a forgotten place that's so dull no one would want to loiter. That was a popular solution here in the U.S. as well - several streets were cut off in my neighborhood as one way pairs and viaducts were put into place over the years to move cars. Old Sanborn maps are quite a revelation - apparently in 1911 the street network around made sense.

The main purpose of the viaducts was to carry cars over the multiple railroad mainlines converging in downtown Atlanta, but one of the side effects is since the roads are 50 feet in the air the land next to the railroads is now good for nothing but special events parking.

[sherri]

You've described it well. I always think the same thing. This image shows it so well. That gothic, ornate church building especially sticks out.