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St. Patrick Street Irish: The Whelans at 332
By Nancy Miller Chenier A magnificent, repurposed church, St. Brigid’s Centre for the Arts, home of the National Irish Canadian Cultural Centre, and the ruins of Our Lady’s, a former Roman Catholic school, now serve as monuments to the Irish Catholic settlers of Lowertown. Along the south side of St. Patrick Street between Cumberland and…
Farewell to the ByWard Fruit Market, and hello to Hard 2 Find, Hard 2 Get!
By Nadia Stuewer Owners Isaac and Miriam Farbiasz are sad to be closing the ByWard Fruit Market this spring, after 26 years of purveying fresh produce and gourmet foods to residents of the ByWard Market, Lowertown, and beyond. Their customers are sad to see them go too. Isaac and Miriam bought the fruit market…
Lowertown’s pull-tab king
By Dave Bowen The neighbourhood has seen a lot of changes over the past few decades and Jacques Archambault has been there for most of it. Born in 1949, he has lived in the same side-by-side duplex on Bolton Street since May 1951, sharing the space with nine brothers and sisters. His uncle lived in…
What ANCHOR’s expansion into Lowertown means for our community
By the Lowertown Community Association’s Health & Wellness Committee Lowertown will soon be included in the City of Ottawa’s Alternate Neighbourhood Crisis Response (ANCHOR) program, a community-led mental health and substance-use crisis response service that offers an alternative to a police response in certain situations. ANCHOR was launched in 2024 as a response to long-standing…
How writer, editor, instructor, and Lowertown resident Chris Johnson forms poems: “one drip at a time”
By Ben Ladouceur A fact about poets: if you give fifty of them the same topic, they’ll write you fifty very different poems. “Everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” Elizabeth Bishop famously cried about a trout. Confronted with the same genus, Anne Carson once noted, “You can write on a wall with its heart. It’s because…
Thoughts on a climate-resilient Lowertown
By Kate Laing Call it solastalgia or eco-anxiety, the feelings are the same – worry, concern, and grief about the future of our planet. Like many others, I am thinking daily about the climate crisis and how to manage its impacts, both globally and right here in our own community of Lowertown. We have dedicated…

