Places · glebe-lens

Place lens: The Glebe

A neighbourhood inside the Ottawa lens, south of downtown between Bank Street and the canal: the old glebe lands of a downtown church, built out along the streetcar to the exhibition grounds between the 1890s and the 1920s. The side streets (First to Fifth Avenue and their neighbours) are tall brick and clapboard houses close together on narrow lots, deep wooden porches, steep gables and big maples, with a few walk-ups and small condo blocks near Bank. Bank Street is the main street: two lanes of independent shops, cafés, bakeries and licensed cannabis counters, buses every few minutes and no train. South is Lansdowne: the old exhibition hall with its green roof, the stadium and arena whose game nights pour crowds up Bank, a weekend market, and two towers whose lobbies log every visitor. East and south runs the canal, stairs down to its path and a footbridge across; it freezes into a skateway in a cold winter and some winters never opens. North, Patterson's Creek and some of the city's most expensive houses, under heritage rules that forbid a visible antenna, so the Glebe's mesh runs through chimneys, dormers and attic vents. Embassies sit in houses on the residential streets, with diplomatic plates, their own cameras and a guard on the porch. The residents are public servants, professors and the retired; the community association and a monthly paper notice everything, and every May the whole neighbourhood sells secondhand from its lawns for a day, cover for anything that changes hands. The licensed counters sell the marked kind; printed Moss with no marker undercuts them a block away.

• Visible Glebe mesh traces