A City’s Former Self

Pierre Burton, the journalist, author and historian, once remarked of Calgary, “The two blocks between the Palliser Hotel and The Bay is the only part of the city that resembles its former self.” While that’s not altogether true (there are parts of town, like Inglewood and Ramsay, that retain the feel of a small prairie town) the area around First Street SW is probably the only part of Calgary with any real historical presence. Perhaps not coincidentally, it is one of the few parts of town with much urban vitality, too.

Something for Everyone

Ahh the Bowness Shopping Centre. If it’s not a power centre - it’s a strip mall; that’s just Calgary. Home to baked goods, groceries, and family videos, one can always sit back enjoy a coffee, get their nails done and pick up the latest Catholic reads.

The strangest mishmash stores… complete with signs from another time.

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Backyards of Bowness

Complete with memories of simpler times, Bowness is a small community that was swallowed up by the “big city” in 1964.

Fence, shed, garage…

Vintage motor under wraps

Country living within the city

Behind the Tower

I took the Calgary Tower for granted when I saw it every day. Now I realize what a remarkable monument to late-sixties kitsch it really was. Built in 1967 by Husky Oil to commemorate the centennial of Canada’s confederation, its has no purpose other than as a monument — a really big monument capped by an orangey-red observation deck. It can seem grand, in a space age kind of way, when you look at it from afar, or in the midst of the downtown office district. But from other angles it just seems odd.

Hydro Pole Art

Hydro pole street art on 4th Street SW in the Mission

Riding the C-Train

Waiting for a train at Centre Street station

Afternoon on a Dalhousie-bound train

Door button on a 1981-vintage train

The Blue Signs

In many corners of downtown Calgary it’s possible to see an old kind of street sign that dates back to the first half of the twentieth century. They’re invariably mounted on buildings and have been made superfluous by newer signs, which leads me to think that they’ve been preserved either by neglect or some sense of historical duty.

What’s even more remarkable is that nearly identical versions of these white-on-blue signs are found in Montreal, where they have also been overlooked or forgotten. I’ve seen one on Lincoln Avenue downtown and another on the rue de Bienville on the Plateau.

The Automobile Experience

Travelling around the city on different modes of transport can completely change your impressions of it. When you walk, you’re exposed to the details of urban life: the scent of fruit as you pass a greengrocer, the words and illustrations of posters glued to lampposts. On the train or a bus, you watch the passing streetscapes while surrounded by fellow spectators, as if you were in a movie.

Construction Site

It would be a bit of an understatement to say that downtown Calgary is in the midst of a construction boom. Construction explosion, more like it. Nearly two dozen new condominium and office towers are under construction in the city’s compact centre; some are destined for obscurity but others, like Norman Foster’s The Bow, which will become the city’s new tallest building, are daring and ambitious in their design.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of the Le Germain, a hotel, office and condominium complex currently under construction at the corner of Ninth Avenue and Centre Street, right across from the Calgary Tower. I like that it subverts the plain-box archetype that has dominated Calgary since the 1970s; by taking two different boxes and bridging them with an bunch of glass condos, it creates an unusual building in a city that strays far too often towards the banal.

At the same time, though, it’s pretty ugly — but I guess it’s better to be interestingly ugly than pleasantly average.

Cherish Your Clothesline

Nobody hangs their laundry out to dry in Calgary. In fact, there are hardly any clothelines. My grandmother’s house had one, but I don’t think she ever used it. She, like everyone I knew while growing up there, had a washer and dryer set tucked neatly in a musty corner of her basement, across from a half-century-old furnace.

It was an eye-opening experience to travel to Newfoundland as a teenager, where I discovered that St. John’s was precisely the opposite of Calgary: everyone had clotheslines. Clothes hung over alleyways and backyards, billowing in the salty Atlantic breeze like flags of chores vanquished. There was something inexplicably romantic, something timeless, about clothes drying on lines, whether in the city or in a stark outport on the Avalon Peninsula.

Montreal is similar to St. John’s, at least in that regard. Here, the clothesline tradition never really died. Although they’re less prevalent today than in the past, you’ll still see an abundance of them if you wander down the laneways of just about any neighbourhood. Immigrant neighbourhoods in particular have a ton of clotheslines, probably because they’re home to so many people who come from countries where drying your clothes outside is still the norm. I remember, earlier this fall, driving east through St. Michel on the elevated Metropolitan Expressway, staring at long rows of triplexes tied together by strands of billowing clothes.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that kind of scene became even more common in the future. That’s because clotheslines are no longer just quaint — they’re fashionable. The growing marketability of anything “green” has led to a resurgence of interest in drying clothes outside. It’s cheaper than clothes dryers, which can consume as much as 900 kilowatt hours of energy per year, and better for your clothes. According to La Presse, which extolled the benefits of clotheslines last summer, the sun eliminates odours and removes stains, and is easier on natural fibres than clothes dryers.

But, as much as I like to know that the sun can whiten my whites, it’s the clothesline aesthetic that really appeals to me. I’m still charmed by the sight of them, which is good because they’re ubiquitous in my back alley from March until November. More than that, though, clotheslines domesticate the street. We’ve spent so much effort over past half-century trying to sterilize our cities, to turn them into machines, that we need these kinds of reminders that they are, first and foremost, places where people live, messy as that may be.

Still, prejudices linger. Many new subdivisions include provisions in house purchase agreements that ban residents from drying their clothes outside. It’s a class thing more than anything else, since clotheslines are still associated by many with poverty. There has been a clear shift in attitude, however. Earlier this month, Ontario’s environment minister announced that he wants to override those clothesline bans.

I’m not alone in enjoying the look of clotheslines, either. There are plenty of Flickr groups dedicated to clotheslines, including one called Les cordes à linge de Montréal.

Calgary’s Missing Street Names

I’ve always resented the fact that Calgary’s streets are numbered. Not just numbered, but numbered according to quadrant, so that streets are known as 4th Street SW or 36th Avenue NE, and 4th Street and 4th Avenue intersect not just once, but four times, in each corner of the city. What makes this even worse is that nearly all streets in Calgary are numbered. Except in recent subdivisons, or in rare cases, there are no names to break up the monotony. It lends the city a certain soulless, anonymous air.

That wasn’t always the case. When Calgary was just a young city, a town really, all of its streets were named. Look at an old map and the history of Calgary is revealed in its street names. In the downtown area, straddling the Canadian Pacific Railroad tracks, many streets were named after CPR executives: Stephen Avenue, for the company’s first president; Van Horne Avenue, after the man who oversaw construction of the transcontinental railway; McIntyre Avenue and Angus Avenue, after two of the CPR’s investors. In Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Avenue, which ran along the north and south side of the railroad tracks, there was a certain sweet harmony.

Even more interesting was Rouleauville, an old French-Canadian village located just south of Calgary, around St. Mary’s Cathedral, in what is now known as the Mission. Here, the street names honoured prominent Franco-Albertan religious leaders like Lacombe, Doucet and Grandin. Rouleau Street enshrined the name of the two brothers who promoted the idea of a French village near Calgary and secured a land grant from the federal government. Other streets testified to Rouleauville’s Catholic faith, like Notre Dame Road, St. Jean Baptiste Street and St. Joseph Street.

Calgary lost its street names in 1904, when it adopted a numbering system that saw the city divided into quadrants, with Centre Street — formerly McTavish Street — dividing east from west. Rouleauville, a separate municipal entity, retained its street names until 1907, when it was annexed to Calgary. Not only did its French-speaking character eventually erode, it lost the only overt reminder of that French-Canadian heritage: its street names.

I can’t help but wonder Calgary’s the loss of its street names at such a formative time in its history planted the seed of an ahistorical city. For years, Calgary’s relationship with its own history has been one of complete ignorance. Its politicians and developers have long been eager to do away with what few old buildings it has and it could be said, at least until recently, that Calgary has lacked a sense of self. Much of its identity revolves around traditions invented for the purpose of tourism and economic investment, like the white cowboy hats that have come to symbolize the city.

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In a Shop Sign, An Evocation of Home

I was a bit surprised, earlier this year, to see what appeared to be the Fairwood logo while walking along Ste. Catherine St. in downtown Montreal. Fairwood, you see, is a well-known fast food chain in Hong Kong, one that serves cha chaan teng-style food. Its distinctive orange logo looks like a cross between a paint splotch and someone jumping.

It turned out that the logo — or at least a close approximation — was part of a sign for Damao, a new Chinese restaurant. It reminded me of other, similar references to Hong Kong businesses I’d seen across Canada. In Calgary, at the corner of Centre Street and 3rd Avenue, there’s a Chinese bookstore named PageOne — which also happens to be one of Hong Kong’s largest bookstore chains. In Richmond, just outside Vancouver, where even big box stores have Chinese signs, Staples’ name is rendered as Seung mo — not coincidentally, the name of a large stationery store in Hong Kong.

It’s clear that these names deliberately evoke those of well-known counterparts in Hong Kong. Rather than simply being knock-offs, they are probably meant to draw customers by associating themselves, quite explicitly, with the quality of an established brands. I wonder, though, is this a phenomenon unique to Hong Kong Chinese in Canada, or does the same thing happen in other immigrant communities?

Calgary’s Montreal Suburb

Stroll up the hill just south of downtown and take a look at the street signs: Frontenac Avenue. Montreal Avenue. Wolfe Street. Cabot Street. Montcalm Crescent. Talon Avenue. Laval Avenue. Dorchester Avenue. Where are we? In Mount Royal, of course, Calgary’s most prestigious neighbourhood.

I’ve always found it odd that the street names found in this hilltop district — hell, even the name of the neighbourhood itself — are meant to so deliberately to evoke Montreal and Quebec. In terms of architecture or design, Mount Royal is typical of pretty much any Garden City-inspired suburb developed in the early twentieth century. So why the references to a city and province so far removed from what was once bald prairie?

At the dawn of the twentieth century, American entrepreneurs, many from property speculators from the Dakotas, flocked to Calgary and settled on the hill just south of town. Very quickly, it came to be known as American Hill, and towards the end of the 1900s many of its residents expressed their desire to name the district’s streets after American presidents such as Washington, Cleveland and Grant.

“This did not go down well with the predominantly British-Canadian culture of Calgary at that time,” write Elise Corbet and Lorne Simpson in their detailed history of Mount Royal. “The majority of the population came from eastern Canada or the British Isles, and they were proud of their connection with the British Empire,” write Corbert and Simpson. “This did not go down well with the predominantly British-Canadian culture of Calgary at that time. The majority of the population came from eastern Canada or the British Isles, and they were proud of their connection with the British Empire. The initial reaction came with the 1907 plan, showing such names as Sydenham, Durham, Colborne, Carleton, Dorchester and Amherst, names resonant of British rule in Canada, which should have been enough to counter the concept of American Hill.”

But it wasn’t enough. In 1910, two Tory members of Calgary’s elite, R.B. Bennett and William Toole — Bennett would later become Prime Minister — convinced the Canadian Pacific Railway, which owned most land around Calgary, to officially rename American Hill after Mount Royal, in honour of the CPR’s president, William Van Horne, who lived in Montreal.

Then, write Corbet and Simpson, “the full force of Canadian patriotism was brought to bear when the street names zeroed in on prominent French Canadians in our history: Frontenac, Montcalm, Talon, Laval, Joliet, Verchères (the only woman in the group), and early explorers such as Cabot and Champlain. Montreal, Quebec and Levis were thrown in for good measure. After this, there was no more talk of American Hill.”

Of course, most of these names, from Amherst to Talon, would be familiar to Montrealers. After all, they grace a number of our own streets. But, removed from local history as they are, the street names of Calgary’s Mount Royal never seem to have become grafted to the landscape. Nearly a century after their imposition, they seem somehow contrived.

(I should add that this isn’t true for the name of Mount Royal itself: it quickly entered Calgary’s collective imagination as a symbol of the city’s elite. In 1910, it was even reflected in the name of Calgary’s first college.)

Today, nearly a third of Mount Royal’s residents are American immigrants or expatriates. In a way, the legacy of American Hill lives on.

Wide Angle Off 17th