of Calgary Past, Present, and Future: A Preliminary Scheme for Controlling the Economic Growth of the City. London: Thomas H. Mawson & Sons, 1912.
Figure 8-1. This is the most telling redirection of Calgary away from the landscape of the CPR on 9th Avenue. This, for Mawson, was to be the Civic Centre, a series of plazas and monuments on Centre Street leading to a low, wide bridge over the Bow River. There is a discussion about incursions into the Bow River in chapter 25 with the River’s Edge project, where eddies and quiet channels can be cut to increase riverbank frontage and to tame the flow of water into an amenity. However, Mawson’s inclusion of rowing eights indicates that he saw the Bow as something like the Thames, rather than the blue-green glacier-fed river it is.
Thomas Mawson. The City of Calgary Past, Present, and Future: A Preliminary Scheme for Controlling the Economic Growth of the City. London: Thomas H. Mawson & Sons, 1912.
Mawson proposed an image of Calgary on the Bow derived almost directly from Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. This world’s fair was designed by Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted as a Beaux-Arts vision of the new American city: white, symmetrical, splendid, and neo-classical. It was an argument for comprehensive city planning over piecemeal, haphazard development driven by land speculation, as was the modus operandi in Calgary. The discourse of the City Beautiful was one of sight-lines and axes, uniform buildings, monuments and flanking public spaces; there was no room for the kind of rhizomatic, anarchic growth based on the self-interest found in a boom town on the Canadian prairies. It seems to have been floated as a material vision to which Calgary could aspire, as it is difficult to conceive of the social and political structures that would have been needed to facilitate Mawson’s plan. To enact such a plan would take a Napoleonic force, as happened in Paris in the 1850s under Haussmann, when the old city was buried under ceremonial boulevards, plazas, monuments, and avenues suitable to an imperial capital.
The Mawson plan came at the end of Calgary’s building boom, which was succeeded by the First World War, the difficult 1920s, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. By time the next building boom occurred, coinciding with the oil boom associated with the discovery of the Leduc oil fields in 1947, demolished European cities and imperialist ideas were no longer considered models — the U.S. was. And it was a postwar American model, not the 1791 Beaux-Arts plan of Washington D.C., but rather the postwar American city of freeways and suburban development, the space age and libertarianism, that changed Calgary radically.
Chapter 9
Traffic and Parking
Bill Milne was very active in the first oil boom of the 1950s and 1960s, relentlessly and effectively championing a modernist Calgary. He wrote, in a preface to a study of Calgary’s increasingly congested downtown core:
Along with a good number of Calgarians, I have become increasingly concerned with what is happening to the downtown business district.
The traffic, transit and pedestrian problems, and the new outlying shopping centre, all represent threats to the survival of the city centre. The Architect is in a little different position than most people in this respect. Firstly, he has access to information describing what is being done throughout the world regarding these problems, and secondly he has the planning and design background to suggest solutions that suit local conditions.[1]
Figure 9-3. How it works: “Free pedestrian movement in parking malls, slow moving traffic in parking malls. Kiosks in street intersections used as news stands ticket booths, telephones, fire alarms, waste paper disposals, information booths, mail boxes, etc. Ornamental street lighting only — no unsightly overhead wires in parking malls. No stop lights or parking on five lane ring road freeway.” Total possible parking: 2,650 cars.
Provincial Archives of Alberta, Accession Number 2008.0411.
These two paragraphs could have come from any year since 1960, when it was written. This is the ongoing dilemma for downtown Calgary: there are bigger draws in the suburbs — schools, shopping centres, malls, parks — than the downtown core itself. Yet, all traffic corridors funnel into the downtown, the LRT lines fan out from the core, and the centre is visible from the far edges of the city, a little wedding cake of tiers and towers, dense and intense, clearly the physical heart of the city. Although parking is expensive, it does not act as enough of a disincentive to driving to work, despite the light rail transit and the bus system. Rush hour starts at 6:00 a.m. and again at 3:30 p.m., traffic jams its way in, and nine hours later rams its way out.
Milne complained that there was a traffic light at every intersection in the downtown core, that no one could get anywhere fast and people had to battle cars at every turn. His thesis was that pedestrians and vehicles should mix with one another as in modern shopping centres, with the tempo geared to pedestrians. The entire downtown should be like a shopping centre while curb parking was doubled to 18,000 spaces, resulting in faster traffic. This is all so contradictory that it appears completely mad; however, it deserves unpacking.
This plan is based on two main propositions:
1 The Belt Highway, a counter-clockwise ring road that acted as a giant traffic circle without traffic lights stopping and starting the flow of cars. This would leave the downtown free of east–west crosstown traffic.
2 Cross Streets, made very discouraging by forcing drivers to take a zig-zag route from north to south with none of the streets as through-routes. This would have been so enraging that most drivers would have avoided the downtown completely. These cross streets then could have been used for parking.
The economics of this plan have a certain beauty: an alternative eight-hundred-space parking structure would cost the city $1.2 million and the parking would not be distributed evenly throughout the core. Rather, in Milne’s proposal, angle parking and a re-designation of existing roads would provide the extra eight hundred spaces needed, and at ground level. The new parking meters would pay for the new curb cuts, which would press the cars into the sidewalk, widening the driving lanes.
The biggest problem would be getting pedestrians across the current of the Belt Highway into what Milne predicted would be a “pedestrian kingdom.” The solution is pedestrian overpasses, which, he believed, “would have a spirit of adventure to them,” adding that “citizens walking over the bridge could watch the traffic passing underneath.” Less expensive would be synchronized walk/don’t walk lights on the Belt Highway. These would probably have had more adventure in them than the overpasses.
Streetcars — or their soon-to-be replacement, electric busses — would circle the core on the Belt Highway, pulling off into any of three bus loops for loading and transfers. There would be a maximum of a two-block walk from anywhere in the downtown core to one of these loops.
The absence of honking, idling, polluting, stop-start traffic would allow the cross streets to be largely pedestrian, full of kiosks and year-round vending stands. In this, Milne refers to the mayor’s idea of a pedestrian mall, which did come to pass with the pedestrianization of 8th Avenue in 1967. It does indeed have kiosks and vendors, benches and pedestrians, safely isolated from traffic. The difference is that Milne’s plan would have spread that easy-going walking street scene throughout the whole downtown core.
Milne’s two sketches that accompany this proposal are a delight: he clearly didn’t like traffic, but loved cars.
