A Tale of Two Capitals

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Ottawa is a fairly nice city, but as a national capital, does it really express, through its public buildings and monuments, the historical, social and cultural values that make up Canada?

Yes, there are the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian War Museum and, across the Ottawa River in Gatineau, the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

Confederation Square is the site of Canada’s National War Memorial. And nearby, of course, is Parliament Hill, the home of our federal legislative branch. There is also Rideau Hall, home of the governor general.

Yet the parts remain greater than the sum. These discrete landmarks don’t form a cohesive whole.

The Unimagined Canadian Capital: Challenges for the Federal Capital Region is the title of a collection of essays about the National Capital Region that grew from a conference in 2011.

Editors Rupak Chattopadhyay and Gilles Paquet, along with the various authors, maintain that too many stakeholders have neglected their duty of imagining an inspiring federal capital region.

Many of the essays blame the fragmented governance of the area. There are too many cooks spoiling the broth: two cities, Ottawa and Gatineau; two provinces, Ontario and Quebec; and the National Capital Commission, which administers the federally owned lands and buildings, all have a say in how our capital should look.

As Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson recently wrote, “various federal governments have done little, being fearful of acting lest they be accused by Canadians elsewhere of ‘squandering taxpayers’ money’ or favouring a city already grown rich on taxpayers’ largesse.” Do Canadians, he wonders, really care about their capital?

Compare this to the grandeur of the National Mall in Washington. While Ottawa, then known as Bytown, already existed when it became Canada’s capital in 1867, Washington was a planned city. President George Washington appointed the French architect Pierre L’Enfant in 1791 to design the new capital city in the square of federal territory between Maryland and Virginia that would later become the District of Columbia.

The Mall spans three kilometres between the U.S. Capitol in the east to the Lincoln Memorial at the other end. Bisecting the area vertically are the White House to the north and the Jefferson Memorial to the south. The center of the Mall is marked by the towering Washington Monument.

The National Park Service states that the purposes of the National Mall are to “provide a monumental, dignified, and symbolic setting for the governmental structures, museums and national memorials; maintain and provide for the use of the National Mall with its public promenades as a completed work of civic art, a designed historic landscape providing extraordinary vistas to symbols of the nation; and maintain the National Mall in the heart of the nation’s capital as a stage for national events and a preeminent national civic space for public gatherings.” (One notable example is the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.)

The Mall does all these things. Along its perimeters there are more than 15 museums and galleries, including the National Museum of American History, the National Gallery of Art; the National Air and Space Museum; the National Museum of the American Indian; the Smithsonian Institution; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

Structures bordering the Mall include the Library of Congress and the United States Supreme Court Building; the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial; the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial; the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The Mall is the place where the nation conserves its past, simultaneously recollecting it, honouring it, and practicing it (in the White House and Capitol), observed Charles L. Griswold and Stephen S. Griswold in their article “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Mall,” published in the journal Critical Inquiry in 1986.

“The area possesses an extraordinary cohesiveness from the standpoint of its symbolism,” they concluded. Through its iconography, it is a concrete and living lesson in American history.

It certainly makes Ottawa pale by comparison.