Pool Halls and Bowling Alleys in Ottawa

There aren’t a whole lot of options for pool in Ottawa, but there are enough. One of the classier places is MacLaren’s on Elgin (301 Elgin St., 236-2766); with a hardwood décor and upscale menu, it also boasts 21 custom-made pool tables. If you prefer a pool hall with a bit more grit, like somewhere your father or grandfather might have played, check out Cue ’N’ Cushion Billiards & Bar (319 Bank St., 237-2404). If you’re looking for something with a solid working-class environment (and cheaper beer), the Orange Monkey in the City Centre building (250 City Centre Ave., 230- 2850) is the way to go. Other good options: D Joint Pinball Billiards (411 McArthur Ave., 741-9177) or the west end Greenbank Broken Cue (250-A Greenbank Rd., 820-4889). If bowling is more your style, there are five-pin options at Walkley Bowl (2092 Walkley Rd., 521-0132), Orleans Bowling Center (885 Taylor Creek Dr., 837-7000), and West Park Bowling Lanes (1205 Wellington St. W., 728- 0933). For 10-pin, you have to go to the McArthur Lanes (175 McArthur Rd., 745-2117).

Sparks Street

The site of the first asphalt laid in the capital in 1895, Sparks Street was named for Nicholas Sparks – not the well-known contemporary author who shares the same name, but an illiterate Irish labourer who became Bytown’s first tycoon and one of the founding fathers of Ottawa, serving on the first town council in 1847 as well as on the first council of the City of Ottawa. In 1826, he purchased – for £95 – 200 acres of farmland in the heart of the present capital in the area now bounded by Wellington, Rideau, Waller, Laurier, and Bronson streets. He married the widowed daughter of Ottawa lumber baron J. B. Booth and helped raise her nine children, and the land he received as dowry he later sold for the construction of the Rideau Canal (specifically, to then- Governor General, the Earl of Dalhousie). Sparks Street was opened as a pedestrian mall in 1960, originally on a trial basis. Every few years the city decides to revitalize Sparks Street, without always improving it (in much the way the city tries to do the same with Rideau Street). The city’s only pedestrian mall, the city planners spent years changing their minds on whether or not cars should be allowed on the street at all, but they’ve finally left it alone, and the current mall remains a model for other urban communities in North America (including Washington, DC, and Philadelphia).

Sparks Street Bones

On the morning of March 11, 1977, a Fuller Construction backhoe and crew discovered a damaged skull and the partial remains of two bodies while working an excavation site on Queen Street at Metcalf, right behind the Bank of Commerce building at 62 Sparks Street (now home of Ian Kimmerly Stamps). The police turned the bones over to the coroner, Dr Tom Kendall, who determined that the remains were over a century old, and that the couple in question had died of natural causes. The area had been the site of a graveyard in the 1880s, and officials speculated that the bones had perhaps been disturbed and shifted a number of times during previous excavations. The remains were then collected and reburied.