Читать книгу Unbuilt Calgary - Stephanie White - Страница 13

Introduction

Calgary is represented by two images: the downtown core — a concentrated island of tall office buildings — and a bucking bronco at the Stampede. One is a physical and spatial reality, the other is a behavioural identity: maverick, fast, and dangerous. The downtown core, which expanded throughout the original city grid, consists of a series of sub-centres, fading in and out of importance with time and changing industrial economies. There is, however, always a larger context for any of the urban changes in Calgary’s downtown core. Much as Calgary would like to think of itself as the free-wheeling cowboy on a twisting horse; its plans, built and unbuilt, connect it with deeper urban histories that continue to affect the city today.

To understand Calgary’s core, one must first understand the block system, laid out by the CPR, that most of the following plans work with. The CPR was given five hundred million acres in a one-hundred-mile ribbon on either side of the tracks as payment for building the trans-Canada railway, which connected B.C. with Canada and tied down the Northwest Territories and Manitoba. Owning most of the land upon which Calgary was built, the CPR sold parcels in a dense pattern of 25-foot-wide lots, as shown in its 1884 map.

On the floodplain of the Bow River, Calgary’s downtown area is flat. The geological conditions that make certain lands ideal meeting places, trails, or paths tend to be the same: flat and fertile with a source of fresh water. Such places are also easy to build upon and underpin most cities. The downtown grid layout did not have to bend around rock outcroppings, although as Calgary expanded, it was laid rigidly upon the map, up escarpment grade changes and over rivers — an abstract ordering system that held until the cul-de-sacs and crescents of postwar suburbia.

Centre Street divides east from west: the east is flat, the beginning of the prairies formed by the Bassano Lake with the melting of the Laurentide ice sheet during the last ice age; the west is the start of the foothills, the once choppy shore of the lake, leading to the mountains. Downtown Calgary sits in a valley formed by the Elbow and the Bow Rivers; at the end of many streets and avenues, one can glimpse the bleached grass of an escarpment, often unbuildable because they are both unstable and steep.

The Canadian Pacific Railway station was on Centre Street, and the avenues were numbered from the point where the Bow River meets Centre Street, locating the CPR tracks between 9th and 10th Avenues south. South of the tracks was a two-block zone of warehouses, workshops, and factories attached to the main line by railway spurs, many of which were still operational in the 1980s. Beyond that were residential neighbourhoods, some that predated Calgary, such as Mission, the site of the Notre Dame de la Paix Oblate Mission, which was founded in 1875. North of the tracks was the designated downtown commercial zone, originally two blocks deep, from 9th to 7th Avenues. Beyond that was a residential district to the river, including Chinatown. At the east the CPR crossed the Elbow River with a bridge, and at the west end of downtown, it made a sharp turn north and proceeded along the Bow River under a steep wooded escarpment now known as Edworthy Park.

Roughly speaking, industrial rail-dependent activities — flour mills, breweries, and hotels — were serviced by 9th Avenue, while 8th Avenue was the shopping street with the Hudson’s Bay store, banks, theatres, opera houses, cafés, and restaurants. Churches and City Hall were on 7th Avenue.

Mewata Armouries was built during the First World War at the west end of 8th Avenue, and still exists. At the east end was Fort Calgary, which stood in one form or another from 1875 to 1914, when the land was bought by the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway and turned into a rail terminal. It was reclaimed by the city in 1974, designated a historic site, and the fort was reconstructed. These are the bookends to 8th Avenue.

This little island with its landmarks and tidy history must be kept in mind when we look at all the non-CPR-inflected downtown plans that started to flourish, especially after the 1950s.