Doors Open Ottawa

This past weekend was another opportunity for me to be a tourist in my own hometown. Every spring, the City of Ottawa presents Doors Open Ottawa. Over the weekend, more than 100 buildings opened their doors to the public. It’s an opportunity to see parts of the city that are normally inaccessible to residents and tourists alike.

I had originally intended to take in several venues each day, but, just as when I was backpacking… there’s never enough time in the day for everything you want to visit. However, I’m not disappointed with what we saw. It was an interesting mix of old and new, industrial and ultra-modern.

On Saturday, our first stop was the Lemieux Island Water Purification Plant, located just off the Ottawa River Parkway. Sounds like a pretty boring stop, but it couldn’t have been more interesting. The plant was built in the 1930s with a marble and brass interior- not your typical municipal building. Esthetically, it’s quite unexpectedly beautiful.

The main foyer inside. The water treatment happens on the other side of the windows.

Our tour guide was amazing. He was soft-spoken, but clearly someone who had a Science degree and years of experience. Our tour lasted so long that the one behind us caught up. It was actually incredibly interesting. I had flashbacks to that Magic School Bus episode where they go through the water purification system. He explained everything from the Ottawa River watershed, to how the plant uses gravity instead of pumps, to floc. Ottawa actually has some of the best drinking water in North America (which I knew before the tour propaganda), so it was interesting to see the process in person. They even had a station where you could taste test three different waters and guess which was tap, spring, and distilled. I thought the spring was tap, but the actual tap water is what I thought tasted best. I’ve always been a big supporter or drinking tap water, so it wasn’t too surprising.

 Inside the treatment area.

After taking some shots outside of the Ottawa River, we headed to the Delegation of the Ismaili Imamat at 199 Sussex Drive. It was designed by Fumihiko Maki and opened only a couple of years ago. If you’re unfamiliar with the building and group, it’s probably easier for you to read the short Wikipedia article. It’s a really stunning building. We went mostly out of interest in the architecture.

Exterior shot of Delegation of the Ismaili Imamat.

Sunday got off to a late start, but we still managed to see a couple of buildings. First, we headed to the Fleet Street Pumping Station. This had been mentioned the day before at our Lemieux Island tour, and Gerry wanted to see it. It was nowhere near as interesting as the Lemieux Island plant, but I got what I wanted… some good shooting! It was a bit tricky to find, requiring a right turn off one-way Albert Street.

Fleet Street Pumping Station

Our last Doors Open stop was the National Gallery of Canada downtown. As we arrived fairly late in the day and had to park at the (expensive) indoor Gallery parking, we decided to just do some shooting and come back another day to tour the exhibits. The exhibit we wanted to see (Pop Life) doesn’t open until later this week anyways, so we were only there briefly. This is another stunning building in Ottawa though. It’s one of the better known symbols of the capital

Ceiling in the entrance to the National Gallery of Canada.

All in all, we saw some pretty interesting things. I’ll definitely be checking out this event in future years. I know the City of Toronto hosted a similar event last weekend. There are more photos from the event on my Flickr.