Wellington Oracle

Photo byncbeets

I was walking through Parc Lafontaine one late spring evening when I first decided that, by some magnificent stroke of luck, I had moved to a kind of paradise. All about me people were sprawled on blankets eating picnic dinners and drinking tumblers-full of wine. Somewhere down the path a guy was beating drums. A man carried a child on his shoulders. The evening light caught the water spraying from the fountain in the heart of pond. Walkers paused on a footbridge to take in the scene. Small groups gathered under trees played and sang. A tightrope walker had tied a long rubbery rope between two trees; standing atop it, he gripped it with his toes, spread his arms and swayed. Deeper into the park games of Frisbee, bocce ball, volleyball and soccer were underway. This was the kind of park that I had come to think existed only in storybooks. Yet here it was, not a 10-minute walk from my new apartment, a giant backyard for thousands of people, heavily and variously and happily used. (more…)

Hintonburg’s Amber Yared has been filing stories at spacing.ca about a topic that might have been custom–picked to send shivers down our spines here at the Oracle; she writes about the problems created by civil servants’ virtually unquenchable thirst for surface parking across the river in Hull.

What she found out about the proliferation of illegal backyard parking lots in her latest installment is so demoralizing it might almost be enough to make us swear off criticizing zoning enforcement here in Ottawa.

But not quite.

The street grid of Hintonburg and West Wellington was formed during an era when when railways ran the freight business and trackside warehouses broke down boxcar-loads into manageable sizes for horse-drawn carts, and later small vans, to safely deliver to neighbourhood businesses.

But these days the same 18-wheelers that have replaced so much rail traffic are expected to make the trip from massive distribution centres in southern (more…)