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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…
By Josiah Frith The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB) is proposing significant changes to school boundaries, including expanding French immersion programs to all schools. On the surface, this appears to be a positive step toward educational accessibility. However, the decision to implement these changes without a grandfathering period – forcing some students to switch schools…
Cultural happenings for you to enjoy / Des événements culturels pour votre plaisir By Robin Etherington GALLERIES – GALERIES City Hall Art Gallery Galerie Jean-Claude Bergeron Galerie St-Laurent + Hill Let’s skate and glide through our winter cultural activities into spring! Karsh-Masson Gallery L.A. Pai Gallery National Gallery of Canada Ottawa Art Gallery MUSEUMS –…
By Ben Ladouceur Download a pdf of the crossword: https://lowertownecho.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/This-or-That.pdf Download a pdf of the crossword solution: https://lowertownecho.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/This-or-That-Solution.pdf
By Curtis Wolfe Tormey Street, bordering Macdonald Gardens Park in Lowertown East, commemorates William Tormey, a blacksmith and civic leader whose work during the Rideau Canal’s construction, and contributions to the development of early Bytown, had a long-lasting impact on the city. Born in 1795 in County Tyrone in what is now Northern Ireland, William…
By Nancy Miller-Chenier Max Finkelstein and James Stone, Paddling the Boreal Forest: Rediscovering A.P Low, Dundurn Press, 2004. This book has two Lowertown connections – Jim Stone, a co-author and current resident of Lowertown and Albert Peter (A.P.) Low, former employee of the Geological Survey of Canada located from 1881 to 1911 at 541 Sussex…
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…
By Robin Etherington Robin sat down with two key members of the Ottawa Little Theatre (OLT), Venetia Lawless and Lindsay Laviolette, for a wide-ranging conversation about the challenges and successes of running a community theatre. Q: What is the greatest challenge for the Ottawa Little Theatre? People don’t come to live theatre as much. OLT…
By Malcolm and John Harding of Compu-Home A lot of people are heading out to buy a new computer just now and it is time to update our suggestions about what to look for, and what to avoid. We have tried to condense the information into what we hope will be the most useful. Do…
By Michel Rossignol Thousands of vehicles travel on King Edward Avenue every day, but I remember a few occasions when there was little or no traffic on that street. On Wednesday, October 16, 1957, I was in my third-grade class at Guigues School on Murray Street between Dalhousie and Cumberland. Around 9:30, the teacher told…