Features
Between Wellington Street and Gladstone Avenue in downtown, Bank Street is a shopping and business development district officially known as the "Bank Street Promenade" and the street is lined with common signage affixed to streetlights and street-level advertising billboards showing this distinction.
The area between Somerset Street West and Gladstone Avenue (within the Bank Street Promenade) is considered the centre of Ottawa's burgeoning gay village, characterized by a small concentration of businesses targeted to Ottawa's gay community. In 2011, the city officially unveiled signs identifying the neighbourhood as Ottawa's gay village, at the intersections of Somerset, James and Nepean Streets with Bank Street.
Travelling south, there exists a shopping district in The Glebe running exclusively along Bank Street from approximately the Queensway to Holmwood Avenue. Bank Street is home to Lansdowne Park where the Ottawa 67's play and where the currently-defunct Ottawa Renegades used to play. Even further south, after the road passes over the Rideau Canal on the Bank Street Bridge, Bank Street is home to the Billings Bridge Plaza and eventually, the South Keys Shopping Centre.
Bank Street north of Billings Bridge is an historic urban arterial road, often with many more pedestrians than vehicular traffic and significant parking issues, hence the flow is generally quite slow. South of Billings Bridge to Leitrim Road, the street turns into a more modern four-lane (or five-lane) urban arterial, which flows much better despite the 50 km/h (30 mph) speed limit on the northern half and 60 km/h (about 40 mph) from South Keys southward. South of Leitrim it is a rural two-lane highway with an 80 km/h speed limit until the community of Vernon. Recently, just south of Leitrim Road, Bank Street gives access to a developing neighborhood called Findlay Creek that will become quite significant in the long term, and it will also provide access (after secondary roads are extended) to the community of Riverside South.
Bank Street also serves in some contexts as an unofficial division between "eastern" and "western" Ottawa. For example, prior to the takeover of Maclean-Hunter by Rogers Cable in 1994, the street marked the division between those cable companies' service areas in Ottawa: cable subscribers west of Bank Street were served by Maclean-Hunter, while cable subscribers east of Bank Street were served by Rogers.
Read more about this topic: Bank Street (Ottawa)
Famous quotes containing the word features:
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)