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Located in a historic district of Canada’s National Capital, the York Street Public School has been a fixture in Ottawa’s Lowertown neighborhood since it was built in 1921. Having been constructed in what is known as the Collegiate Gothic Style, even through decades of development that has taken place around the school, its original design still reigns true to this day. 

Ahead of this year’s summer Olympic Games in Paris, Cadillac Fairview teamed up with Team Canada in an effort to expand opportunities for play this summer with the launch of “CF Play Makers,” - an initiative for school-aged children to harness the power of sports and playtime.

Looking to give children more access to physical play opportunities, the program aims to promote the many health benefits of physical play while inspiring a passion for playtime and organized sports. Starting in Ontario, the program will spread across Canada by refurbishing play spaces at schools and other community spaces.

Image: Pickleball Kingdom

If there’s one game that is making big moves, it’s one that you’ve likely been exposed to in one way or another over the past few years. Popularized throughout the 2010s, we now find ourselves in the middle of what many are labeling the “pickleball gold rush”. With the first national tournament in 2009 drawing over 400 players from Canada and the United States, the pickleball bug has since bitten participants of all ages.

As such, the search for space has become a growing challenge for facility managers and communities alike. Although many have repurposed tennis courts and converted other under-utilized outdoor spaces into pickleball courts, it has hardly kept  up with demand. As part of the rush, we’ve watched as individuals and even commercial real estate players get into the game in an effort to secure more space for additional courts.

Proudly serving the National Capital Region for over 100 years, to say that the Ottawa Boys and Girls Club is a staple in the community would be an incredible understatement. The club currently provides free community-based services and supportive places for area residents across four full-service clubhouses located throughout the city, along with a number of satellite campuses.

We’ve had a long-standing relationship with the local Boys and Girls Club for a number of years now and working alongside them always gives us the added bonus of making a difference in our community. 

As the need for highly-specialized padded rooms continues to grow, so too does our custom padding department. Working once again with our partners at King Carpentry - with whom we’ve done many of these rooms - our latest project brought us to the picturesque St. Lawrence Seaway.

A call was placed from a high school in the area who saw our work in a neighbouring school and was looking to replicate the work. With a growing number of students in need of a safe and calming space to facilitate de-escalation and relaxation we were once again called to design and install a fire-rated safe room.

With the rise in mental health awareness, we welcome opportunities to participate in projects that foster such development. For one of our recent projects, we were proud to have been invited to lead a project at Canada’s largest research facility for mental health and addictions.

The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) is the result of an amalgamation of four separate facilities - the Queen Street Mental Health Centre, the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, the Addiction Research Foundation, and the Donwood Institute. 

Having completed a number of projects in the beautiful state of Nebraska, we returned for another job, this time  in the state’s Capital city of Lincoln. Originally named Landcaster, the city was renamed in 1869 after the great President Abraham Lincoln. In that same year, the University of Nebraska was established in Lincoln and today remains the largest university in the state, serving nearly 30,000 students.

Our partners at Crouch Recreation in Omaha, brought us yet another opportunity in the Cornhusker State, this time at an established Christian school in neighbouring Lincoln. With a history dating back to the 1950s, Lincoln Christian School has been serving local families and the community with faith-based education for decades, currently boasting nearly 900 students and over 80 faculty members.

Located just inside Canada’s National Capital Region is the small town of St. Albert, Ontario. The small, Franco-Canadian community is located within what is known as The Nation, a municipality in the united counties of Prescott and Russel. In addition to having a rich history including a nearby ghost town, St. Albert is also home to one of the nation’s oldest cheesemakers.

In the fall of 2022, we were contacted by a school in the region that was looking to perform some upgrades and modifications to one of its rooms. Looking to create a room for students requiring a safe and calming space, key stakeholders from the school were looking for a custom padding solution that could cover both the flooring and the walls of the room.

Our custom padding department recently answered the call for another unusual and highly customized padding job.  We were approached by Crestwood High School in Peterborough, Ontario to design some padding as part of some recent renovations to the gymnasium.

Serving as home to the Mustangs, the school began a list of renovations which included some brand-new storage units that would allow for additional athletic equipment to be stored when not in use. Because these units run along the edge of the sports court they required the installation of safety padding to protect student athletes.

Managing long-term relationships with our customer base over the last 40-plus years has been one of the many factors that has contributed to our longevity as an organization. While we revel in developing new relationships and customers, it is our repeat business that has been a constant factor in our company’s success.