RPCA Summer Festival and Movie Night
Join us on Saturday August 29 at 6:30 pm in Balena Park!
On August 29th, we will have our annual Summer Festival and Movie Night. This event is always one of our biggest events and is a great way to celebrate the summer while meeting your neighbours. For 2026, in conjunction with the City of Ottawa’s celebration of Bytown 200 we have received additional event funding and we have some exciting, lasting additions to the regular event. Ottawa is celebrating its bicentennial in 2026, marking exactly 200 years since the settlement of Bytown was founded by Lieutenant Colonel John By on September 26, 1826. The city-wide Bytown 200 programming honors the region’s transformation from a frontier logging camp into Canada’s capital. In addition to the city supporting local community groups like ours, the city is supporting Business Improvement Associations and Cultural groups to deliver programming throughout the summer celebrating Bytown 200 leading to the marquee celebration on September 26th.
At the Summer Carnival & Movie Night will be showing a short National Film Board movie on how Bytown was turned into the capital of Canada before the main event movie, Zootopia 2.
As part of our funding the RPCA and residents will also create a temporary celebratory collage mural on one wall of the Balena Fieldhouse in honor of the 200th anniversary of Bytown, using a banner and then pinning up drawings by residents young and old alike. Selfies will be encouraged!
Two lasting additions to Riverview Park from the event funding will be a permanent community communication board and a set of community historical poster boards.
The community communication board will encourage the sharing of information about important community events in locations that are central, open to the public and attract a wide spectrum of residents. This bulletin board would allow the RPCA and other community groups opportunities to share information about upcoming events and key issues.
The RPCA, in close partnership with the Riverview Park Review, our beloved local community newspaper, plans to research and create a number (6-10) of historical posterboards about the community and its evolution; and to display these during the Summer Carnival and Movie Night. Some historical topics to explore:
– include the establishment of Riverview Park as a community in the 1950s;
– the Grey Nuns Convent
– the confidential Spy Agency here
– Balena Park containing a major skating oval;
– the evolution of the market area on Alta Vista near Dorion;
– and the protection of the Coronation woods.
These poster boards could then be used for historical walks in the neighborhood in future years.
