The rise and fall (and rise again?) of the ByWard Market

John Diener grew up in Saslove’s Meat Market. As a boy in the 1960s, he worked in the store on weekends and holidays, serving customers from behind the counter, cleaning meat coolers, washing floors.

Diener’s father, Nathan, a Holocaust survivor from eastern Poland, originally bought the business located at the core of the ByWard Market from Sam Saslove in 1954, six years after he arrived in Ottawa. Nathan Diener kept the Saslove name because it was well-established in the meat industry.

The ByWard Market then was home to about a dozen butchers. There were fruit and vegetable stores, fish markets, cheese and specialty food shops.

“The Market was a really vibrant place to be: Retail food was a big part of the draw,” Diener says. “You didn’t have supermarkets in every neighbourhood like you do now. There were 150 stands with local farmers. Some of them even sold live chickens and rabbits.”

Pushed by his parents, Diener pursued a career in information technology, but he still helped out at Saslove’s on Saturdays. Then, in the early 1980s, when his aging parents talked about selling the business, Diener made a decision.

“I just decided that the business was such a big part of our lives, I didn’t want to see it shut down,” he says. “So, I talked to my parents and said I’d like to take it over.”

One year later, his brother, Joel, who worked for an MP on Parliament Hill, agreed to join him as a partner at Saslove’s. Their children grew up working in the meat market, along with a host of nephews and nieces.

Three generations of the Diener family made Saslove’s into an essential part of the ByWard Market, a downtown neighbourhood that defined the Ottawa experience. But sometime around the turn of the century, the new millennium, Diener noticed a change: fewer people were coming through the store’s front door. Other meat stores and specialty food shops began to pack up and leave.

Diener believes the ByWard Market began its decline as supermarkets and weekend farmers’ markets increasingly kept shoppers in the suburbs. “The decline was gradual: It got tougher and tougher every year,” he says.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated that slide and coincided with an increase in social disorder from the opioid epidemic. What’s more, civil servants did not return to the Market in the same numbers after being mandated back to the office three days a week.

“Over those four years, people’s habits changed: they got used to shopping somewhere else,” Diener says.

At Saslove’s, a decrease in sales combined with an increase in costs meant the store wasn’t financially viable anymore.

After 70 years in business, Diener was unable to sell the place. He simply closed its doors for good last fall.

Losing Saslove’s, the last meat store in the ByWard Market, was one more body blow to the neighbourhood during a year in which it had already said goodbye to the Courtyard Restaurant, Mamma Grazzi’s Kitchen, the Oz Café and the boutique store, Cantas Fashion. In December, Steve’s Music Store also announced it would be leaving nearby Rideau Street after 42 years.

It means that almost two centuries into its existence, the ByWard Market is at a crossroads.

No longer defined by its butchers, bakeries, cheese stores and vegetable stands, the Market is in the process of turning into something altogether new.

It’s not clear yet what that will be or whether it will succeed in returning the neighbourhood to its traditional place as the city’s most popular destination. There are still too many unanswered questions. Will farmers ever set up their stalls again? Will cars be made more unwelcome? Will the opioid epidemic ever end?

“I’m not really sure what the future holds for the area,” says Diener.

The rise

The ByWard Market is as old as the city itself.

In 1826, the British government decided to carve out a new transportation link between Kingston and Montreal. The War of 1812 demonstrated the vulnerability of the St. Lawrence River to blockade, and the fear of another American invasion spurred action on the Rideau Canal project.

Lieutenant-Colonel John By, the military engineer in charge of its construction, mapped out plans for a small town next to the canal’s terminus at the Ottawa River. That plan included a parcel of land on Geroge Street for a public market.

The first ByWard Market building opened in 1827 to serve the small army of stonemasons and manual labourers, most of them from Ireland and French Canada, who settled in Bytown to build the canal. Horses, hay and lumber were for sale along with meat and produce.

The town emerged slowly from what had been bush and swamp. Military officers, tradesmen and other affluent newcomers made their homes in Upper Town, west of the Rideau Canal, while the rough-and-tumble labourers populated Lower Town, east of the canal.

The Market faced its first competition in the 1840s as the town’s population topped 3,000. The West Ward Market, built in 1848 on Elgin Street, between Queen and Albert Streets (the site of today’s National Arts Centre), threatened to eclipse the ByWard Market, which had moved into a new building.

But established shopping patterns were hard to change, and the West Ward Market closed within a year of its founding. Its market building became Bytown’s first city hall.

The ByWard Market building then burned to the ground in the 1860s and had to be rebuilt as the city around it changed dramatically. Bytown had officially been renamed Ottawa, and then, improbably, it was chosen as the new seat of government for the Province of Canada. The city’s lumber industry boomed.

A young man from Lorraine, Quebec named Moise Lapointe opened a fish store in ByWard Market in 1867, the year Canada became a country.

In the 1870s, the ByWard Market again faced competition from the new Wellington Ward Market, which opened on Lyon Street. But once again, ByWard prevailed.

Meanwhile, Ottawa assumed new importance as a regional commercial centre, and the ByWard Market became home to bakeries, bottling works, a broom manufacturer, a soap and candle factory, carriage and furniture manufacturers, hardware stores and agricultural machinery shops.

Tailors, carpenters, saddle makers, metal and tin workers were also open for business. Hotels, taverns and boarding houses surrounded the Market, which had expanded to include York, ByWard and William Streets.

Places like the Martineau Hotel on Murray Street filled every spring with lumbermen returning from the bush, where they logged all winter. Many of the men spent their wages in places like the Raceway Tavern on Clarence Street, the Chez Lucien Tavern on Parent Avenue, and the Chateau Lafayette, built in 1886, on York Street.

The Market’s first department store, T. Lindsay and Co. opened in 1889, and would soon be followed by more on the north side of Rideau Street.

In the early 1900s, thousands of Jews fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe settled in Lower Town and carved out their living as peddlers in the ByWard Market, where it cost just $9 a year for a licence. Many would go on to open stores in the Market.

Newspapers reported daily on prices in the Market. In 1921, the Ottawa Journal reported that hay was selling for $27 a tonne, potatoes were .50 cents to $1 a bag, while live fowl were selling for $1.25 to $2.

When the ByWard Market building burned down again in 1926 — fire would repeatedly reshape the Market — it was replaced a year later with the building that still stands today.

During the Depression, jobless men looking for work converged on the area and the Salvation Army expanded its services to shelter and feed them. Many second-hand stores opened.

The area also became the heart of French-Canadian culture in Ottawa. The Market was home to Le Droit, Ottawa’s French-language newspaper, Le Theatre Francais, the city’s only French-langue movie theatre, and Le National, a 700-seat theatre.

During the Second World War, Market buildings warehoused uniforms, clothes and dry goods, while fleets of trucks delivered milk, bread, vegetables, fish, ice, wood and coal across the city.

The post-war era brought a new wave of immigrants — Italians, East Europeans — and a housing boom that expanded the Market’s resident population.

Shoppers increasingly relied on cars, and by the 1960s, ads for the Market boasted of the area’s 5,000 parking spaces.

In the early 1990s, the area was declared a heritage district, and a report on its designation suggested traffic was part of that heritage.

“The congestion, both vehicular and pedestrian, currently associated with the district is traditional,” the ByWard Market Heritage Conservation District Study concluded.

The fall

The fall of the ByWard Market broadly traced the ascent of the automobile in Ottawa.

As cars and trucks slowly displaced horses, carts and carriages, the complaints began as early as 1917 when one Ottawa Journal letter writer demanded to know why a portion of George Street could not be used “for the parking of private motor cars, thus relieving the congestion around the market buildings.”

By the time the final phase of Ottawa’s crosstown expressway, the Queensway, opened in 1966, the city was already undergoing profound change. The Westgate Shopping Centre had opened a decade earlier. Other malls soon followed: Carlingwood, College Square, Elmvale Acres, St. Laurent.

The shopping malls, with acres of parking space, were built with the convenience of motorists in mind. Shiny new suburban grocery stores made it easy for shoppers to buy fresh meat, fruit and vegetables in their own neighbourhoods.

It meant that by the late 1960s, there were already public calls in Ottawa for politicians to “save” the shopworn ByWard Market.

The area’s farm stalls, butchers and groceterias were losing market share as shoppers increasingly opted for convenience over the schlep downtown, and the eternal challenge of finding a parking space.

Studies were undertaken which led city council to approve a 1971 plan, developed with the National Capital Commission, that called for a new parking garage, a refurbished ByWard Market building and the conversion of two street segments into pedestrian walkways.

More than $1 million was poured into renovating the ByWard Market building, and a $2.5 million parking garage opened on Clarence Street in August 1975. Both projects were controversial. Some wanted the old market building torn down, while others said the parking garage did not suit the historic district.

But nothing could stop the slow leak of farmers’ stands and food stores from the ByWard Market. Local farmers complained that the rules governing the market favoured vendors who trucked produce in from the United States.

The historic district was further roiled by the launch of the nearby Rideau Centre in March 1983, and the adjacent Rideau Street Mall, which converted Rideau into a bus mall. It rerouted traffic and sent more cars through the congested Market.

By the 1990s, there were growing calls once again to “save” the ByWard Market. Another study was commissioned, this time by a Vancouver-based consulting group.

In January 1993, the ByWard Market Retail Food Study recommended ways to save the disappearing retail food sector. It said the city should discourage the Market’s transition into a tourist district while encouraging more residential development. It also recommended the city develop a pricing system that favoured farm vendors who sold their own products.

Most controversially, it recommended the city buy property on the west side of ByWard Market Street and lease the stores to food retailers at subsidized rates.

The report led to years of study.

Ultimately, city council rejected the idea of buying Market properties to lease, but it did introduce a bylaw that favoured local growers over produce dealers when it came to the allocation of market stalls.

It slowed but did not arrest the Market’s decline as a market. Weekend farmers’ markets began in other parts of the city, starting at Lansdowne Park in 2006, and expanding to Main Street, Westboro, Orléans, and Barrhaven.

More ByWard Market studies followed. In 2012, a U.S. consulting firm, Project for Public Spaces, was hired by the city and the ByWard Market Business Improvement Area to make recommendations. The New York-based firm specializes in creating “culturally rich gathering places.”

The Project for Public Spaces (PPS) report, published the following year, neatly encapsulated what ailed the Market:

“Despite the ByWard Market’s rich history, the public market, which formed the identity of the area and helped it become the city’s number one tourist attraction, is at great risk,” the report concluded.

“The market is struggling to keep farmers and fresh food retailers while other uses, such as bars and restaurants, predominate and are displacing these historic uses. As a result, the public market has been in a slow decline for several decades, and PPS believes that if nothing is done, the city is in danger of losing the public market forever.

“The retail food sector has evolved where big chain stores offer consumers a choice of cheaper food and there is a proliferation of new public markets around the city that offer more amenities to both the vendor and the local consumer.”

The report warned: “To lose the ByWard Market’s continuity and uses as a public market would be to lose the very history and iconic centre of Ottawa.”

The consultants recommended the city buy strategic Market buildings and rent them at subsidized rates to fresh food and produce vendors, offer parking validation for shoppers, create a large public gathering space, and make the area more pedestrian-friendly.

In its conclusion, the report anticipated its fate: “Over the last several decades countless studies have been completed with a focus on improving and preserving the ByWard Market. A lack of vision is not the problem; the problem is the lack of a clear plan and committed resources to make that vision a reality.”

There would, of course, be another study on how to make that vision a reality.

In the meantime, the COVID-19 pandemic added fuel to the forces remaking the Market.

The pandemic changed and deepened the opioid epidemic: It brought a new supply of toxic drugs to Ottawa, which led to more overdoses and more social chaos. At the same time, the city’s homelessness crisis worsened. Since the ByWard Market and Lowertown play host to most of the city’s homeless shelters and services, the crisis was most visible there.

A shift to remote work during the pandemic also robbed the Market of its reliable supply of civil servants, many of whom lunched and shopped during the noon hour or after work.

It was all too much for Saslove’s owner John Diener. “There was no more fight left in me,” he says of his decision to close his family business.

The rise again?

For all of its trouble, the ByWard Market continues to enjoy a host of advantages.

It remains a major tourist site — with as many as 50,000 visitors during summer weekends — and has another 50,000 people who live within walking distance. The Market is home to some of the earliest surviving residential and commercial buildings in the city, along with a handful of charming, hidden courtyards: Clarendon Court, York Court, Jeanne d’Arc Court, Tin House Court and Beaux-Arts Court.

The neighbourhood’s storied past was the basis on which the Market was designated as a heritage conservation district. Its 1991 designation covers 15 city blocks and 160 buildings.

The Market is well-served by the LRT and sits in proximity to Major’s Hill Park, the National Gallery of Canada and the Rideau Canal.

In June, the Ottawa Police Service launched a program aimed at reducing crime in the area. The Community Outreach Response and Engagement (CORE) Strategy increased foot patrols in the Market, resulting in fewer calls for service (-17.9 per cent) and less crime (-4.62 per cent).

The Market also continues to attract investors. Beyond the Pale Brewing Company has taken over the George Street heritage building that used to be home to the Courtyard Restaurant. “We hope we can be part of the revitalization,” co-owner Shane Clark said earlier this year.

Live Nation has also announced it will open a new, mid-sized music venue in the space once occupied by Chapters bookstore on Rideau Street, near Sussex Drive.

Almost 200 years after it began, the ByWard Market remains a destination and a place to live, eat and raise a drink. But will ever again be a market?

That question is at the heart of current discussions about the Market’s future.

Architect and urban designer Barry Padolsky, an expert in heritage conservation, argues that the Market was “vivacious and lively” even before its streets were paved, largely because of the existence of a fresh food market.

He argues such a market — both outdoor and indoor — should be at the heart of ByWard Market’s renewal.

“We really need to reinstate the farmer’s market,” he says, “but it’s more difficult to do now that it’s been allowed to die and become extinct.”

There’s no doubt demand exists for such a market, Padolsky contends, noting three grocery stores — Loblaws, Metro and Farm Boy — now operate on Rideau Street. Metro opened its new store at 255 Rideau Street in August 2024.

“Many thousands of people are moving into the area because of intensification — and they have to eat,” Padolsky argues. “A farmer’s market creates the kind of animation the neighbourhood needs, and people want to be able to buy directly from farmers.”

But John Diener believes the Market has changed so much in recent years that there’s no going back to its past.

“I’m convinced it will never be a market again,” he says. “It will be a bar and entertainment area. For the longest time, I thought it might turn around, but I don’t think the political will was there. There was not enough action.”

Another plan is now in place to revitalize the ByWard Market. In January 2021, Ottawa City Council approved a $129 million plan to improve the Market’s public realm, and make the area more green, welcoming and pedestrian-focused.

The plan, which builds on the 2013 Project for Public Spaces study, calls for the Clarence Street parkade to be redeveloped as a “destination” building, and for the creation of a “flexible” York Street plaza, between Sussex Drive and the ByWard Market Building. The plaza would host special events sometimes and cars at other times.

The plan also calls for new gateways into the ByWard Market, the reinvention of ByWard Market Square and a pedestrian-only William Street, from Rideau Street to Clarence Street.

The public realm plan, however, is not fully funded and relies heavily on provincial and federal grants. (In early December, the province announced an $11.8 million contribution to the makeover plan, which will be used to pedestrianize William Street, remake ByWard Market Square and improve lighting and other basic infrastructure.)

The plan also clearly favours pedestrians over cars, even though many food retailers believe parking is essential to a successful business. “If you’re operating retail food store, people have to park nearby,” Diener contends. “This is not a city where people rely on public transit.”

If the Market is destined to become an entertainment and dining area — something like Toronto’s Distillery District – then making it more pedestrian-friendly makes sense. But if the goal is to attract fresh food vendors back to the Market, it could prove an impediment.

Zachary Dayler, executive director of the ByWard Market District Authority (BMDA), acknowledges there’s a tension between those two ideas, but he’s convinced improved foot traffic will lift all local businesses, including produce vendors.

Statistics show foot traffic in the ByWard Market has grown in each of the past four years — there were 18.9 million visits in 2023 — but has not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels. Dayler wants to do more to bring visitors back.

The BMDA, a not-for-profit municipal services corporation, is charged with enhancing the Market, and organizing special events, such as the Day of the Dead Festival and the ByWard Market concert series.

In 2025, Dayler says, the authority plans to close more streets on Canada Day to maximize foot traffic in the Market. “We want to use days like that to create the case and illustrate that more people moving about in public space can lead to positive economic outcomes for everyone,” he says.

Dayler contends the Market has to “be careful about resting on the nostalgia” of the fresh food market experience.

He believes the area must evolve into a “public market” where food vendors are one component of a wider experience — one that embraces art, entertainment and music.

Rideau-Vanier Coun. Stéphanie Plante, whose ward encompasses the ByWard Market, says her nostalgic view of the Market comes from working as a server at The Great Canadian Cabin 20 years ago.

“I miss the days when people could just go out for a night in the ByWard and not worry,” she says. “I miss it being a great, carefree place to go no matter what time of day.”

Plante contends the social disorder in the ByMarket Market has to be addressed before the area can thrive. “Everyone is nibbling around the edges and no one is going to the heart of the matter,” she says.

The area has three supervised consumption sites, three men’s shelters and a safe supply dispensary, she says, all of which have concentrated the problems associated with homelessness and addiction in one part of the city.

“Everyone’s feet are in cement on this issue,” says Plante, who contends such services should be more equitably distributed in the city.

Pat Nicastro is the owner of La Bottega Nicastro on George Street, a specialty food store that has thrived in the ByWard Market for 30 years. The key to that longevity, he says, is constant evolution.

“We’ve seen less foot traffic in recent years so we’ve evolved our business not to require as much foot traffic,” Nicastro says. The store now sells wine, offers more prepared foods, and provides delivery and catering.

“For us, we wish the city would make it a bit easier to get down here,” Nicastro says. “That means more parking spots and easier access to the Market. More spots for pickups. The world is changing with the Ubers of the world….I’m always fighting for more parking. That’s what retailers need.”

Still, he’s optimistic about the Market’s future, particularly as more government workers return to the office and more of the public realm plan is put into place.

“Downtown is always going to be downtown. People are coming back slowly. We’re seeing it. We’re growing and we’re planning to stay here.”

The Citizen newsroom is proud to uncover and report important stories like this one. If you would like to support our work and help our team continue to tell longform, deeply-reported journalism, please consider purchasing a digital subscription. ottawacitizen.com/subscribe