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Many of the photographs were used in CMHC publications and reports.

For local historians like Phil Jenkins, who writes a column for the Citizen on Ottawa history and planning issues, the pictures offer a chance to “time travel”. He suggests viewing the CMHC pictures on a tablet or smartphone while walking in the neighbourhoods, viewing the scenes in the past and the present.

“To be able to walk around the city in two tenses at once. That is a pleasure.” Jenkins said. “It turns everyone into a historian, and when you do that you start to take the city more personally.”

Photo by File photo / Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation

Jenkins would love to see these and other historic photos used for an interactive “then-and-now” type comparison such as on the website www.pastottawa.com. The city could also install street plaques with photos of what a neighbourhood used to look like as the City of Montreal has done along Sherbrooke Street.

“It lets you look and answer the question, ‘Is my city getting more beautiful or less beautiful?’ ” Jenkins said. “In my mind, it’s getting less beautiful. If you look at pictures of Ottawa from the ’30s and ’40s, it was gorgeous.”

Marc Lowell, a freelance Ottawa researcher who has a business producing “house histories”, has a more jaundiced view. He came across the CMHC photos online while researching at the Ottawa Public Library.

“Do you see what Ottawa used to look like? It was a real dump,” Lowell said with a laugh. “Lowertown was full of shanties.”

Many of the houses Lowell is hired to research are in Lowertown. He scours city directories to find former owners and hunts down historic photographs while his partner searches property records to provide a timeline of a house and its owners. Lowell plans to mine the CMHC archives for his research.