Tracing the History of Aberdeen Pavilion through Images

Our first project for Digital History is a Digital Doors Open or Digital Landscaping. For this project, we have to choose a building or a small landscape and show how the site has changed over time using whatever digital tools we want. Our professor emphasized that we should choose a tool that we have never used before to stretch ourselves and learn something completely new. The tool was easy to choose. I have seen images like the second one on this list on various sites, and I always find them fun to play with and explore. This project gives me the opportunity to learn how to make one of my own. Choosing a location was a little more difficult. I went through multiple choices before finally settling on the Aberdeen Pavilion in Ottawa. 

                                                            Side View of Aberdeen Pavilion

Aberdeen Pavilion, or the Cattle Castle, is at the center of Lansdowne Park, a complex of buildings at the outer edge of downtown Ottawa. Modeled after the Crystal Palace in London, England, it was built in 1898 for the Central Canada Exhibition. ¹ It was designed by Moses C. Edey, a local architect, and named after the Governor General at the time, Lord Aberdeen. It is the oldest and largest surviving example of this type of exhibition building. ² The pavilion and Lansdowne Park has gone through multiple uses throughout its history. Its use as an exhibition building has been constant throughout its history, with multiple conventions and fairs using the building to present their wares. Unlike the Horticultural Building, another historic building on the site, the pavilion has not been moved, although it was threatened with destruction in the early 1990s. Fortunately, the Ottawa city council provided funding for the building’s restoration. Recently, there was controversy over the re-development of Lansdowne Park. Many were concerned about what would happen to the existing buildings amidst the building of large new shops and restaurants. The site went under construction last year and just recently opened to the public, although many of the new shops are not open yet. The site is interesting because it is important to study how heritage buildings can fit in to new landscapes while not diminishing their status. The Lansdowne Park re-development project is a good case study for this type of transition.

For this project, I will trace the history of Aberdeen Pavilion and the way Lansdowne Park has changed around it. To illustrate this, I will use a series of before/after photos sliders like the one below to compare how the building and the surrounding landscape have changed through time. Slider tools allow the user to easily compare two photos in the same location from vastly different time periods. This highlights features that have changed dramatically, or remained the same in ways that cannot be done in other formats. The final product is aimed at anyone interested in the history of Lansdowne Park, and what the re-development of the area means for the pavilion.

For the modern day pictures, I will use a combination of photos I took myself onsite, as well as images pulled from various newspapers. For historic images, I have found some good sources at Library and Archives Canada, and plan to search other repositories, such as the Ontario Archives as well. Among other things I plan to include photos sets contrasting modern and historic uses of the building and blueprints from the construction of the pavilion, and the modern re-development project. Depending on the sources I find, this list will probably expand. In particular, I would like to search for historic and modern aerial pictures of the site. From my review of various tools, the best one for my purposes seems to be Zurb’s TwentyTwenty plug-in. This tool allows users to create sliders by stacking two pictures on top of one another, and then trimming one side of the picture to make the opposing picture clearer. The tool will require me to learn the code used to layer the images. As well, if I want to embed the pictures on my blog I may have to adjust the code to allow me to insert the sliders. This type of project is completely different from anything I have ever tried before, but after admiring other people’s work for a while, I’m ready to make my own contribution.

---

1 Hofley, Chris. "Aberdeen Pavilion set to make more history in new revamped Lansdowne."Ottawa Sun August 2, 2014. 
2 ^{Canada's Historic Places. "Aberdeen Pavilion National Historic Site of Canada." Accessed October 14, 2014. ↩}