Live in Alta Vista

The name is literal: the ground here is higher than most of Ottawa, and Alta Vista Drive runs along the top of it. The land was the Billings estate — Braddish Billings built a wood-frame house on the rise above the Rideau in 1828, still standing and still the oldest wood-frame house in the city — and it was farmed by market gardeners until the first subdivision, Rideau Park, was laid out on it in 1892. The Alta Vista name appears as a separate subdivision by at least 1939.

Then the annexation. Ottawa took the area from Gloucester Township in 1950 and the postwar building began: Faircrest Heights and Applewood Acres to the north, Ridgemont to the south, Elmvale Acres to the east, Urbandale Acres in between in the 1960s. The lots were generous by any later standard and the streets curve rather than grid. Seventy years on, that is exactly what the neighbourhood sells: a large lot with a mature canopy over it, six kilometres from Parliament Hill.

The other defining fact is medical. The Ottawa Hospital's General Campus and CHEO sit just north of Smyth Road, and the Riverside Campus is at Smyth and Riverside on the neighbourhood's western edge. A great many people who live here work in them, which shapes everything from the traffic pattern to the shift-friendly hours the local shops keep. It also explains why the neighbourhood was an early adopter of the Transitway: Pleasant Park and Riverside stations are inside it, with Billings Bridge and Smyth immediately outside.

The honest version. This is 1950s and 1960s stock on 1950s and 1960s services. The houses are solid and the lots are the product, but expect to find aluminium wiring, single-pane windows, a sixty-year-old sewer lateral and, on the older streets, the occasional buried oil tank. Nothing here is walkable in the way that the Glebe or Old Ottawa South are — Bank Street and Billings Bridge are the nearest thing to a high street, and both are drives or bus rides. And the big live question is what the new Civic campus on the Experimental Farm does to the General's role over the next decade, which for a neighbourhood this dependent on one employer is not a small one.

Worth knowing before you commit

The lot and the canopy are the product

And the hospitals are the economy

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• Postwar lots are larger than anything built since, with seventy years of tree growth on them
• Three hospital campuses on or beside the edges — a five-minute commute if you work in one, and constant Smyth Road traffic if you do not
• 1950s–60s construction: check the wiring, the windows, the sewer lateral and for a buried oil tank
• The Transitway runs beside the neighbourhood with two stations inside it, which is better transit than the map suggests
• There is no walkable high street; Billings Bridge and Bank Street are the shopping and both are a ride
• Canterbury High School's arts programme admits by audition from across the city, which is a genuine local asset

How Alta Vista got here

• 1828Braddish Billings builds a wood-frame house on the high ground above the Rideau River. It is the oldest surviving wood-frame house in Ottawa, and the estate around it controls most of what becomes Alta Vista for the next sixty years.
• 1874–1892A subdivision called Gateville is established in 1874 and disappears again by the 1920s. Rideau Park, laid out on Billings land in 1892 for market gardeners, is the one that sticks.
• 1939The Alta Vista name appears as a subdivision distinct from Rideau Park — named, like the drive, for the height of the ground.
• 1950Ottawa annexes the area from Gloucester Township, and the postwar building begins in earnest.
• 1950sRideau Park expands and the new subdivisions go in: Faircrest Heights and Applewood Acres to the north, Ridgemont to the south, Elmvale Acres to the east. The lots are large by later standards and the streets curve rather than grid.
• 1960sUrbandale Acres fills the gap between Elmvale Acres and the rest of Alta Vista. The hospital campuses on Smyth Road grow alongside, and the neighbourhood acquires the medical character it still has.
• 1970s–1980sThe Transitway is built along the eastern side of the neighbourhood with stations at Pleasant Park and Riverside, and Billings Bridge and Smyth immediately outside it — bus rapid transit thirty years before the rest of the city had rail.
• 2020sThe trees are seventy years old, the bungalows are being renovated or replaced, and the hospital campuses keep expanding. The neighbourhood's biggest live question is what the new Civic campus on the Experimental Farm does to the General's role — and to the doctors' commutes.

The resident's angle: the river path is the good one — flat, continuous, and it connects to the whole NCC network in both directions. Mooney's Bay, ten minutes south, is the nearest supervised swimming. What the neighbourhood does not have is a destination park of its own; the green here is private, in the form of large back gardens, which is a trade some people make happily and others do not.

The free option is the Rideau River pathway on the western edge, which runs north to the canal and south past Hog's Back to Mooney's Bay — and, ten minutes south, Conroy Pit in the Greenbelt, with sand trails through pine plantation and the best-known off-leash area in the city.