Esplanade Laurier at dusk, as seen from Lisgar Street. Behind and to the right looms Plaza 234 at Laurier and O'Connor, the "old EDC building", of late home to an expansion of Shopify.
The 23-storey Esplanade Laurier building (Olympia and York) opened in 1975 to less fanfare than I'd realized. Newspaper mentions from that year are mostly small placements announcing businesses opening in (or relocating to) its two-level shopping concourse — now largely deserted. A brief, perfunctory mention appeared on December 1, when R.U. Mahaffy wrote (Ottawa Journal)...
The white-marble-clad towers were, I seem to recall, well-received by the public, curious to know what an "esplanade" might be. Satisfied that it was actually just a building, our attentions turned elsewhere... until the building, miffed, started shedding slabs of marble onto the sidewalks below.
Urbsite's August 10 2011 article detail's l'Esplanade's protracted decline ("Bleakest Block?") — read it here.
Urbsite mentions a large emergency power generator which for several years blocked l'Esplanade's Gloucester Street sidewalk. This was apparently a response to perceived 9-11 threats — it was finally taken away some time between spring 2015 and spring 2016. Given Saudi Arabia's recent suggestion that it might fly a jet liner into a Canadian Building, one wonders whether that removal was premature...
The Esplande's construction consumed an entire city block — a "block-buster" if you will...
...whatever. This is what the Bank/Laurier/O'Connor/Gloucester block looked like a decade before l'Esplanade opened its doors. Click the pic to avoid eyestrain.
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| geoOttawa, 1965 |
By 1965, at least a quarter of the block had been taken over by parking lots, marking the incremental demise of old houses in the years prior to the big event. The process continues apace through the older parts of the city, condominiums having assumed the role once held by office towers.
