Inside the main concourse of Ottawa Union Station. The train station was conveniently located across the street from the Chateau Lauier Hotel - circa 1950 National Capital Commission.

31 May 2012

Putting Things Back on Track for Ottawa's Train Station

Ottawa Ontario - It was built when railways were Canada's economic engine. Everyone from King George VI to Elvis Presley has passed through its portals. It survived a near-death experience in the 1960s and was improbably reborn as the scene of some of Canada's most momentous political events. It even has a ghost.
 
The building at 2 Rideau Street began life 100 years ago this weekend as Ottawa's imposing new train station, known initially as Grand Trunk Central Station, and from 1920 to 1966, as Union Station. For the past 43 years, it has had a second life as the Government Conference Centre. But in one guise or another, it has helped define Ottawa for generations of visitors and residents.
 
For some, including a young University of Manitoba graduate who travelled here by train to take up his first architecture job in 1961, the train station was their port of entry to the capital.
 
"It was a very emotional experience that I've never forgotten," says Barry Padolsky, today one of the city's most celebrated architects. "I always felt I owed something to the station because it was the gateway through which I came to Ottawa."
 
Padolsky has now repaid that debt. His firm recently completed a heritage conservation plan, commissioned by the federal government, that provides a blueprint for restoring and preserving the century-old structure.
 
After years of neglect, that will be expensive. A 2006 assessment found the building was in overall poor condition, with many of its systems exceeding their life expectancy. Padolsky will only say it requires "a significant amount of investment for upgrades in life safety and conservation."
 
With money tight and plenty of competing priorities, the building "could suffer the 10,000 cuts of negligence," Padolsky admits. If so, that will only increase the eventual cost of restoration, he says.
 
The National Capital Commission planned to tear the old station down in the mid-1960s, when rail lines were removed from downtown Ottawa. Today, that's unthinkable. Since 1989, the Conference Centre has been a classified federal heritage building, the highest designation, and is an integral part of the Confederation Square National Historical Site. Barring fire or flood, it will remain an iconic part of the capital's street scape far into the future.
 
When construction began on Ottawa's new central railway station in 1909, most residents were delighted. Mayors of Ottawa had been promising a union station since the 1870s, but somehow it never happened. "People were just so frustrated," says David Jeanes, a railway buff who arguably knows the station better than anyone.
 
The catalyst was Charles Melville Hays, general manager and later president of the Grand Trunk Railway, who had acquired rail access to the city core in 1904 by purchasing the Canada Atlantic Railway from Ottawa lumber baron J.R. Booth. In Hays' mind, Ottawa's station and the Chateau Laurier Hotel across the street were just the first in a nationwide network of monumental rail stations and luxury hotels.
 
Along with the Chateau, the station opened on 1 Jun 1912 without ceremony, in deference to Hays, who had died on the Titanic six weeks earlier. It cost more than $1.9 million, and Ottawans had never seen anything like it. It was the city's first large steel-framed building, and first monument to Beaux-Arts architecture, a neoclassical style that evoked Imperial Rome.
 
The monumental waiting room, with its 75-foot-high vaulted ceiling, was a half-scale replica of the now-demolished Pennsylvania Station in New York City. Both were based on the Roman Baths of Caracalla and Diocletian, but the Ottawa station's building methods and materials were modern.
 
"Everything is actually a fake," says Jeanes. The plaster columns in the waiting room are hollow, the ceiling is suspended plaster hanging from steel trusses. Even the walls, apparently of Roman travertine, are actually a clever imitation material devised by French plaster workers.
 
The station's elegance was in stark contrast to the low concrete train shed, since demolished, that sheltered the tracks. "It was really ugly," Jeanes says. "It ran all the way down to where the Mackenzie King bridge is now, 600 feet long. There was not very good lighting inside, so it became kind of a gloomy place."
 
Though the station was supposed to serve all railways, the Grand Trunk's great rival, the Canadian Pacific, initially made little use of it. The layout required CP passengers to cross tracks to reach the station, prompting the company to complain in 1911 that it couldn't imagine "anything more inconvenient and dangerous."
 
But few shared CP's grumpy view. The new station soon assumed a central position in the city. At its peak in the 1950s, Jeanes says there were 64 arrivals and departures daily, including two transcontinental trains in each direction. A steam train came in every day from Barry's Bay and Eganville, providing service to Ottawa Valley residents with business in Ottawa.
 
The station was where people would gravitate whenever the famous came to town. The Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, arrived there in 1927. After his abdication, his brother and successor, King George VI, journeyed to Ottawa by train during a wildly received 1939 royal tour. Its concourse welcomed Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Exultant Ottawans greeted Barbara Ann Scott after the Ottawa figure skater captured gold at the 1948 Lake Placid Olympics.
 
Then there was Elvis. When he arrived at Union Station in 1957 for a show in Ottawa, his handlers directed him to a baggage annex. "They were trying to get him out a side door so no one would see him," says Jeanes, "but he still got mobbed by screaming teenaged girls."
 
The station was the scene of more sombre events, as well. The funeral train bearing the body of Mackenzie King departed from there in 1950.
 
Despite the building's importance, there was no shortage of people eager to tear it down. As early as 1937, French architect Jacques Greber proposed its demolition. Its fate was apparently sealed when the federal cabinet endorsed Greber's 1950 plan calling for the removal of downtown railway tracks and their replacement by a scenic drive along the canal.
 

Looking towards Union Station, the Chateau Laurier, and Parliament - Date unknown Bruce Chapman.
 
 
There were compelling reasons to relocate the station to Alta Vista. It would remove dangerous level crossings that plagued the capital, eliminate the need for an expensive interchange over the Queensway then under construction, and banish the polluting black smoke spewed by locomotives (gone by the mid-'60s, Jeanes points out, as CN and CP had switched to diesel engines).
 
In 1962, the NCC hired John B. Parkin Associates, the architects of the new train station, to prepare a sweeping redevelopment plan for Confederation Square and the surrounding area. Among other things, the Parkin Plan proposed to raze Union Station and replace it with a modernistic flat-roofed convention centre.
 
By July 1966, most of the rail lines had been ripped up, the station was closed and the NCC was poised to begin demolition. A few lonely heritage advocates railed against the plan, but many agreed with the Citizen editorialist who wrote:  "The station should be razed at the earliest possible moment, and the site turned to a useful purpose."
 
Officially, that was the NCC's position, too. One commission member called it a "dirty old building." But Padolsky says there were strong advocates for conservation within the agency, as well.
 
In the end, Canada's 100th birthday bought the building a reprieve. The NCC "didn't want to have a vacant wasteland in downtown Ottawa for centennial year," says Jeanes. Moreover, there were few public washrooms in the city core, and the station's facilities could serve the anticipated hordes of visitors. So for a year, the building became the Centennial Centre and demolition was put on hold.
 
The plan was still to tear it down in 1968. But by then, Treasury Board had identified a serious shortage of government meeting space in downtown Ottawa. A "temporary" solution, the bureaucrats suggested, would be to establish some meeting space in the former train station. The NCC agreed that the station could be used as a conference facility for five years.
 
"That's what saved it," Jeanes says.
 
In 1969, the country's first ministers gathered for the first time at the former train station for constitutional talks. There would be many such meetings over the next two decades, including the seminal 1981 conference at which all provinces except Quebec endorsed a constitutional amending formula and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, clearing the way for patriation of Canada's constitution from Great Britain.
 
Though the "Night of the Long Knives" agreement was reached at the Chateau Laurier while Quebec's Rene Levesque slept in a Gatineau hotel, one of the most famous episodes occurred in a Conference Centre kitchen.
 
That's where Jean Chretien, then Canada's justice minister, and the attorneys general of Ontario and Saskatchewan, Roy McMurtry and Roy Romanow, sketched out a last-minute compromise, the so-called "Kitchen Accord", that led to the patriation agreement. The elements of the deal were supposedly jotted on a napkin, but an original copy in Library and Archives Canada shows Romanow's handwriting on lined notepad paper.
 
In 1987, Brian Mulroney and the Premiers negotiated the Meech Lake Accord, designed to bring Quebec into the constitutional fold, at the Conference Centre. In 1990, they were back for last-gasp talks to save the accord, which had to be ratified by all 10 provinces by 23 Jun 1987.
 
Mulroney and the premiers spent seven days closeted in a windowless room on the Conference Centre's fifth floor, puffing on cigars, as they looked for a way to save the accord. They ratified an agreement on 10 Jun 1990, but the accord died anyway when Manitoba and Newfoundland declined to ratify it.
 
Along with the constitutional soap opera, the Conference Centre has also been host to major events, including the 1973 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, the G20 meeting in 2001, and the Open Skies Conference in 1990, which launched the process that led to the reunification of Germany.
 
In gratitude, Germany gave Canada a 3.5-tonne chunk of the demolished Berlin Wall. It was on display in the Conference Centre lobby for 20 years before being relocated to the Canadian War Museum in 2011.
 
After the failure of Meech, the first ministers avoided the Conference Centre, perhaps spooked by its painful associations. By the late 1990s, the federal government was openly entertaining other uses for the building.
 
It was ready to lease it for $1 a year for use as Canada's Sports Hall of Fame, but the plan collapsed in 2002 because the promoters couldn't afford the $13-million cost of urgently needed repairs.
 
The following year, Chretien proposed to turn the building into a museum of Canadian political history. That idea fell through when his successor, Paul Martin, ordered a review of federal projects in the capital. The National Arts Centre eyeballed the building as a performance hall and the Ottawa Public Library considered it as its new main branch. Those ideas, among others, came to naught.
 
In 2005, the government reaffirmed the building as a Conference Centre. According to Public Works, that's still the plan. Today, its 29 meeting rooms are heavily used. "I've been told that they hold about 1,200 meetings in that building every year," Jeanes says.
 
Padolsky regrets that it remains off limits to the public, though. "It's such a great piece of architecture."
 
For his part, Jeanes thinks the building is unlikely to remain in its present use indefinitely. "It's within 500 metres of just about everything, from the Parliament Buildings, to City Hall, to the ByWard Market, to Arts Court," he says. "It really needs to be a pedestrian connectivity hub."
 
While ad hoc repairs have been made over the years, the heritage conservation plan developed by Padolsky is the first comprehensive guide to the building's restoration.
 
If approved this summer, the plan will set the guiding principles for a five-year program of renovations and upgrades. Assuming money can be found to do the work, the old building could emerge renewed and refreshed.
 
Oh, about that ghost. It's thought to be the spirit of a CN official named Leduc, whose office was on the third floor of the station's south wing. It's said he sometimes appears late at night. "Just keeping an eye on things, I think," says Jeanes.
 
Given the building's unsettled history, Monsieur Leduc can't rest easy just yet.
 
Don Butler.