June 18, '15 - Counter-attack of the Dutch cavalry (centre) & Mont St. Jean farm, hospital of the allies (at right), a segment of the panorama of the battle of Waterloo, Braine-l'Alleud

The Belge government has advanced a proposal to Unesco for the designation of this panorama as a Unesco world heritage site. whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5364/ The painting and the round bldg. housing it were completed in 1912. The proposal maintains that "the Panorama of the Battle of Waterloo is one of the most important witnesses to the panorama phenomenon in the world." But I like the more finely detailed and colourful one at Sevastopol much better. www.flickr.com/photos/97924400@N00/4286380753/in/photostr... Importantly (for Unesco's consideration) it's older too, dating from 1904-1905. But it was damaged in the war and I don't know how much the Soviets have restored it. But what's really something is that a larger, older (by 20 yr.s) panorama of finer quality has been closed to the public since 2018 (I got to see it in 2016, I'll upload shots when I catch up with this stream) and it's here in Canada (!) at Ste.-Anne-de-Beaupre, Quebec, a 360 degree scene of New Testament Jerusalem from Golgotha painted in Munich, and it's pristine. Until 2 yrs ago it was exhibited in its own rotunda by the Trans-Canada (hwy.) and was marketed with the cheesy name 'the Cyclorama' which has to be part of the problem. www.cycloramadejerusalem.com/en/ www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU9Hm8Mrvo8 But I ask what's wrong with us, that we have a much earlier surviving panorama from the great age of panoramas (they were a big fad) and which is arguably superior to that at Braine l'Alleud, and not only is it not the subject of a proposal to Unesco, but it's been shuttered.

 

- Here in Ontario we have 2 Unesco sites, the Rideau canal and Pimachiowin Aki, the latter designated only in 2018, a vast tract of the boreal forest in the west (in a huge border-straddling site shared with Manitoba), the ancestral homeland of the Anishinaabeg and under First Nations management. But I ask "only 2?" (There are currently 22 designated Canadian sites on the list; 6! in Alberta incl. 1 shared with B.C. and 1 with the N.W.T., 2 more in B.C. incl. 1 shared with the Yukon and Alaska, 1 more in the Yukon, 1 more in the N.W.T., 3 in Quebec, 4 in N & L, 3 in N.S., and none in N.B., P.E.I., Sask., & Nunavut.) A list follows of sites and sights in Ontario with good potential for Unesco designation.:

- Toronto's 'Gooderham & Worts distillery' was the most intact Victorian industrial heritage site in North America before it was gutted less than 20 yrs. back for shops and condos. I was told that it would've been a candidate for Unesco designation if it had been preserved in the state it was in as recently as the 90s! It wasn't to be what with developers' $$ and our shady politics.

- But we have Moose Factory up on James Bay, the 2nd HBC trading post (1673), but much more intact and, importantly, more 'representative' than the first, Rupert House, 1668, a bit further east along the bay in Quebec, aka 'Waskaganish' today, both on my bucket list. (The remaining historic bldg.s in its 'Centennial park' date from the 19th cent., incl. St. Thomas Anglican church, the powder magazine, the HBC staff house, etc., but I think that should be fine with Unesco.)

- Point Pelee is an important stopover on one of the greatest flyways for migratory birds and Monarch butterflies in N.A. (which I toured the once in late 2002) www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_ZjRzqLDOw I heard or read once that it's the greatest 'flyway' north of Costa Rica. Birds fly south across the southern end of Lake Erie from the tip of the point after flying SW along the northern shores of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. It's a mecca for birdwatchers.

- Petroglyphs provincial park at Nephton near Peterborough is a gimme. Petroglyph sites all over the world have been designated, and this is the largest known concentration of indigenous rock carvings in Canada and the best preserved site representing a culture that ranged over a vast territory in what is now Ontario 900 yr.s ago or earlier. I've toured it en route to Bon Echo, but photography of the carvings is forbidden. The park is often open after dark in summer when lights are shone on the carvings from an angle which really makes them pop, or so I've been told.

- Killarney park and the Georgian Bay Islands provincial park both represent a pristine natural ecosystem on the Canadian shield which could be 'representative', and it helps that both are so beautiful. Killarney's famous for its fall colours, and the view from a height at 'the Crack' in the fall often features in calendars (I think, or it should).

- Sites at Temagami include the "White Bear forest", the "White Bear trail" and the largest stand of old growth white and red pine in Canada.

- Packs of Eastern wolves in Algonquin provincial park (we referred to them as 'Timber wolves' in the 70s) have prowled and howled there since time immemorial and didn't have to be reintroduced as they've been stateside. Unfortunately, they're under threat once again, this time from the coyote, an invasive species. Some coyotes moved north some decades ago and interbred with wolves in the park (some ecologists maintain that the Eastern wolf subspecies is the result of much earlier interbreeding /b/ the Gray wolf and the coyote; the geneaology of all North American wolf and coyote subspecies is hotly debated en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_wolf ) which then became a fountain of the new hybrid 'coy-wolf', which has arrived and how in and @ Toronto and southern Ontario and spread throughout southern Quebec, the Maritimes and south down the Eastern Seaboard. Many ecologists consider this to be a good thing apart from the threat to the genetic integrity of the Eastern wolf subspecies. (That threat [a result of human hunting and trapping o/s protected areas, which leads to genetic introgression with the coyote due to a lack of mates] won't be a selling point to the Parisians at Unesco, quite the contrary if they're important to the application unless it includes a plan to protect them.)

- Bon Echo provincial park is home to the Bon Echo or Mazinaw rock (a cliff-face really) on deep, narrow Lake Mazinaw with its well-preserved pictographs (First Nations paintings in red ochre, the greatest collection in North America - !) an art gallery to tour by canoe with images of Nanabush et al. at a site considered sacred for many centuries if not millenia, another gimme. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlTyDonk5cI

- Big, beautiful, perfectly preserved Fort Henry in Kingston (1830s), all in white limestone should be a contender (or should the prize go to the Halifax citadel? The fort at Quebec city is included with the old town in one designation; can there be only 1 British colonial fort on the list? They were built in different periods.) Two well-preserved Martello towers in town could be included in the designation.

- Fort York here in Toronto has the largest collection of original, intact bldg.s built or rebuilt during and for the War of 1812 in North America. The explosion of the powder magazine set by retreating Brits and Canadians during the American attack on the city was the largest on North American soil to that point in history en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_artificial_non-nuclear_expl.... , resulting in the deaths of Zebulon Pike (after whom Pikeville, Penn., and Pikeville and Pike Co., Kentucky were named) and more American troops at once than all the Canadians and Brits killed in the battle for the city, and so enraged the Americans that they pillaged the city for 9 days. But they lacked supplies and abandoned the city, and the fort was promptly rebuilt by the Brits in the midst of the war. It includes the remains of the oldest kitchen in Toronto.

- There's that lovely, rolling north shore of Lake Superior, with its views from a height out over the lake, an inspiration for Lawren Harris. Not enough people know how beautiful that stretch is, the road from just north of 'the Soo' to Agawa bay in particular. That stretch offers one of the most beautiful road trips on the planet in the fall (@ Oct. 1). A proposal for designation could and should include the famous pictographs at Agawa bay with Mishepezhu, the underwater panther (which could be the most famous indigenous work of art in Canada east of British Columbia), Mishikenabek (sp?), etc.

- Is Niagara Falls too built up with the Clifton Hill cheese-fest? (I love all the fudge shops, but would the Parisians from Unesco?) It is what it is, a mind-blowing world wonder. The Horseshoe falls on the Ontario side is the largest continuous single-drop waterfall by volume anywhere on the planet.

- I envision a collective designation of sites on both sides of the Ontario-New York border, and possibly in Michigan too, representing the history of the 'Underground Railroad', incl. a preserved hiding place in a church in Buffalo (!), the 'Salem Chapel' attended by Harriet Tubman in Ste. Catharines, ON, and possibly the cabin in Dresden, ON which was the home of Josiah Henson, Beecher Stowe's inspiration for 'Uncle Tom' in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'. (That book hasn't aged so well, but it was important to the history of the abolition movement stateside.)

- The 'Royal Chapel of the Mohawks' in Brantford, the oldest church in Ontario (1785), has designation potential as it represents the movement of Six Nations populations west across the border, their settlement in Ontario, and the early, colonial history of the reserve following the British defeat in the American Revolution. Important historical figures are buried in its churchyard. It could be included in a collective designation with sites in the Finger Lakes region and in Georgia and Oklahoma representing the history of the 'Six Nations' and of the Cherokee and other First nations and their (often tragic) efforts to cope and coexist with encroaching communities of European immigrants and their descendants.

- The Davidite 'Temple of Peace' in Sharon north of Toronto (1825-'31) is an unusual jewel of a church, and a gimme for its architecture, history and level of preservation.

 

- But we have only 2 designated sites and not a one on Canada's tentative list, which currently has 10: 3 in B.C., 3 in Nunavut, 2 in the Yukon, 1 in Sask., and 1 in N & L. The westerners and northerners get it. Btw, we have 6 top-notch Canadian paleontology sites on the Unesco list (although the Burgess Shale is included in the Rocky Mtn.s parks site). So 1/4 of our world heritage sites are about fossils. The relative absence of Ontario from the list is a function of our ignorance of what we have and of its appeal to visitors and/or our lack of interest in trying to appeal to a broader range of them. Europeans and all types love heritage and historic and prehistoric sites, and anything representative or superlative in natural sites, and go out of their way to tour them, something Albertans have learned these past 40 years. (Again, Alberta's home to 6 of the 22 Canadian sites, > 1/4.) They stumped for designation of the 'Writing-on-stone' Blackfoot site, where there's less to be seen than at 'Petroglyphs' here which, again, isn't even on the tentative list. In Ontario we have more to offer than baseball and hockey games and musical theatre and film festivals (not to say that we don't do well with that).

 

- There are also several sites and sights with Unesco potential written all over them in Manitoba (the depot at York Factory on Hudson's Bay for one, indubitably! and the red-sided-garter-snake dens in Narcisse, see my photo) and in New Brunswick (lovely, historic St.-Andrews-by-the-Sea? How about a site representative of Loyalist architectural heritage in that town or in St. John?). One risk in seeking to nominate parts of or a piece of the Bay of Fundy, such as the famous and photogenic Hopewell Capes, as a site in light of that Bay being home to 'the highest tides in the world' is that it risks revealing that it's not. Tides at Ungava Bay are higher (in season), and so Quebec could seek designation for Ungava on the same basis and dispute the claim. (Or would they? Ungava is practically inaccessible to tourists, and any publicity could hurt NB and NS.) At least both Bays are in Canada. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh46vxgru88

 

- Another example of how clueless Ontarians can be as to local heritage: 2nd only to the telephone, or to the long distance phone call (first made to or from Brantford by A.G. Bell), and not including natural features like the Great Lakes or Niagara Falls, I can't think of a more popular or successful or renowned thing on an international, national, or provincial scale that has its point of origin in Ontario, be it cultural or otherwise, than the McIntosh apple. It was first grown by John McIntosh on his farm in Dundela, ON, @ 50-60 clicks SE of Ottawa just north of the 401. (I could be biased. It's my favourite apple. I was raised on it.) But that farm receives no interest or assistance with its preservation from any level of government, despite that the very tree on which the first McIntosh apple grew still stands there.: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbQS--BfCaw

- www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgSHB4wk1bk

- There's some more competition.: again, Harriott Beecher Stowe based 'Uncle Tom' on Josiah Henson of Dresden, ON; the Huron Carol, an increasingly popular addition to the Christmas caroling canon, was written and first sung at Jesuit missions here in the 1640s www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-VIGkWEbe0 ; and the first commercial oil well in N.A. (while not something to be proud of), and the first anywhere o/s Poland, was at Petrolia, ON (1858).

Done