A Postcard Tour of the Plaza

Lost Ottawa loves old postcards.  Almost by definition, they capture what people found both distinctive and characteristic of a place at the time they were made. That makes them great for studying history. They are almost always colourized, and that makes them nice to look at. 

The link below will take you to the first of a series of postcard-based virtual tours from what is known as the Golden Age of Postcards, 1903-1914.

The goal of these tours is to give you a sense of place and a feeling for the life of the city at the height of the Edwardian Era, and the end of what is often called the Long Nineteenth Century.

You can navigate the tour in various ways.  You can scroll down the page and enjoy the pictures without too much text.  You can click on any pic and see the full text, then move forwards or backwards from there. 

But let’s not dally.  Get started with your tour of the Plaza by clicking here.  

Location
Route

 

 

About the walk leader

Lost Ottawa is a Facebook community whose 50,000 members post images of the Ottawa area from 1800 AD to the Year 2000.   It is devoted to the history of Greater Ottawa, Greater Gatineau, and the Outaouais as a whole, as well as towns and villages up and down the Ottawa Valley.  When a photo catches their eye, members of the community leave dozens and sometime hundreds of comments about forgotten buildings, places, and events around the nation’s capital.

In 2017, we took our most popular stories (meaning the posts with the most likes, shares and comments) and put them together in Lost Ottawa, Book One. People liked that so much we had to come out with a Lost Ottawa, Book Two.  Now there’s a third book on the way, containing 75 more pictures and stories that will be sure to get you laughing — and sometimes crying — about life in our fantastic city.

Lost Ottawa website:  https://lostottawa.ca

Lost Ottawa Facebook page:  https://www.facebook.com/lostottawa

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Lost Ottawa

Gallery
Postcard showing how it was imagined that the centre of the city would look in 1913.