Ottawa's first postwar subdivision, now nearly eighty
Manor Park has an unusually specific origin. The first development on the site was the Rockcliffe Annex in the mid-1920s, and after the war Manor Park was built over the top of it as Ottawa’s first postwar subdivision, with the first families moving in during 1947. It was built by a consortium of five Ottawa-area developers and the newspapers of the time described it as Canada’s first completely co-ordinated community. The great majority of the single-family housing stock dates from the late 1940s and early 1950s, which puts it right at the transition point from plank to plywood subfloor, both nailed rather than glued. Eighty years later those connections have had a lot of seasonal movement to work through. The later Cardinal Glen pocket, which began construction in 1988, is a separate and much younger cohort.