This derelict railroad bridge spans the Ottawa River just past the end of the O-train line at Bayview.
It seems like it wouldn’t take much to extend light rail across the river to Gatineau, which would do plenty to solve the problem of Gatineau buses clogging up Rideau Street, but it’s not going to happen.
For one thing, Gatineau is on record as rejecting the idea of commuter trains. They like their buses, and they like doing things their way. And for another, even though the city of Ottawa recently bought the bridge, they don’t show any sign of being able to do anything as sensible as running the O-Train over it.
David Gladstone of Friends of the O-Train often writes about this in the Centretown Buzz, so I won’t go on about it.
I’ve walked across this bridge in the past, but now they’ve got it all blocked off. I guess they’re afraid of being sued if somebody falls off it into the river.
I did find it a bit creepy being out in the middle. It reminded me of the movie Stand By Me, in which kids cross a railroad bridge and a train comes. They have to run like crazy and one of them trips and falls.
I knew there were no trains on this bridge. Maybe I was afraid of meeting the kids from Stand By Me and having them toss me into the river in a random act of teenage cruelty. It seemed very remote and lawless out there.
This day I went exploring under the bridge, on the south side of the bike path. Homeless people are evidently living there.
If homeless people sleep somewhere, is that their home? I think maybe home is where you toss your bedroll.
I’m pretty conflicted about homeless people. I don’t like the begging. I wish there was some other way to get by without working, in such a rich land.
I used to kind of like it if a stranger would approach me on the street. Usually they’d be looking for directions. Maybe they’d be from Australia or someplace, and it would be fun to meet them. Now if someone approaches me I know they want money, and I’m pretty sure they want it to buy crack with.
But I’m not here to spout off about that either. That place under the bridge was a rich trove of graffiti that I hadn’t seen before.
Insert soul here
222
Monster
X
Cory loves Angel
There wasn’t anyone there, but I felt like I was trespassing, so I didn’t stay long. I liked it under the bridge because I felt like I’d stumbled into the place where Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer live, or maybe Peter Pan and the lost boys.
There’s a lot of appeal in the idea of slipping out of society, lighting out for the territories, riding the rods, living free. It’s the drugs that screw it up. But that place under the bridge just felt like somebody’s home.
A year ago:
Road trip to Maynooth, Part 1
7 Comments
We should sneak over there after dark sometime, and get 222. I want it for my living room.
Think you’re right. Homeless is where you make yr home, owned, rented or used.
Nice photos of some nice artwork, there.
It may interest you to know that many panhandlers in Ottawa do, in fact, have homes.
Many are on ODSP (Ontario Disability Support Programme), whose payments barely cover their rent. Unemployable, they beg.
They tried selling newspapers as a way of earning money that was not panhandling, but the City of Ottawa enacted a by-law that made it illegal for them to do so.
So they beg.
Those who can’t afford a home stay at homeless shelters. The City of Ottawa, on top of annual grants, pays homeless shelters a per-diem fee for each night for each person filling a bed–so much so, that it would literally be cheaper to put them up in motels.
As for panhandling, if you are ever thinking about whether you think it’s “right” or “wrong”, just remember: everyone has the right to ask for help.
Cheers,
- RG>
Zoom, I’m in.
Hi Pearl! Thanks for coming.
RG, I don’t think panhandling is right or wrong, I just think it’s annoying.
Most citizen of Gatineau would like to revive the bridge …. Politics prevents it.
I used to regularly cross the bridge on foot in the mid-2000′s when a pedestrian barrier had disintegrated and was then removed. In about 2008 or 2009 I was stopped by police under the parkway bridge and told the bridge was blocked and the approach was dangerous (for whom, intelligent people or rather those that would silence them perhaps) and all I needed to do to prove it was look at the graffiti on the wall of the ‘parkway’ overpass (parkway being a euphemism for expressway I think you know where this comment is going). I responded that if their employer (the city) ensured sufficient pedestrian traffic in open areas there would not be a problem. But as you said don’t expect any common sense or at least don’t expect anything remotely resembling contemporary urbanism in this sadly deteriorated, eviscerated inner city that’s been given the shaft through a couple of generations of crappy policy that began with things like removal of all rail services from the two bridges (the Alexandra having been built as a railway bridge). If something doesn’t serve the car in this very north americanized donut city, you might as well forget it. I called the city bylaw number and subsequently the councillor about car alrams that constantly go off outside my apartment window, it was just unbearable, and neither the city nor the councillor appeared then or at other times to give a fig about declining quality of life of us low-lifes, people who live in the core or people who can remember what the city was once like. Thanks, signed, can’t wait to get back home, to Toronto (despite current transit planning fiasco, much better planning, many types of urban rail, much greater level of amenities because they didn’t get on the anti-density bandwagon that plagues many North American cities). Sorry if I’ve gone a bit off topic but the sad state of the bridge can be seen in the light of the state of this eviscerated city- and for petes sake, it’s the capital, it,s supposed to be a winter place, where’s the underground city in the core, all you got is the dump called Rideau, c’mon now; or one can ponder the crowds of office workers standing on Wellington I notice passing by on the bus in mid winter afternoons with the wind howling, barely any trees.
John, I know what you mean.