Ottawa’s Rockcliffe Park designated a National Historic Site

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In Ottawa’s Rockcliffe Park, the past is not only present – it’s fiercely protected. This green enclave just northeast of the city’s core has a thick cover of trees, curving streets without sidewalks, and hundreds of houses built for Ottawa’s elite and occupied by diplomats from around the world.

Now it also has a plaque marking it as a National Historic Site. In a ceremony on Friday, Parks Canada will formally offer the 1.8-square-kilometre neighbourhood with that distinction. For some heritage advocates among the area’s 2,000 residents, this is an accomplishment that has been decades in the making – despite rising tensions around what heritage means.

“We love this place, and we realize that we’re indebted to generation after generation of care for the heritage that we’ve inherited from others,” said Martha Edmond, author of a book on the neighbourhood’s history. The plaque designation “is our generation doing its part.”

Ms. Edmond was sharing tea with two other members of the local residents’ association, Susan Peterson and Scott Heatherington, at Mr. Heatherington’s rambling house on Buena Vista Road. “For us, this is a place like no other,” Mr. Heatherington said.

It is certainly unusual. The hilly site on the south bank of the Ottawa River was bought by Thomas MacKay, a major backer of the Rideau Canal, in the 1830s.

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In 1864, his son-in-law, civil engineer Thomas Coltrin Keefer, laid out a neighbourhood as a green enclave – an early example of what came to be known as the garden suburb. Such neighbourhoods, most famously Llewellyn Park, in New Jersey outside New York, were places for the upper classes of industrializing 19th-century cities to withdraw into green, but heavily designed, pastoral environments.

Rockcliffe’s lots were carefully divided; a local government encouraged the use of several historicist styles such as Tudor and Georgian. Rockcliffe Park remained a separate municipality until 2001. A community hall, library and three schools now make up the town, along with nearly 800 houses.

Some of these are particularly grand. Crichton Lodge on Lisgar Road, a towering greystone built in 1889 by another member of the Mackay family, is typical; it became the residence of the Norwegian ambassador and continued as such until last year. Dozens of official residences dot the area “and the embassies are good neighbours,” Mr. Heatherington said.

Since Rockcliffe’s amalgamation with the City of Ottawa in 2001 – a move regarded by some locals as an imposition – advocates including Mr. Heatherington and Ms. Peterson have worked “to protect the character of this neighbourhood,” as Ms. Peterson puts it.

The threats come in familiar forms: Large contemporary houses throughout the area, and apartment buildings on the fringes. The “monster homes,” as Mr. Heatherington calls them, are more common.

Some of Ottawa’s wealthiest people live here, and houses sell for as much as $7-million. New arrivals want more space than their neighbours. “The bigger the houses get, the more of the unifying green landscape – the trees, the bushes, the ground cover – gets eroded,” said Ms. Peterson.

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Thanks to vigorous campaigning from locals including Ms. Peterson – a former civil servant whose husband is former Business Council of Canada head Tom D’Aquino – the municipality of Rockcliffe Park, which amalgamated with the City of Ottawa in 2001, created a heritage conservation district for Rockcliffe Park in 1997. This imposes some limits on the size and configuration of new homes. It has impeded, though not stopped, the demolition of some existing houses and their replacement with new and bigger homes. The limits have also impeded the construction of apartment buildings on the fringes of the district.

Critics argue that such protections come at a cost. Heritage conservation districts, in particular, can slow or prevent opportunities to densify where it makes the most sense, including in the downtown Ottawa districts of Centretown and Lowertown. Even in Rockcliffe Park, a handful of apartment developments have crept into the edges of the neighbourhood – and have been fiercely opposed by the association.

“There’s been a lot of talk lately about addressing the housing crisis and adding more density to our cities,” Mr. Heatherington said. “We, of course, aren’t against that, but there’s more than enough room to add that density in other areas.”

John Zvonar, a landscape architect and board member of Heritage Ottawa, argues that good policy requires “looking at these things case by case. There’s no question that this is a historic landscape.” And when different homeowners wish to build bigger houses, rather than respect the prevailing scale? “There is always a compromise to be brokered,” he said.

Yet the neighbourhood has not always been static. Ms. Peterson and Mr. D’Aquino occupy a modernist house built by the architect Hart Massey in 1959: an elegant assemblage of black steel, white siding and large panes of glass that perches on a hill overlooking the small McKay Lake. The couple has painstakingly restored it, maintaining its colour scheme right down to the bold red of the front door. This house resembles nothing else in the neighbourhood; the designed looked to Californian modernism, not the garden suburbs. And yet it was named a National Historic Site in 2018, proof perhaps that each generation sees history in a different light.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Ottawa created a heritage conservation district for Rockcliffe Park in 1997. It was the municipality of Rockcliffe Park that made the designation.

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