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.

Mixed Sky

Sarcee Trail and 17th Avenue SW. Suburban arterials in Calgary

Husky Oil, Three Views

Legoland, Alberta

Sometimes Calgary is a bit too neat, its buildings too boxy, its streets too linear: a Lego City come to life.

Confrontation

Dog walking, Crescent Heights, Calgary

Calgary’s Urban Renaissance?

In January, I wrote about Calgary’s seemingly unstoppable sprawl into the countryside. Although I outlined some positive developments, it was by and large a negative portrayal of what’s happening in this city of just over a million inhabitants.

Thankfully, the story is a bit different in the inner city. Given the age in which Calgary has grown, its inner areas mostly lack the rich urban fabric possessed by older centres. Indeed, there are only a handful of true “urban” neighbourhoods in the city. Recently, though, these areas have seen an unprecedented wave of development, adding new vibrancy to central Calgary. But this boom is not without its downsides: the inner city is becoming increasingly unaffordable.

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This City Was Built on Urban Sprawl

It’s a snowless December night in Calgary and there’s just a hint of chill in the air as I wander down quiet streets, jacket open. I’m on my way to Broken City, a deliberately ramshackle bar on Eleventh Avenue where I’ve arranged to meet a handful of people from the Calgary Urban Initiative (CUI), an upstart group of young Calgarians concerned with the development of their city. There’s a first-year university student, a real estate agent, an art school slacker, even an orchestral musician who plays bass for the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra.

Then there’s Josh White, a master’s student in urban planning at Queen’s University and the group’s founder. “I started CUI to give more voice to citizens of Calgary who want to help push it in a more urban, diverse and cosmopolitan direction,” he explains to me. The Calgary that White envisions is one that is high-density, transit-friendly, pedestrian-oriented and architecturally sophisticated. His hometown, he says, “is at a critical juncture. Either Calgary will simply grow and become an unremarkable place, or it can develop into an extremely livable and interesting city.”

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Calgary and the Imaginary Cowboy

What comes to mind when you think of Calgary? If you’re like most Canadians, the answer is likely a combination of oil, cows and Stephen Harper—and, oh yes, the Calgary Stampede. The Stampede, a celebration of cowboy culture that modestly proclaims itself “The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth,” is an enormous, all-consuming event, anticipated months in advance by fluttering banners hoisted above traffic lights and an army of white cowboys (shoulders hunched, legs firmly grounded, left arm raised to wildly spin a rope into a gaping ‘O,’ presumably to lasso some scampering animal with triumphal cowboy furor) set against a scarlet red backdrop.

The Stampede’s relationship with its host city is unlike that of nearly any other event in the world; for more than nine decades, the Stampede has come to define Calgary’s character and identity. This is the Calgary of popular imagination, a Calgary synonymous with its annual ninety-three-year-old cowboy festival.

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Purgatory on the C-Train

“No Name” by Jason Mark. Digital composite

I first met Jason Mark when he came to live in my apartment. Actually, I should be more precise—I met him when he came to sublet my apartment. I was living in a cheap studio on Park Avenue near Fairmount, pleasantly appointed but also quite small and dark. When the opportunity arose to move up the street into a bright two-bedroom place with my girlfriend, I put out a call for subletters. Jason answered and, not long thereafter, he settled in with a few boxes of stuff and some leftover furniture I have yet to reclaim from him.

Jason is an artist, born and raised in Saskatchewan, where he received a degree in fine arts from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. When he moved into my old apartment, he set up an easle in the corner of the kitchen and hung some of his paintings on the walls. It wasn’t until last week that I took a closer look at his art, though, and I was surprised to find a lot of public transit imagery and themes of cultural confusion and hybridity.

“Purgatory.” Oil on canvas

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The Sprawling City

Most Canadians are aware of Calgary’s status. For those who are not, it is quite simply booming in every sense of the word. Booming may even be an understatement, as very rarely has the city seen expansion at such epic proportions. The population grew by almost 36,000 in the past year, a number only surpassed during the 1980s boom years, and the city has been growing almost as rapidly for over a decade. The boom has brought both many positive and negative changes to the urban and social fabric of the city, including labour shortages, expanded cultural institutions, a growing homeless problem, large reinvestment in the inner city and countless other examples. What is most obvious, however, is the sprawl.

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When the Buildings Smoke in Calgary

In Calgary, when it’s freakishly cold, so cold your skin starts to burn just from walking outside—cold like it was just a few days ago, after temperatures plummeted to 30 degrees below zero—the skyscrapers release giant plumes of steam as if they were on fire, or perhaps enjoying a few good cigars.

I’m glad I’m not there right now, but the beginning of winter always makes me think of the place, since that’s usually when I return to visit family. Maybe that’s why I finally got my act together and uploaded all of my Calgary photos to Flickr, which you can see here. (Permanent links to my photosets are available in the sidebar.) More Calgary photos after the jump.

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Morning Coffee: Caffè Beano

Morning Coffee is a new series that will focus on cafés around the world.

Caffè Beano in late December, Calgary

Date muffins. I am craving date muffins, because there are few places in this world that make date muffins as good as those at Caffè Beano. But Caffè Beano is 4,090 kilometres from my front door. Google Maps tells me it will take 50 hours of driving to get there. I can’t even imagine how long that would take to walk.

I live in Montreal, you see, but Caffè Beano is in Calgary, tucked away between an ice cream parlour and a barber’s shop near 17th Avenue. I grew up in Calgary and, whenever I go back to visit family, I make a daily pilgrimmage to this small coffee shop with its awkward layout and black-and-white tiled floors. Its prices are reasonable ($2.50 for a café au lait; $1.75 for those date muffins) but that isn’t what compels me to visit. It isn’t the ambiance, either, the warm, convivial atmosphere that spills onto the sidewalk outside. No, the real reason I go to Caffè Beano is nostalgia.

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