Old Ottawa South: The Neighbourhood That Used to Be Rideauville

Not Always "Old"

"Old Ottawa South" sounds like it's always been called that, like the name has just been sitting there since the neighbourhood was built. It hasn't. Before it had this name, it had a completely different one: Rideauville.

The Origin

American and British settlers began arriving around 1814, and the area stayed sparsely populated for decades under the name Rideauville. That started to change after Confederation in 1867, when a canal bridge finally gave the area a real connection to Ottawa proper.

Rideauville incorporated as its own police village in 1905, and just two years later, in 1907, it was annexed into the City of Ottawa.

The Streetcar Boom

Annexation alone didn't build the neighbourhood, a streetcar line did. Around 1910, a line roughly tracing today's bus route 7 began running through the area, turning around in what is now Brewer Park. That access to downtown sparked rapid growth, and most of the homes going up through the 1920s and '30s took the form of Craftsman and American Foursquare houses, many of which are still standing today.

The neighbourhood's geography hasn't changed either: it still sits neatly between the Rideau Canal to the north and the Rideau River to the south, with Carleton University just across the water.

Unlike some Ottawa neighbourhoods, Old Ottawa South never really had a second wave of postwar construction in the 1940s and '50s, by then, the streetcar-era boom had already built most of it out, which is part of why its housing stock feels so consistently vintage today.

What it has instead is serious walkability. Old Ottawa South regularly scores in the 90s on Walk Score, earning it "Walker's Paradise" status, with Bank Street's independent shops, cafes, and restaurants, plus the canal and river pathways, all within easy reach on foot, no car required for most of daily life.

The Takeaway

The word "Old" wasn't even added until the 1990s, purely to tell this long-established, central neighbourhood apart from newer southern suburbs that had started borrowing similar names. Today it's known for Bank Street's heritage shops, theatres, and antique stores, around 300 buildings on Ottawa's heritage reference list, and a progressive, upper-middle-class character that's held steady for generations.

It's a good reminder that the neighbourhoods carrying the newest-sounding names sometimes have the oldest roots of all. Old Ottawa South had its own identity as Rideauville decades before it was ever annexed into Ottawa, the city grew out to meet a community that was already there.

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