“Well, hello, Centretown.
My name is Cameron MacIntosh. I’m the president and founder of Tuesday Club 613. We are a community organization that aims to make Ottawa fun and support small businesses by organizing events on Tuesdays, which are usually one of the slower nights in the national capital.
We have been going for about four years now and have had just shy of a hundred and seventy events. But in terms of my personal motivation, I remember very distinctly when I was a kid how hard my father worked in order to build his small business. He was, in fact, a baker, which is funny because I am allergic to gluten. So, life is full of little ironies. But I’ve always had a real passion for people who look to build and create things that are new in places where they don’t exist. So, it’s a big part of the reason I’m a huge fan of places like Fono. I like that it’s a unique concept. It’s something that Ottawa doesn’t really have. And honestly, my big passion is very much about finding exciting, interesting things in a place that you might not think of, and about showing people who may have a misconception about, say, what Ottawa is like, showing them that it is, in fact, an amazing city that we all are very fortunate to be citizens of.
So, Ismael is a local legend who has a souped-up car that he has personally described as a piece of crap. But what he has done is taken it, decorated it, and added in, I believe, eight massive subwoofers which will literally hit the block like a 20-megaton bomb. But anyway, so I reached out to him simply to ask, “Hey, man…”
Ismael is somebody who works very hard to make Ottawa fun, to do something interesting. He literally does it because he wants to make people smile. And I think that’s fantastic, and I think there’s so much potential. There are so many really intriguing things that happen in Ottawa that I think often get overlooked. And, you know, for me, sometimes all it takes is, you know, a message reaching out in order to make things happen and to connect people. But yeah, seriously, I’m very proud. I’m from Eastern Canada, and for me, a big part of our culture is about creating community. It’s about welcoming people. It is about feeling like you’re part of people and a culture, and I feel that Ottawa lacks that sometimes. I think a lot of the people who come to Ottawa, they… they come here later in life, they come here for school, they come here for work, and they don’t always have an easy way to connect with the city that they live in. And so Tuesday Club 613, we make it… we try to make it really easy for people to access things that are unique about the national capital. And, frankly, it’s like the city’s amazing.
Well, I would really like to build Tuesday Club 613 into a local institution that people who are new to Ottawa, who are looking for something exciting to do, or looking for some way to engage with their community and connect with the things that are happening, I would like Tuesday Club 613 to be the first resource that people think of. I would like them to connect with fantastic businesses, with places that are doing something unique and interesting that are making the city more lively and vibrant. We want to make Ottawa fun. Like, and I think if we can keep getting people out on a night where they would generally write it off and not think about it, if we can, you know, bring… we can make people happy, just like Ismael, if we can bring some smiles to people’s faces, that’s actually something the city is… is very much in need of. I know it sounds a little hokey, but it’s genuinely like… I’m happy when I see other people happy, and I feel like Tuesday Club has been really lucky that we’ve been able to find a way to make people happy in the city. And as long as we’re still doing that, as long as we’re, you know, we’re still bringing some joy to people’s lives, we’re gonna keep going. And, you know, 5, 10 years from now, if we found a more sophisticated, impactful, and impressive way to do it, that’s the goal. And I don’t know exactly what that will look like, but I do know that the spirit of the thing is to… to help people feel joy and, you know, and just, man, to make… make life fun, make Ottawa fun. That’s all it is.”
Cameron MacIntosh
Founder of Tuesday Club 613
@tuesdayclub613
Photos and Interview by @_finn
