Smoothing the National Landscape: Red Line Taxi

As an operator of over 50 cabs, plus 40 independent operators, the central location of Red Line Taxi at the Corner of Fleet and Duke Streets near major thoroughfares, was conveniently located drivers within 1.5 miles of Union Station and Chateau Laurier where 60 per cent of business was produced. As part of the ongoing property rationalization, the company received $236,000 as compensation for relocation to a site near the new railway station being completed as part of Gréber’s plan. This accounted for the cost additional mileage that would be incurred by the company. No longer able to operate in the CBD due to zoning rules, the company received compensation for relocation on suburban land on land purchased from the NCC. While there was advantages to being located near the new train station, and near the cross-town expreswat, the extra labour costs of the new location were born by the individual drivers. In fact, just as the move was being completed, as the assessment report notes, additional mileage costs would no longer be born by the company, as it was switching to a model in which the company rented out the cars and sold gas to the drivers, rather than paying them a salary, in essence externalizing the operating costs to the drivers. Just as waged labour was becoming a relic in the taxi industry, so too was the very physical building itself: the hub of its network, the stand-alone radio tower above the garage, was deemed surplus and bidders attempted to purchase the ruins, to fulfill new functions, however, the NCC would not easily relinguish goods, and left them instead to the wreckers ball.

Smoothing the National Landscape: Victoria Foundry

Photo: Victoria Foundry Scrap Yard

Among the remaining industrial production, there were a number of foundries on LeBreton Flats including the Victoria Foundry complex. In business for 118 years, Victoria Foundry had at the time of expropriation 26 employees, 9 of which had been with company for over 10 yrs and another 13 employees with over 5 yrs. The shop works at the Victoria Foundry consisted mainly of custom foundry and machine work, both in the manufacture of new products and maintenance and repair of existing machinery. The location, in one of the “most central locations in the Ottawa, Hull area” proximity to the “source of semi skilled labour who find it difficult to commute to the periphery of the city, resulting in higher labour costs” as well as increased production cost of operation in new building such as capital costs, municipal taxes. Customers included the Federal Government, the City of Ottawa, and various supply companies.

A number of appraisals were done to assess both the value of the property and the associated costs of relocation. These valuations varied significantly, and are an incomplete record of the life-world of the plant, however, these do point to the view of value creation, and recreation among the pattern of disintegration on the Flats. Like the valuations, the condition of manufacturing fixtures and moveable equipment varied considerably. Mechanical equipment such as “the ducting from blowers to forgers, and from blower to cupola, and from blowers to brass furnaces” were not “economically worth removing for re-installation elsewhere”. Other fixtures were clearly out of date such as the “wooden fixtures such as cupboards, shelving, lockers” whose place would “largely be taken by modern steel racks and binning in a new plant”. Fixtures such “shafting, pulleys, belts, etc., that jointly provide the power of the few pieces of machinery” was “ very ancient” yet reasonably maintained.

Forges and ovens, on the other hand, had “a good proportion of their active life remaining in them” and the overall structure “had adequate utility and physical stamina for the next 25 years”. This latter appraisal considered the advantages of the present building and location over a new site which although it would improve aesthetic considerations, the “prestige building were in no way increases volume of trade or volume” especially since the overall design was not only “efficient”. All of this mechanical residue, judged by appraisers as not ‘economically worth removing for re-installation elsewhere’, would be silenced in the smoothing of the LeBreton landscape.

Smoothing the National Landscape I

On 17 April 1962, the federal government publicly announced a massive urban renewal project for the neighbourhood of LeBreton Flats in downtown Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The expropriation of LeBreton Flats, and its working-class residents, emerged from an ambitious state-led initiative to remodel Ottawa into a new, modern, national capital. Initiated in 1945, and carried out in the 1950s and early 1960s, the federal planning initiative would radically alter Ottawa’s urban socio-environment. The proposed reconstruction projects proceeded from class-based assumptions, transatlantic urban reform consensus, that tagged low-income neighbourhoods as undesirable ‘slums,’ making it easier — if not necessary — to run expressways, construct large office blocks through the working-class districts. The state-led project provoked the ‘creative destruction’ of the rich socio-industrial landscape of LeBreton Flats and cleared away the ‘dead weight of past environments.’ The relics of the vast lumber and milling industry did they fit with the image of a modern national capital – and were cleared away for a new dream image – a National Defense Headquarters.

Taking a cue from Walter Benjamin, this series will expose the wreckage of past to help make the translation of the modern maelstrom possible. Empirically, it exposes the last vestiges of the industrial staples trade, and how all users – residents, squatters, scrap-dealers, manufacturers – were relegated to negotiating the terms of their disappearance from the Flats. Yet, despite this extensive attempt to remake the Flats into a national ‘landscape of power’, the state-led recalibration of industrial-ecological landscape remained incomplete. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, this new series of blog entries looks-back at the promise (and failure) to re-make nature at remains a symptom of the phantagasmoric spell of progress and mimics Benjamin’s methodology by focusing on collection of ‘scraps of history’ as a means from which to expose the false promise of the postwar dream.Second, inspired by Benjamin’s atmosphere of One Way Street, photographic and archival evidence is used to uncover fragments of ongoing activity on the Flats. These textual and visual fragments, drawn from expropriation files, offer cues to the distorted spell of progress of the postwar consensus and a counter narrative to the rent-based determination of urban decline.