Unbuilt Calgary. Stephanie White

      Figure 10-5. This drawing, EV Pedestrian Concept Design Study, shows a +15 8th Avenue extension over the present parking lots and LRT open chasm, depositing people directly onto the block that contains the St. Louis Hotel. The roadway directly behind the Municipal Building becomes parkland; in fact, the whole two-block-wide 8th Avenue section is heavily treed, a quiet oasis behind the civic machine of the Municipal Building.

       Harold Hanen fonds, Glenbow Museum and Archives, M8906-261.

      However, by this time, in the late 1970s, Calgary was in the throes of its second oil boom, awash with disposable income and both embarrassed by and impatient with anything and anybody not participating in the boom. All downtown housing was levelled in preparation of massive high-rise development facing the Bow River; east downtown was gone. With the 1982 crash, it was left as one huge six-by-five-block gravel parking lot, a state in which it remained until 2009 and the advent of the East Village development plan. The destruction of the east downtown Calgary infrastructure, such as it was, was made easier because it had been cut off from the rest of downtown by the sheer eight-storey mirrored glass cliff that was the back of the 1985 municipal building. Out of sight, east downtown didn’t even have sentimental value and was soon out of mind. It became a prostitute’s stroll, the Safeway became a food bank and then was torn down for more parking, and it passed the 1990s as a drug-fuelled, homeless blot on the downtown core. A set of incongruous senior citizens’ apartment blocks facing Fort Calgary and a brave loft-condominium tower were marooned in this social wasteland.