Hillary Clinton made history last week by clinching the democratic nomination, but twenty years ago she also came to Ottawa as the First Lady and took in the sights. After the governor general at the time, Romeo LeBlanc, joked with the Clintons that they should have brought their skates, Hillary in fact did just that and took to the canal, telling her security team, “‘I brought my skates. I’m going to skate. My security is your problem.”

After extensive searching through our old CCLA Bulletin newsletter, we learned that the first CCLA website went live in Spring 1998. Through the magic of the Wayback Machine, we grabbed an image of the earliest archived version of the website:

Now, if you can believe it, the CCLA’s website looked like that until 2010. For those of you who will get a kick out of this sort of detail, the site was built using Netscape.

For an association as old as we are, there are shockingly few pictures from CCLA history. We can’t find any pictures from inside the old courthouse, our conferences and events weren’t well documented in photos (not anymore, of course!), and we don’t have pictures of many of our past presidents (or librarians!).*

We did dig out of storage, however, pictures from when the library at the Elgin Street courthouse was new. Old technology! Temporary signage! The Scotiabank calendar that is *still* in our copy room 28 years later!

1988 (left) and 2016 (right)
Click each picture to enlarge

Here are two pictures of our Canadian Law Reports section – as it was in 1988, and how it is today. It’s hard to believe those shelves ever had so much empty room. When someone does this retrospective in another 28 years, it’s safe to say there will be no law reports at all. With legal research moving online, this section doesn’t get a lot of use anymore, and like the law reports from many other libraries who’ve remodeled recently, this part of the collection will have to go when we renovate our space.

*All that to say, please send us your old CCLA pictures!

Everyone’s favourite downtown eyesore, Somerset House, was in the news again this week. For as long as I’ve lived in Ottawa, the building has been in a state of disrepair, and it got me wondering what this building looked like in its heyday. I managed to dig up this old picture courtesy of OttawaStart.com.

Somerset House circa 1900 (Image via Heritage Ottawa)

Somerset House was originally built in 1899, and over the years was a dry goods store, a hotel, and a pub. Unrelated to the building, but worth noting, is in the picture above, the person to the right in the foreground appears to be riding a donkey.

You can see a sliver of the building in this later photo of the corner of Bank and Somerset. The building in the centre of this photo was the Bank of Montreal, and is currently part of the Your Independent Grocer (known more commonly, of course, as Hartman’s) – you can still see this outer facade on the Somerset side of the building.

(Bank of Montreal exterior, 1954. Image MG393-NP-30364-001, copyright held by the City of Ottawa Archives)