Shopping in Ottawa

Phil Jenkins has a nostalgic item Shopping Down Memory Lane in Monday's Ottawa Citizen worth reading. He suggest's Lapointe's Fish is the oldest continuously operating business in Ottawa, 144 years old.

It might be interesting to compile a list of long-lasting Ottawa businesses. There's no lack of resources.

City directories go back more than 144 years, and there are newspapers older than that, both on microfilm, at the downtown Ottawa Public Library.

LAC also has them, perhaps more than the OPL, although these days you never know if some dolt LAC bureaucrat has decided to "de-accession" most of them, saving only a few so we know what a city directory and newspaper looked like.  That seems to be the way LAC is going.

Let's not overlook the new City Archives near Centrepointe; and the collection in the library at the Bytown Museum.

It may perhaps be that the longest established business isn't in Ottawa's downtown area but in one of the rural communities that now enjoy, or otherwise, being part of the larger City of Ottawa.