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Canadian Pacific Railway

The Canadian Pacific Railway received 500,000 acres and $500,000 for the building of a trans-Canada rail link, a condition of British Columbia entering Confederation in 1873. The railway was preceded by the Dominion Land Survey, which applied a six-mile square grid from Winnipeg, the first meridian, to the Rocky Mountains. Calgary is on the fifth meridian. A half section west is Centre Street and the site of the CPR station, which in 1967, for Centennial year, was replaced by the Husky Tower, now the Calgary Tower. The CPR station went underground, disappearing from public view, a reflection of how, by the 1960s, the oil-and-gas landscape had started to obliterate the older CPR urban structure.

Calgary is one of a series of cities shaped by the CPR, which include Winnipeg, Regina, and Vancouver. The same grid, the same relationship between commercial zoning and the train station, and the same social determinism in the setting out of districts for CPR managers and CPR workers characterize early CPR urbanism. The placement of the rail yards condemned some sectors to be forever industrial and worker housing. Other areas, for Hudson’s Bay Company factors and CPR brass, remain exclusive housing districts today.

This commercial map indicates a density of downtown development that competes with contemporary images of stores on 8th and 9th Avenues that show a very low density: no building touches another, the streets are broad and empty. The downtown core has been a gradual filling in of this original urban diagram to achieve a density forecast at Calgary’s very beginning.

Figure 1-1. This is perhaps confusing: the downtown area is laid out in blocks, possibly from the McVittie drawing, but amended in 1960 by Ian Christie, showing “early buildings placed in plan. North of 6th Avenue added to show early Residential District.” 1960 was the beginning of the dismantling of old downtown Calgary as the oil-and-gas boom started to bite into it. This is one of the first indications that there was an old and a new Calgary. In Calgary of 1900, Chinatown was on 10th Avenue between 1st and 2nd Streets Southwest, and an open air rink sat on 7th Avenue and 1st Street West. In 1892 a gas well was on the corner of 7th Avenue and 4th Street East.

Community and Historical Resources, Calgary Public Library.