Bells Corners, Ontario
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bells Corners is a neighbourhood in the city of Ottawa, Canada.
The community, originally part of Nepean Township and later the city of Nepean, was named after Hugh Bell, who owned a tavern in the area from 1834 to 1863. It was located on the Richmond Road (formerly Highway 7 & Highway 15, which connected Bytown and the settlement at Richmond. Most of Bells Corners was destroyed in a massive fire in August 1870. In 1950, Ottawa annexed the main urban areas of Nepean including Westboro, where the town offices were located. A town hall was built in Bells Corners which was used from 1966 to 1978, when a new city hall was built at Centrepointe.
Up until the middle of the 20th century, Bells Corners was a mainly rural area with many dairy farms.
Bells Corners is probably best known for the commercial strip along Robertson Road, which is dominated by car-oriented retail uses, gas stations and fast food restaurants.
Most of the houses in Bells Corners are in a neighbourhood called Lynwood Village, built in the late fifties and early sixties. It is one of the first examples of tract housing in Ottawa.
In the fifties Nepean had acknowledged the rights of property owners to subdivide their land for housing but usually individual lots were sold to small builders. In Bells Corners land speculators Lloyd Francis and Donald Sim had assembled a vast tract of land. In 1958 they brought in Bill Teron to build the entire subdivision. By 1960 four hundred families lived in Teron's sprawling ranch-style bungalows; another four hundred homes were built in 1961. Many more were built in 1962.
The magnitude of the shift to tract housing is demonstrated by the fact that most of the subdivisions built during the rest of the sixties were the work of three large firms (Minto, Campeau and Assaly/Johannsen).
The interactive website of the Bells Corners community and the Lynwood Village Community Asssociation is http://ato.smartcapital.ca/bc (more history of Bells Corners at http://ato.smartcapital.ca/bc?go=1275108 )
