Peter, that's kind of Every Pond on Every Farm that was outside of the city, then on the edge of the city, then swallowed by the city.

If you ever drive through Ottawa from west to east on the Queensway, and don't turn onto "the split" where 417 heads across the flat hundred mile run to Montreal, but keep going east a half mile towards Orleans on what is now called Highway 174, you will pass the Blair Road turnoff. You have just entered Gloucester, an edge-city suburban / rural township when I grew up there, an incorporated city for the last twenty-five years, and soon to be a part of the new megacity of Ottawa. The cloverleaf intersection can of course be bisected into compass quadrants, with Hwy 174 as the west-east line and Blair Road running north-south over it.

The southwest quadrant contains a couple of tall buildings with huge stylized corporate logos on the roofs: "Investors Group" and some telecom company. The northwest quadrant contains the Gloucester Centre, a huge (seemingly) mall with a futuristic looking bright red transit station on one side. The mall contains a Loblaws store which is bigger itself than any mall I was ever in as a youngster. My friend Bob who grew up next door and has worked for Loblaws since he was 15 managed that store for a few years. I happen to know that where it sits was once the Ogilvie farm, Ogilvie Road being the northern boundary of the mall property. To the north of Ogilvie Road is a large federal government property, with a prominent new feature, the CSIS HQ building (our very own Canadian spy service!) which is supposed to look like a ship. It just looks like a weird building to me but what the hell do I know.

Getting back to our quadrants, the southeast quadrant is a golf course. Beyond it in that direction is Green Creek, where my brother and I and Bob and his brothers used to ride our bikes to and stay all day fishing and hiking.

The quadrant that bothers me the most is the northeast one. It contains three identical, medium sized, glass-sided, utterly non-descript office buildings festooned with various corporate logos. It is always apparent to me that this site, the imaginatively named "Glenview Park of Commerce", was designed with absolutely no thought for how it would look from the highway, on which side there is no landscaping, trees added or anything aesthetic. Tens of thousands of people see it from there every day; its a bleak thing like something from the vision of A Clockwork Orange. Once I took a walk through the Glenview Park of Commerce, on the short curving paved road with a security gatehouse and seemingly cameras anywhere. I just wanted to firebomb the place skyhigh. At that time the city of Gloucester was renting its council chambers and office space there, at a cost of about $1.2 million per year I recall reading. This is a lot more money than that lot generated when it was at the end of a scrubby dirt road which ran alongside Shoppers City, the first shopping centre to be built along Ogilvie Road. I remember when it opened in 1961; I was five years old and it was a big deal. We lived in Cardinal Heights, where my parents still are, just to the north of Ogilvie, now an elderly suburb of 1950's brick bungalows, mostly occupied by older folks. I learned to drive in the Shoppers City back parking lot. Its a second-rate tarted-up cinderblock relic since Gloucester Centre opened. But I digress.

Before the Glenview Park of Commerce appeared like an alien menace where it is now, there was a pond there. We would ride our bikes over there, build rafts, annoy tadpoles and frogs, and generally enjoy ourselves with no adults in sight. That's why my reaction to this development is particularly strong, and it doesn't improve matters that it's butt-ugly and devoid of human or natural character. Murray McLauchlan recorded a song on his very first album that has always been about this place, for me. "Then the tractors came, and the trucks and the heavy graders.
And in a month, they tore that swamp apart.
And left an ugly scar while we stood watching
Some progress-minded planners work of art.

Now paradise is sixteen lanes of highway
And the peace is gone and the cars roll by each day.
And the house in which I grew now affords a lonely view
It overlooks a sixteen-lane highway."

I could walk you through more of the neighbourhood, but it's more of this stuff in every direction, so it seems. Woods, a haunted old farmhouse, and other landmarks that now exist only in memories. Peter, I understand completely what you're up to here. Its important. If you can't save the pond and the land around it, at least remember it well.

Best,
Bill