on>
Cover
UNBUILT CALGARY
STEPHANIE WHITE
Preface
Writing this book has been an interesting process. It isn’t the book I started out to write, but as it developed, the importance of land and landscape came to the fore in what is often considered to be a very tough city. I have become aware of the distance between underlying values and public relations. What impressed me is how many ideas are still being developed today that appeared in plans made at Calgary’s very beginning.
Both sides of my family came to Calgary during the wheat boom as British immigrants; my mother’s grandfather was busy flinging together small houses in Albert Park in 1909, just at the end of the wheat boom and its associated real estate bubble. Another grandfather surveyed the layout of the Stampede racetrack on his honeymoon in 1907. As children, both my parents lived on the same street, 18A Southwest, on the edge of the city — beyond was prairie and buffalo wallows, and the endless summers of the Depression.
I worked in Calgary during the architectural boom in the late 1970s and early 1980s; like so many after it crashed, I left to find work elsewhere. One can be most nostalgic about Calgary and the landscapes of southern Alberta when one no longer lives in it, so much so that I eventually wrote a doctoral dissertation about how modernism in architecture and planning hit the landscapes of Calgary, and how Calgary bent it to fit.
It is repeated several times throughout the text about how easily unbuilt projects were discarded — the drawings and all the accompanying files. The architects are long gone, and there is no one to ask anymore. However, those drawings that were found — ink and pencil on paper — can be terrifically eloquent, and so we must thank the generations of draftsmen, designers, and architects who had so many ideas about how to live well, and how to live well in the city.
Linda Fraser, of the Canadian Architectural Archives at the University of Calgary, has been extraordinarily helpful, as have Lindsay Moir of the Glenbow Museum Archives; Iris Morgan of the Maps, Academic Data, Geographic Information Centre at the University of Calgary; and Carolyn Ryder of the Community Archives of the Calgary Public Library.
Tom Martin, Gerald Forseth, Dan Jenkins, Manfred Grote, Karl Pokorny, Ali Famili, Barry Johns, Bob Ellsworthy, Rick Balbi, David Lachapelle, and Darrel Babuk all took the time to discuss Calgary and their work in it, and to them I am very grateful. Not all the projects I looked at have been included, but they were all thought about and their circumstances and ideas incorporated somewhere in the text, even if not by name.
I would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and its Alberta Creative Development Initiative program for the research portion of this project.
Introduction
Calgary has long been known as a typical boom/bust town: its mayors have been boosters and caretakers, it grows in spurts and then lies fallow, it explodes and crashes. But, as a city, Calgary is never dismayed by its slow periods; it plans, always plans for its next glorious future. Because growth is not steady, many of these plans aren’t implemented in their entirety — fragments are built, and partial plans are rushed into production before the next downturn, which always comes sooner than anyone predicts. By the next boom, these plans are out-of-date relics of a previous era.
In these superseded plans are visions for Calgary that tell much about the social history of this place, its ambitions, its particularly maverick behaviour, and its opacity to the rest of Canada. The projects in this book are ones that were particularly prescient and contain ideas still in play today. What is surprising about many is how long ago these ideas were formed.
Calgary started as a fort in 1875, became a CPR service depot in 1883, and by time the 1901–13 wheat boom crashed, Calgary had established itself as a centre for settlement.
Here are three telling images to start this book of Calgary visions. The Dominion Survey Map of 1884 documents homestead plots and the new railway; this is what was actually, measurably, here. The next is an 1885 photograph of what Calgary looked like. The bottom image is a declarative CPR plan of downtown Calgary in 1884 drawn up to attract both investors and commercial development by implying there was more building already in progress than there actually was.
This book also describes Calgary in various contexts larger than the city itself, which is sometimes self-absorbed to the point that things such as recessions, international political events, and federal and provincial changes are taken personally. For many architects whose
Figure 0-1. Surveyed by Charles Eugene Larue, July 3, 1883, and approved March 8, 1884, this is the actual Dominion Lands Office survey based on the Dominion Grid of townships and ranges. Township 24: six miles by six miles, divided into 36,640-acre sections. The marshy spot between sections 35 and 36 is in Albert Park today; the marsh straddling the corners of sections 2, 3, 10, and 11 is where Mawson planned his artisans’ village and where Manchester stands today. The lighter squares are cleared land, a condition of the Homestead Act, and the tiny black dots nearby are houses. The CPR line doesn’t go much farther than today’s downtown core.
Glenbow Archives NA-3487-9.
Figure 0-2. This 1885 photograph shows Calgary as a string of hostelries, hotels, small houses and storefronts, and a couple of churches, all facing south to the CPR tracks. Calgary has become such a green city; here, there is not a tree in sight. As none of these buildings are indicated on the Dominion Survey done in July 1883, and the plots only registered in January 1884, these buildings were all built in a year.
Glenbow Archives NA-4035-77.
Figure 0-3. This 1884 CPR Land Department map is signed by A.W. McVittie, surveyor, and states, “This Plan is correct and is prepared under the provisions of the North West Territories Registration of Titles Ordinance. Winnipeg, January 1st 1884.” The avenues are named after CPR financiers, presidents, and executives: Smith (11th Avenue), Stephen for 8th, McIntyre for 7th. Atlantic and Pacific Avenues flank the tracks, tying Calgary into a national landscape.
Glenbow Archives G3504-C151-1884-C212.
particular projects were not built, the circumstances are as vivid today as they were thirty years ago. It is time to step back and look at some of these unbuilt projects as significant declarations of the intent to build a responsive and thoughtful city. A factor in Calgary’s development has been its relatively transient population. Many Canadians have spent a few years in Calgary, especially during its boom times, and then moved on. Too, the young average age of Calgarians indicates that not everyone stays after they retire — the Okanagan and Vancouver Island beckon. So, while the population steadily increases, there are not a lot of people, or families, who have seen the city through all its phases. People are transferred to Calgary, or come to Calgary on spec, single or with young families, and take the city much as they find it. Its past is not their past, and they share Calgary’s present but not necessarily its future.
A Laurie Anderson quotation on the hoardings outside the Performing Arts Centre when it was undergoing renovation in 2012 said something along the lines of the more we tell our stories, the
