Description of Historic Place

Ottawa Gardens is a planned subdivision that includes a planted 21 metre wide boulevard and the adjacent residential properties in the 200 block of West 6th Street between Mahon and Chesterfield Avenues in a predominantly single-family neighbourhood of North Vancouver.

Heritage Value

Ottawa Gardens is valued as a planned garden subdivision, designed to attract affluent families to the North Shore of Burrard Inlet. Planning and development was initiated in 1906 by the North Vancouver Land and Improvement Company. Prestige was guaranteed through minimum construction cost standards and restrictions on buildings and landscaping. Ottawa Gardens was divided into 32 lots and today 30 houses representing a wide variety of architectural styles occupy these lots. The area's varied architecture reflects that the houses were developed in four stages: six buildings built from 1908-14; nine buildings built in the period from 1920 until the Second World War; eight from 1945-70 and seven since. Many of the residences are set in mature landscapes characteristic of their eras.

Ottawa Gardens is valued as part of a rectilinear system of boulevards and parks known as North Vancouver's "Green Necklace," which also includes Grand Boulevard, Victoria Park and Mahon Park.

Source: Heritage Planning Files, City of North Vancouver

Character-Defining Elements

Key elements that define the heritage character of the Ottawa Garden development include its:
- linear and open nature
- shift in street grid at the west end, with a church completing the vista to the west
- central wide landscaped median
- grade change between the houses on the north and south sides of the boulevard
- well-maintained but informal plantings
- laurel hedges accompanied by wooden fences or random coursed stone walls that enclose the properties fronting the boulevard, that define the linear nature of the streetscape
- hedges, fences, mature trees and garden setting on most of the flanking properties
- form, scale and massing of the surrounding houses
- larger massing and scale of the north side of buildings in relation to those on the south side