Bars, Bars, Ottawa Bars

Here are a few places off that beaten path that are worth dropping into. A charming secret in Little Italy is Pubwells (96 Preston St., 236-1175), a quiet working-class bar that features a fine selection of beer and spirits as well as some of the best pizza around, and a good weekend breakfast special. It’s my local, so I might be biased, but I doubt it. Another little spot is the Mad Cow Pub (1070 Bank St., 730-1020) in Old Ottawa South that has musicians performing various country and folk tunes on guitar (and their open-mike Wednesdays offer the usual combination of dreadful and extremely compelling). Still looking for the drink that once drove European artists mad? Well, your search stops here at the Absinthe Cafe Resto Bar (1208 Wellington St., 761-1138). The drink of choice for Oscar Wilde, Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent Van Gogh, Edgar Allen Poe, and Charles Baudelaire, absinthe was banned in France in 1915, but was never outlawed in Canada.

In the heart of the market, the Empire Grill (47 Clarence St., 241-1343) is a good place to spend an afternoon on the patio with martinis, or enjoy some of the finest dining in the city. Don’t let the name fool you; buttless chaps and thigh-high boots are not required when drinking at Kinki (41 York St., 789-7559). If you can put up with the slightly self-conscious hipness, come check out the impressive Asian-fusion cuisine, including two-for-one sushi during happy hours (3-5 p.m., weekdays), and DJs as well as various live musicians from Wednesday to Saturday nights. If mixing dining and politics is more your bag, check out Parliament Pub (101 Sparks St., 563-0636), directly across from the Hill.

If you want to enjoy a martini while listening to a live DJ, the best and coolest place for both is at the Mercury Lounge, (56 Byward Market, upstairs, 789-5324). Or check out the Foundation (18B York St., 562-9331), in one of the few remaining (as they claim) “historically rich, heritage buildings.”
Otherwise, there’s Helsinki Lounge (15 George St., 241-2868), or the Aloha Room beneath Barrymore’s (323 Bank St., 233-0307), where you can get pints and hear the DJ spin tunes from your older brother’s record collection. You might even see some musicians hanging out from shows upstairs, or maybe Gord Downie from the Tragically Hip, just passing through town. Still, I prefer the lounge’s original name: Pete’s Nervous Onion.

If you’re in Corso Italia (Little Italy), check out the centre of all activity: Pub Italia (434&1/2 Preston St., 232-2326, ). “The world’s only Italian pub” (so they tell us), it features 165 distinctive beers from around the world (each with its own glass) with 34 taps, as well as food and ground coffee. Sit in the main section, which is their showcase Belgian pub, The Abbey, or on the outdoor patio.

For yummy blinis, good vodka, weird pickle plates, and intriguing ambience, go to Avant-Garde Bar & Gift Shop (135&1/2 Besserer St., 321-8908). Chosen in 2006 as the unofficial International Animation Film Festival drinking hole and meeting place, here you can get a variety of drinks and a bowl of munchables as you take in their heady decor, a mix of Russian constructivism and artwork inspired by Kandinski. They even play European music videos on the overhead television.

Located downstairs at 370 Elgin Street (231-2070), The Manx Pub is one of those friendly neighbourhood pubs you’d love to have close to where you live. Cornering the market on cool, the Manx Pub often sees the likes of musicians Kathleen Edwards, Jim Bryson, or Danny Michel on any given night, or writers Ken Babstock, John Metcalf, or Michael Winter. Even the staff is made up of writers and artists, including visual artist Andrew Farrell and poet David O’Meara, who hosts a reading series here on irregular Saturday afternoons. With a fine menu for lunch, weekend brunch, dinner, and appetizers, the Manx also offers a range of beers and scotch, as well as regular art shows and musical entertainment on Monday nights. But get there early, as this small venue fills up pretty quickly.

The Stony Monday Riots

Despite whatever mild-mannered reputation Ottawa may have, the city’s history is rife with roughneck tales of debauchery, riots, and malfeasance going back decades. Here are a few examples of tales seldom told that could easily change your mind about this city and its residents.

In the early 19th century, the construction of the Rideau Canal brought large numbers of recently arrived Irish Catholic labourers into the area. After the canal was completed, and with increased unemployment in the region, the Irish Catholics became restless and revived old animosities with the French, English, and Protestant Irish. A group of disgruntled Irish known as the Shiners began to wage campaigns against French raftsmen and the Protestant fraternal order the Orangemen, escalating from street fights and bar brawls to a series of assaults and murders in 1837 (this period of Ottawa Valley history, 1837-1845, became known as the “Shiners’ Wars”). The end of the Shiner terror came when their leader, Peter Aylen, left Ottawa for Aylmer after a series of particularly brutal attacks, but tensions among the various groups remained.

Most of the affluent Englishmen who lived in Uppertown (now Centretown) were Tories, while the French and Irish were Reformers. The Tories spent much of the 1840s incensed at the Reformist-minded politics of Lord Elgin, then Governor General of Canada. After riots started in Montreal, where Tories burnt down the Parliament Building located there, Elgin was prompted to look for another capital for Canada. When His Lordship announced plans to visit Bytown in September of 1849, the people of Lowertown began preparing a royal welcome. Uppertowners, meanwhile, argued that Elgin should be ignored, and a meeting was called in the Byward Market to discuss the situation. The gathering on September 17 erupted into another riot. Stones were thrown, mayhem broke out, and one person was shot on what became known as “Stony Monday.” The British militia was called in to block the Lowertowners from advancing into Uppertown the following day, and the riot was dispersed.

Assasination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee

One of Canada’s early political assassinations occurred in Ottawa on Sparks Street. On April 7, 1868, poet, Member of Parliament, and Father of Confederation Thomas D’Arcy McGee walked home after a particularly late session and was shot dead in the doorway of the rooming house where he was staying. A reward of $2,000 was offered to anyone who could bring the assassin to justice. Soon after, Patrick James Whelan, a tailor and Fenian sympathizer (Irish nationalists who brought their fight against England to the colonies) was convicted of the murder, though, years later, it was suggested that Whelan was chosen as a scapegoat. Held for months in the county jail (now the site of the Youth Hostel on Nicholas Street), Whelan was executed on the gallows outside the courthouse before a huge crowd on February 11, 1869. This was the last public execution in Canada. The Smith & Wesson Tip-up revolver that Whelan allegedly used in the crime was sold at auction to the Museum of Civilization in 2005 for over $100,000 (it had been held in a family collection for years, perhaps even going as far back as the event). As of 2000, the bullet was in the possession of the Ontario Archives, but when the 2005 sale of the gun brought attention to the story, the organization informed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that it had gone missing sometime within the last five years. A plaque has since been erected in front of the Royal Bank Building at 142 Sparks Street, identifying the location where McGee was assassinated. Just down the block, at the corner of Sparks and O’Connor Streets, printer George Desbarats (forebear of journalist Peter Desbarats and his daughter, poet Michelle Desbarats), who owned the rooming house where his friend McGee was staying, had originally put up the first memorial plaque soon after his McGee’s death. After it was erected, Desbarats had received an anonymous warning that his printing establishment would be destroyed; and sure enough, it was lost to a fire in 1869, barely a year after McGee’s assassination.

1985 Turkish Embassy Attack

On March 12, 1985, a squad of terrorists armed with assault rifles and hand grenades stormed the Turkish embassy. It all started early that morning, when a rented U-Haul van backed up to the wall of the embassy and three heavily armed members of the Armenian Revolutionary Army leaped out, scaled the wall, shot and killed a guard, and worked their way into the building’s inner sanctum. They demanded the return of their land and the acknowledgment of the genocide that was carried out on the Armenians by the Turks in 1915. During the siege, the Turkish ambassador, Coskun Kirca, was forced to throw himself out of a second-storey window. Arriving on the scene, Ottawa police constable Michel Prud’Homme kept the ambassador, who was severely injured by the fall, hidden from the terrorists for hours, earning Prud’Homme the Medal of Bravery. Once captured, the three gunmen were sentenced to 25 years in prison without parole. Before the attack of 1985, many foreign diplomats had complained about the lax security for embassies in Canada. The 1985 incident caused Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s government to act quickly, leading to the creation of Canada’s top-secret commando unit, Joint Task Force Two.

Diplomatic Non-Immunity

In 2001, Russian diplomat Andrei Knyazev, working as first secretary at the embassy, was driving home from an ice-fishing party, where he had allegedly consumed considerable amounts of alcohol, when his car skidded onto the sidewalk after missing a turn in the quiet residential neighbourhood of New Edinburgh. He struck and killed 50-year-old Catherine MacLean, a prominent labour lawyer, and seriously injured Catherine Dore, whose dog was also killed. Knyazev refused a breathalyzer test, and invoked his diplomatic immunity, enraging Canadians across the country. The Russian ambassador immediately ordered Knyazev back to Moscow. A year later, he was sentenced by the Russians to four years in a “village colony,” where he would sleep in medium-security barracks, report to guards twice a day, and spend his time labouring either in farming or forestry. Originally, the embassy had denied that anyone there had reported any sort of accident, and when questioned, Knyazev denied even having a drink that day. Both Deputy Prime Minister John Manley and Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham were adamant that zero tolerance of drunk driving be upheld, however, and apparently the Russian government agreed—they introduced their own zero tolerance policy for their diplomats abroad.

Stopwatch Gang

The Stopwatch Gang, led by Ottawa’s own Paddy Mitchell (who grew up in Little Italy), Stephen Reid (of Massey, Ontario), and Lionel Wright, are perhaps Canada’s most infamous bank robbers. The trio, whose orchestrated meticulous heists never took longer than 90 seconds, robbed more than 100 banks and armoured cars during the 1970s and 80s in the United States and Canada. Their most notorious job was a 1974 gold heist (worth $750,000) at the Ottawa airport, earning themselves a place on the FBI’s most-wanted list. The gang’s exploits were detailed in several movies, including Point Break (1991) and The Heist (2001), as well as in the book The Stopwatch Gang (1992) by Toronto Sun reporter Greg Weston, and in Mitchell’s own memoir, This Bank Robber’s Life, which he wrote in prison and sold over the Internet. While still in jail, Reid wrote his own book, a semi-autobiographical novel titled Jackrabbit Parole. Through this book he met his editor, West Coast poet and writer Susan Musgrave, and in 1986 they married while he was still imprisoned. Upon his release a year later, he and Musgrave attempted to live a quiet life on Vancouver Island, and had a child as well. He appeared as a rifle-toting security guard in a 15-second cameo (as well as acting as the film’s bank heist consultant) in the independent movie Four Days (1999). Unfortunately, in the spring of 1999 in Victoria, BC, his heroin addiction resulted in a return to crime and a botched robbery and shootout; currently, Reid remains in prison. The leader of the gang, Patrick “Paddy” Mitchell, called “North America’s most famous, most successful and, especially, most likeable bank robber of our time” by his son, grew up on Preston Street in Ottawa, and died of cancer on in 2007 in a US prison while serving a 65-year sentence. Wright served his sentence, and according to a 2005 report from the CBC, worked as an accountant for Corrections Canada. The gold from the airport robbery in 1974 was never recovered.

Ottawa—City of Gold Diggers?

Ottawa, as the site of the Bank of Canada, played a central role in Operation Fish, an undertaking initiated in 1940 to provide safekeeping for the assets of Britain, Norway, France, and Belgium in Canada for the duration of World War II. Six ships carried combined gold and securities from the four allied countries via Britain; secretly unloaded in Halifax, the reserves were transported to Montreal by train, then to Ottawa, where the 60 million ounces of gold were loaded onto trucks at night and ferried to the basement of the Bank of Canada on Wellington Street under the watchful eye of armed guards disguised in simple overalls. The crates were unloaded and stacked by two 30-member teams who, although they worked 24 hours a day, were unable to keep up with the number of crates delivered. The backlog of 1,500 unopened crates of gold that lined the halls of the basement soon required a contingent of RCMP officers to guard it round the clock. But it’s hard to keep any secret for long. One can only presume that once the war ended, the gold was just as secretly slipped back out of the country and returned to its owners.

Flying Ace Billy Barker - Killed by Ottawa?

On March 12, 1930, lieutenant-Colonel William George “Billy” Barker was killed in a crash at Rockcliffe airport in Ottawa while demonstrating a new training plane. Since Barker was a highly skilled pilot and there was no indication of mechanical malfunction, it has been theorized that Barker deliberately crashed the plane, thus committing suicide. During World War I, he had brought down 53 German planes and was praised as a hero, but once home after the war, his years were filled with constant pain and depression. One of his early planes was the Sopwith two-seater Dove, which was later reconstructed and transferred to Canada for permanent display at the Canadian War Museum.

Heather Crowe Butts Out

Name doesn’t ring a bell? You might have seen her in all those Canadian anti-smoking public service announcements a few years ago, whether on television or in movie theatres. Crowe, who was a waitress for 40 years, was dying of lung cancer, despite having never smoked a day in her life. She contracted the disease through second-hand smoke she inhaled at work. After her diagnosis, she spent her last four years leading a nation-wide battle against second-hand smoke and influenced policy through her anti-smoking activism across Canada. Sadly, she died in 2006 at age 61. Her last 14 years were spent working at Moe’s infamous Newport Restaurant in Westboro; a year after she died, Health Promotion Minister Jim Watson presented owner Moe Atallah with the Heather Crowe Award for making his workplace smoke-free and voluntarily stopping the sale of cigarettes in the Newport convenience store. Crowe is the subject of a short documentary film, Heather Crowe’s Legacy: An Ordinary Canadian’s Extraordinary Gift, which is available free to schools, community and church groups, book clubs, and to those in the workplace by calling Cynthia Callard at Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada at 233-4878.

Oscar Wilde in Ottawa

In May 1882, the infamous playwright Oscar Wilde made a two-day stopover in Ottawa during a lecture tour of North America, with his performance making the front page of the Ottawa Citizen. During his stay, he visited a sitting of Parliament, and met Frances Richards, a young Ottawa portrait painter. The following year Richards visited Wilde in Paris and eventually moved to London in 1887. In late December that same year, she painted his portrait which, according to Christopher Millard, a contemporary London art critic, was the inspiration for Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Richards, who later became Mrs W. E. Rowley, Esq., had ties to another Canadian expatriate living in London, Mrs Augusta Ross, daughter of Robert Baldwin, the premier of the Province of Canada (1848-51). And, according to many of Wilde’s biographers, it was Ross’s third son, Robbie, who, through a meeting with Wilde, helped the famous writer recognize his homosexuality (he had previously shown little interest in the male sex and was even known as quite the ladies’ man). “Faithful Robbie” became not only Wilde’s first recorded male lover, but was with Wilde when he died, in Paris in 1900, disgraced and abandoned by
the public.

Ottawa Quality of Living

In a 2007 survey, MoneySense magazine ranked Ottawa-Gatineau first out of 122 communities in Canada as economically the best place to live. At the same time, Ottawa was ranked 18th in the world among cities with the best quality of life by a global survey published by Mercer Human Resource Consulting, placing it third in Canada, after Vancouver and Toronto.

City on the Grow

According to the 2006 Census, Ottawa is the fastest-growing G8 city with a population of 1,130,761 in the Ottawa-Gatineau area, putting us fourth behind Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver (with Calgary and Edmonton very close behind). In 2001, city officials predicted a growth rate of 11.5 percent, but by 2006, had seen only a five percent growth in that time.

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