Over the summer of 2016 I had the opportunity to work on Ottawa’s historic Sparks Street as a social media coordinator, among other things.
One of my first projects working for the Business Improvement Area was a 200th year anniversary of Nicholas Sparks’ settlement into Bytown, today known as the Ottawa-Gatineau region. Sparks’ descendants were planning a giant hurrah! to celebrate their ancestor’s good fortune and hard work in collaboration with the Bytown Museum. My job was to find some fun facts about Nicholas Sparks and Sparks Street for posters to be hung up up and down the pedestrian walkway. Little did I know, I was helping to create what Pierre Nora would consider lieux de memoire in downtown Ottawa!
I was surprised the endeavour was launched by the family. There was only room to print one sentence of general historical information on each poster (an embarrassing misfortune for this MA History candidate with an 120 page thesis looming in the future), so the historical value is in somewhat dissolved. Pedestrians won’t immediately know some of the darker elements that complete the 200-year-old picture, but they will feel a slight reminder that the land they are standing on, eating lunch on, shopping on, has a deep connection to the past.
There are more posters on Sparks than there are pictured here. Go for a stroll downtown for to read the rest!
Jenn Leah Ko 