Parking garage for new Civic hospital gets committee's OK
4-storey parkade would be the first structure at the future $2.8B campus
Ottawa's planning committee has approved The Ottawa Hospital's plans for a parking garage for the new Civic campus at Dows Lake.
In a nine-to-two vote at the end of an eight-hour meeting — one that saw councillors come and go to deal with the convoy protest — the committee endorsed the site plan for the four-storey garage with 2,500 parking spaces and a rooftop park and sent it back to city staff to finalize.
City council had already approved last fall the master plan for the entire $2.8-billion hospital campus, set to open in 2028 and become among the priciest projects ever built in Ottawa.
Part of the reason the hospital wanted to keep approvals moving, said executive vice-president Joanne Read, was to start construction and avoid losing purchasing power as costs rise.
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The first structure to go up on the new campus will be the parkade on the eastern edge at Carling Avenue, Preston Street and Prince of Wales Drive, atop the Trillium O-Train line.
If construction begins this spring, the garage could be finished by the end of 2024, added project manager Graham Bird.
In sketches, the hospital's architects laid out how the parking garage would include 310 secure indoor bicycle parking spots and another 225 outside. A winding path would lead to a rooftop park with a play structure, an Indigenous garden and four courts for the DARA tennis club, as it will lose its long-standing location to the future hospital.
