The Nortel campus in Ottawa, which has been sold to the federal government.Dave Chan for The Globe and Mail
The Nortel Networks research campus in Ottawa once represented everything the city dreamed of becoming - a world-respected hive of activity staffed by the type of super-nerds who could change the world one algorithm at a time.
But that was then. The city's dream of escaping its dreary bureaucratic reputation was officially put down this week by a rapidly expanding federal government that is desperate for office space.
While there will be no gravestone planted anywhere on the site's 370 acres, an obituary is clearly in order. No longer will engineers in corduroy pants and patched sweaters waste away the days chatting about photonics and frequencies - the civil servants from downtown are moving to the suburbs.
Way back when, the Carling Campus, as it was known, was packed full of geniuses whose inventions were revolutionizing phone networks and clearing the way for the introduction of the Internet. Long before Research In Motion asserted its global dominance, Nortel was the country's technological heavyweight - and it stacked up well against any challenger.
There was no hint of the ridiculously enormous catastrophe to come - that its shares would drop from $1,231 in the 2000s as crushing debt and changing markets forced the company to seek the shelter of bankruptcy courts. The good times were great, and you could hardly walk down the street without meeting someone who had just been hired by the world's greatest telecom company.
Nortel at its peak was more than just a company, it was a catalyst for the city's burgeoning technology community. It spun off dozens of high-tech companies and thousands of high-paying jobs, transforming the city into a technology hotbed.
Civic leaders were able to refer to the region as Silicon Valley North with straight faces, and when a monthly newspaper launched using that name, everyone agreed it was a brilliant idea. City officials even flirted with adopting a new slogan, which they all agreed to never speak about ever again after everyone came to their senses - Technically Beautiful.
"Nortel allowed the city to have some swagger and we all dreamed that we were replacing the old guard with a new generation of technology entrepreneurs," said Martin Vandewouw, who worked at the campus in the 1980s and is now the president of KRP Development Group in Kanata. "It was all about technology, innovation and risk. It was everything that government was not, in the middle of a government town."
The seeds for the campus were planted in 1961, when 46 engineers agreed to commute to the western edge of town at a company that was then called Northern Electric. The company was working along the fringes, developing technology that would eventually allow phone companies to connect calls from house-to-house without operators frantically plugging in wires.
The company's engineers also wanted to prove that information could be transmitted over glass fibres, a suggestion that was outlandish at the time but is now the basis of the world's high-speed telecom networks.
Their work had the potential to transform Ottawa from a sleepy government town to a burgeoning centre of innovation. Within five years, 800 workers were toiling away in what would eventually be the research and development headquarters for Nortel Networks.
The city would spend the next few decades telling itself over and over that it was indeed Silicon Valley North, just like its marketing materials said. There was reason for its swagger - the little research facility morphed over time into the globally respected Carling Campus, a world-class research hub creatively named after the street it faces (they were engineers, not poets), with 11 buildings and up to 10,000 super-geniuses working at any one time on any number of complicated and unlikely technologies.
"Nortel employees divided the world into two types - engineers and non-engineers and they treated non-engineers like second-class citizens," said Ian Lee, the MBA director at the Carleton University Sprott School of Business. "They were geeky and they all dressed the same, but there was some extraordinary human capital there. The company failed because of its strategy, not because it didn't have brilliant engineers."
As important as the company's technologies were, the campus will be remembered most for the way it fostered a sense of community among its employees. A late 1990s expansion saw the site swell to 11 buildings and more than two million square feet of office space, but all of the buildings were connected with tunnels and featured huge windows so workers could look out at the country setting - which included a manufactured lake.
The campus was also the home of North America's largest recreational softball league, with thousands of employees playing in six different divisions. It was part of the company's holistic approach to employee health, which is common now but was groundbreaking in the 1980s.
"It was like a corporate Disneyland," said Alan Kearns, a recruitment expert who helped place contract employees at the campus through the boom years of the late 1990s. "The site was more influential than they get credit for - they realized they had people in stressful situations and built a space full of water and ponds and it had a huge impact on their happiness. That just wasn't very common."
The sense of wonder remained, even as the company fought to stave off bankruptcy before finally giving in last year. Kelvin Ng was a Nortel intern in 2007, and spent a year chronicling the campus on film just because he was enraptured with the park-like setting.
"I thought that the campus was like a large castle," said Mr. Ng, who now works at Research In Motion. "When I took those pictures, I wasn't thinking 'Wow, this company is performing terribly.' The only thing I had on my mind was 'Wow, this campus is beautiful.' "
Of course, the company was performing terribly. The company had $1-billion in the bank, but the global credit crisis, falling sales and a plunging stock price persuaded its executives the end was nigh. It filed for bankruptcy protection in January of 2009, and the real estate sale is one of the last loose ends waiting to be tied up.
It had $4.5-billion in debt when it packed it in, and had already shed most of its Ottawa work force. The sale will pull more civil servants to the west end of the city, a seismic shift in the distribution. And while the government's estimated $544-billion debt dwarfs Nortel's fatal $4.5-billion bill, its creditors are far less likely to come after its real estate holdings when times get tough.
"There was a time when it seemed we'd all end up working for Nortel one day," said Mark Sutcliffe, who published the Ottawa Business Journal through the tech boom. "You could probably say that about the government today."
It was a good run, but Silicon Valley North is once again Canada's Capital Region. But at least residents can skate along the Rideau Canal or gaze wistfully across the river at the Gatineau Hills and know that if they have to be bureaucrats, at least they are doing it in one of the country's most beautiful cities.
Technically.