Live in Centretown
Bank Street, Elgin Street and the walk-up apartments behind them — the densest square kilometre in Ottawa, and the only neighbourhood in the city where most households do not own a car.
Centretown is the part of downtown Ottawa that people actually live in. The office towers and the federal departments occupy the blocks north of Gloucester Street; south of it, between Bronson Avenue and the Rideau Canal, is a grid of Victorian brick, 1960s walk-ups, and — since the late 1990s — a great many condominium towers. The City counted 25,687 residents in 2.1 square kilometres at the 2021 census, a density of about 12,200 people per square kilometre and the highest in the city by a wide margin. What that buys you is the thing Ottawa is otherwise bad at: two commercial high streets running the length of the neighbourhood, a fifteen-minute walk to Parliament Hill, two Line 1 stations at the top of the hill, and a genuine expectation that you will walk to the grocery shop. What it costs you is space, quiet and, on the Elgin Street blocks, a Friday night that belongs to somebody else. This is what living here is actually like.
The only part of Ottawa built before anyone assumed you would drive
Bounded by Gloucester and Lisgar streets to the north, the Rideau Canal to the east, the Queensway to the south and Bronson Avenue to the west — the City's own definition. This guide covers the Ottawa Neighbourhood Study's Centretown and West Centretown together, which is how the Centretown Citizens Community Association and most people in casual conversation use the name. The Golden Triangle, between Elgin Street and the canal, is a sub-neighbourhood of it.
Centretown is Uppertown — the half of Bytown that Colonel By laid out west of the canal in 1826 for the officers and the merchants, while the labourers went east into Lowertown. The street grid is that old. Most of the houses are not: the neighbourhood as it stands was built between the 1880s and the First World War, when annexation pushed the city limits south to the canal and the Bank Street streetcar made it possible to live here and work on the Hill.
Two high streets, and they are not the same. Bank Street is the working one — groceries, pharmacies, hardware, a long tail of restaurants, and the only stretch of Ottawa where the shops run continuously for two kilometres. Elgin Street is the going-out one, the Sens Mile, and the reason a Golden Triangle address is quieter on Tuesday than on Saturday. Between them the avenues are residential: brick doubles, converted rooming houses, 1960s walk-ups and, since the late 1990s, a great many towers.
What is inside the walk. Parliament Hill in twenty minutes, City Hall in twenty, the Rideau Centre and the ByWard Market in half an hour, the Canadian Museum of Nature at the end of Metcalfe, McNabb and Jack Purcell for the gym and the outdoor rink, and the Rideau Canal Skateway along the eastern edge for six to eight weeks a year. Line 1 runs underground beneath the north end with two stations, Parliament and Lyon, which is the first rapid transit the neighbourhood has had since the streetcars came up in 1959.
The honest version. Most of what is for sale here is a condominium, and a large share of the stock is investor-owned and rented, which makes the status certificate the most important reading you will do: rental rules, short-term-rental rules, parking allocation and the reserve fund all vary building to building on the same block. The pre-war houses come with pre-war problems — knob-and-tube, galvanized supply lines, and in the Golden Triangle a water table that has been finding basements since the sewers exploded in 1929. Parking is a real constraint and the overnight winter ban is enforced. And the downtown's social pressures are concentrated in these blocks in a way the listing photographs never show; walk Bank Street at 11pm as well as 11am before you decide.
- Nearly all new stock is condominium — read the status certificate, the rental rules and the reserve fund before you assume anything
- Parking is frequently unbundled, sometimes separately titled, and the overnight winter ban runs from mid-November to April
- Pre-1940 houses here carry pre-1940 wiring and plumbing; budget for the inspection to find something
- The Queensway runs along the southern edge and is audible from further north than you would expect
- Elgin and Bank change character sharply after dark — the Golden Triangle is quiet, the blocks either side of Elgin are not
- This is the only neighbourhood on this site where the majority of households do not own a car, and the transit is genuinely good enough to make that a choice
How Centretown got here
- 1826–1832Colonel John By lays out Bytown in two halves on Lord Dalhousie's instructions: Lowertown east of the canal for the labourers, and Uppertown west of it — the ground that becomes Centretown — for the officers, the commissariat and the Protestant merchant class.
- 1855Bytown is reincorporated as the City of Ottawa. Two years later Queen Victoria names it the capital, and the demand for housing within walking distance of Parliament Hill begins the process that produced these streets.
- 1889–1891Annexation extends the city limits south to the Rideau Canal, and in June 1891 the first electric streetcar runs down Bank Street. The streetcar is why Bank and Elgin are commercial and the avenues between them are not.
- 1912The Victoria Memorial Museum Building opens at the south end of Metcalfe Street — a castle of Nepean sandstone, and for decades the largest building south of the Hill.
- 1916The Centre Block burns on 3 February. Parliament moves into the museum's auditorium and galleries and sits there until 1920, which is why the building has a Senate chamber with dinosaur bones in the basement.
- 1929A series of explosions in the sewers on 29 May damages property across the Golden Triangle — the sort of thing that happens to a neighbourhood built on the fill between a canal and a swamp.
- 1960–1966The Queensway is driven through the old Canada Atlantic railway corridor along the neighbourhood's southern edge, cutting Centretown off from the Glebe except at the bridges and giving it the noise line it still has.
- Late 1990s–2020sA condominium boom fills the blocks north of Cooper Street with towers, and the population rises 7.8% between the 2016 and 2021 censuses while the rest of inner Ottawa barely moves. Almost all of the new housing is apartment.
- 2019Line 1 opens on 14 September with Parliament and Lyon stations underground at the top of the neighbourhood — the first rapid transit Centretown has had since the streetcars were pulled up in 1959.
No big park, and a very good linear one
Centretown has no large park inside it. What it has instead is the Rideau Canal along its whole eastern edge — a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2007, with the Queen Elizabeth Driveway pathway on one bank and the Colonel By on the other — and a string of small ones inside the grid: Dundonald Park on Somerset, McNabb and Jack Purcell with their outdoor rinks, and the lawn around the Canadian Museum of Nature. Half an hour south along the water is Dow's Lake and Commissioners Park, where the Canadian Tulip Festival plants the largest beds in the region.
The resident's angle: the canal does the work of a park here, and in winter it does the work of a road. But it is a public, linear, busy space — there is no quiet neighbourhood green big enough to kick a ball on that is not also a festival site. And the Skateway is no longer a certainty: the 2023 season did not open for a single day, the first time since it began in 1971, and the NCC now treats a full season as the good case rather than the default.
24 places, with real drive times
Road-adjusted distance and drive time from the centre of the community to each destination, nearest first. Filter by category.
Showing 1–12 of 24 places, nearest first.
Method: distances and drive times are estimated from a representative point near Bank and Gladstone, using straight-line distance multiplied by a road factor and a tiered speed model — honest ranges, not routed times. In this neighbourhood the walk column matters more than the drive column: everything above Lansdowne Park in this table is genuinely walkable, and residents mostly do walk it.
Every gym within reach
Centretown is unusually well served by municipal recreation and unusually badly served by parking for the commercial kind. McNabb at Bronson and Gladstone has a gym, a fitness room, an arena and an outdoor rink; Plant on Somerset West, rebuilt in 2010, has the nearest 25-metre pool; and Jack Purcell off Elgin has the second rink and most of the community programming.
- Municipal pricing, and a City membership works across McNabb, Plant and Jack Purcell
- Plant Recreation Centre at 930 Somerset Street West has the 25-metre lane pool, a leisure pool and a weight floor
- Both McNabb and Jack Purcell run outdoor rinks through the winter, weather permitting
- Commercial gyms cluster on Bank, Elgin and in the office towers north of Gloucester rather than in the residential blocks
| Facility | What it is | Drive |
|---|---|---|
| McNabb Recreation Centre open | The City centre at 180 Percy Street: a gymnasium, a fitness room, an arena with public skating and a summer wading pool, plus the outdoor rink in McNabb Park. Municipal prices, and the reason a lot of Centretown households never buy a commercial membership. | 2–3 min |
| Plant Recreation Centre open | The City's aquatic centre at 930 Somerset Street West, rebuilt in 2010 — a 25-metre lane pool, a leisure pool, a weight floor and a gymnasium. The nearest full pool to most of the neighbourhood. | 3–5 min |
| Jack Purcell Community Centre open | A gymnasium, fitness room and programme space at 320 Jack Purcell Lane, off Elgin — small, busy, and the community hub for the eastern half of Centretown. The outdoor rink beside it runs most of the winter. | 4–6 min |
| The Rideau Canal Skateway open | Not a gym, and for six to eight weeks a year the best exercise in the city: 7.8 kilometres of maintained ice along the neighbourhood's eastern edge, with entrances at Fifth Avenue, Pretoria Bridge and the Bank Street bridge. Whether it opens at all is now a live question — the 2023 season did not open a single day. | 4–5 min |
The free option is the canal, and for six to eight weeks a year it is the best one in the country: 7.8 kilometres of maintained ice from the Bank Street bridge to Dow's Lake and beyond, with entrances three blocks from most of the neighbourhood. The rest of the year the same corridor is a flat, lit, uninterrupted running and cycling route.
Two catchment elementaries and the oldest high school in the city
Elgin Street Public School serves most of Centretown and Centennial on Gladstone serves the western half; both feed Glashan on Arlington for grades 7 and 8. The catchment secondary is Lisgar Collegiate Institute on Lisgar Street, founded in 1843 and the oldest secondary school still operating in Ottawa. Francophone families are generally looking across the canal to the CEPEO and CECCE schools in Sandy Hill and Lowertown.
| School | Board | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Elgin Street Public School | OCDSB | The catchment elementary for most of Centretown, at 310 Elgin Street, kindergarten to grade 6. |
| Centennial Public School | OCDSB | At 376 Gladstone Avenue, serving the western half of the neighbourhood, with an English and an early French immersion stream. |
| Glashan Public School | OCDSB | The middle school at 28 Arlington Avenue, grades 7 and 8 — a Victorian building and the intermediate feeder for most of central Ottawa. |
| Lisgar Collegiate Institute | OCDSB | The catchment secondary at 29 Lisgar Street, founded in 1843 and the oldest secondary school in Ottawa still operating. |
| École élémentaire publique Francojeunesse | CEPEO | The French-language public elementary school in Sandy Hill, across the canal — the nearest CEPEO elementary, and the reason many francophone families here cross the bridge twice a day. |
| University of Ottawa | Post-secondary | Across the canal in Sandy Hill — the largest English-French bilingual university in the world, founded as the College of Bytown in 1848 and about 46,000 students today. |
Catchments in central Ottawa have been redrawn repeatedly as the condominium towers filled in, and the OCDSB runs several specialised and alternative programmes out of these buildings that admit from well outside the catchment. Confirm the current catchment for a specific address with the school board before you buy.
Month by month, what living here looks like
Not a highlights reel — the actual annual rhythm, including the dates residents have to remember.
- The coldest month — a daily mean of −10 °C at the airport, with about 16 nights a year below −20 °C
- The Skateway usually opens in the second half of the month if it opens on time, and the neighbourhood's eastern edge becomes a commuting route
- January alone averages 59 cm of snow, and Centretown's narrow streets are among the last plowed to bare pavement
- Winterlude runs the first three weekends, and the ice sculptures at Confederation Park are a five-minute walk from most of the neighbourhood
- The busiest weeks on the Skateway, and the only time of year the canal has queues
- Peak sidewalk-ice season: the freeze-thaw cycle here is worse than the cold, and the side streets are genuinely treacherous
- The Skateway closes, usually in the first week, and the canal is drawn down for the summer
- The worst-looking month of the year — a winter's worth of grit and gravel emerges from under the snow
- Potholes on Bank and Elgin reach their annual peak before the crews get to them
- Elgin Street's patios come out, optimistically, and the neighbourhood's evening character changes overnight
- Spring freshet on the Ottawa and Rideau rivers peaks — not a Centretown problem, but it is the month the flood maps get read
- The Great Glebe Garage Sale is announced, and the neighbourhood starts planning its Saturday
- The Canadian Tulip Festival fills Commissioners Park at Dow's Lake, a half-hour walk down the canal
- Doors Open Ottawa opens buildings that are otherwise closed, several of them in Centretown
- The best cycling weeks of the year, before the humidity arrives
- Ottawa Jazz Festival takes over Confederation Park at the end of the month — audible from a surprising distance
- Sunset is close to 8:50pm and the canal path fills up in the evenings
- Glebe and Centretown street closures begin; check before assuming Bank Street is drivable on a weekend
- Canada Day shuts the core down and puts hundreds of thousands of people between Centretown and the river
- July is the hottest month, with a daily mean of 21.2 °C and humidex readings that regularly pass 35
- Bluesfest runs at LeBreton Flats for ten days, a twenty-minute walk from the west end of the neighbourhood
- The federal government empties out and the neighbourhood is at its calmest — the one month parking is easy
- Peak humidity, and the month that decides whether your walk-up's lack of air conditioning was a problem
- The Bank Street and Elgin Street sidewalk sales run before the students return
- Both universities come back and the rental market goes from slack to impossible in about ten days
- Warm days, cool nights, and the month most locals would pick if they had to choose one
- City Folk at Lansdowne, and the Redblacks' home stretch across the canal
- The maples along the Queen Elizabeth Driveway turn, and Gatineau Park draws a genuine traffic problem on the weekends
- The heating season starts in earnest, and the older walk-ups reveal what their windows are worth
- The first frost usually lands in the first half of the month
- The bleakest month here — dark by half past four and rarely cold enough for snow to stay
- Remembrance Day at the National War Memorial, ten minutes' walk away, is the one civic event the whole city attends
- Christmas Lights Across Canada goes on at Parliament Hill in the first week of December, and the setup is visible all month
- The Rink of Dreams outside City Hall opens, and the outdoor rinks at McNabb and Jack Purcell follow when it holds
- Snow arrives properly, and with it the overnight winter parking ban — which matters enormously if your building has no parking
- The federal shutdown between Christmas and New Year makes the neighbourhood briefly residential again
24 photographs of Ottawa and the region
Drawn from the site's shared, freely licensed Ottawa photo library — not photographs of Centretown itself. Filter by category.
Showing 1–12 of 24 photographs.
About these photographs. Openly licensed images geotagged in or near Centretown, found on Wikimedia Commons and served from there with full attribution. Inline photos elsewhere on the page may still come from the site's shared Ottawa library.