Chapter 1
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.
Chapter 2
CPR Gardens
One cannot overestimate the importance of the CPR to western Canada. A hundred and forty years later, in the light of energy security and sustainability, the benefit of rail over roads is being reconsidered. In the discussion of unbuilt projects for Calgary, we could include no-longer built projects that exist only in photographs or drawings and that, if considered today, would set Calgary off in a new direction. One such project is the block east of the CPR station that, until the 1930s, was taken up by a large market garden. Photographs show beds of cabbages, beans, and potatoes, bordered with pinks and marigolds, and gravelled paths lined with young fruit trees. Today, it reminds one of the agriponicos of Cuba, where fruit and vegetable production now covers almost all open space in Cuba’s cities, including the grounds of disused factories, parks, and parking lots, producing several million tons of food per year. This is food security, and it is as important in the twenty-first century as energy and water security.
Were the CPR gardens simply demonstration projects, or did they provide food for the railway? One suspects the latter, with surplus distributed amongst CPR employees. This was an urban landscape before the industrialization of food supply, and because of that it offers a template for a more sustainable future. An ongoing debate about Calgary’s steady expansion into surrounding farmland concerns the displacement of agriculture in favour of low-density housing development. It is possible that allotments, very much in favour in inner-city communities such as Hillhurst and Inglewood, might reinstate intense local food production, such as that seen with Vancouver’s 2003 Food Action Plan for rooftop gardens, community gardens, farmers’ markets, coordinated food processing, and distribution facilities for low-income citizens. The surprise was to find that this was a reality initiated by what was then corporate Calgary, a century ago.
Figure 2-1. These are the gardens to the east of the CPR station, on 9th Avenue. Vegetable plots are set out in formal parterres edged by flowering borders. We take for granted the provisioning of passenger trains, not thinking that in the 1890s food would have been gathered along the route, non-perishables warehoused, fresh meat and stored vegetables — or in-season fresh fruit and vegetables — picked up at each station. Pat Burns provisioned the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway as it was being built, and this was the basis of his fortune.
Topley Studio / Library and Archives Canada / PA-026186.
Chapter 3
The Shape of Calgary
There is a taxonomy of cities based on their origins: company towns have few civic spaces, as they are not based on demonstrations of democracy but on corporate organization — there is work and there is where the workers live. Usually, such towns remain small, their size dependent upon the technology and labour force needed to maintain the industry. Other cities, such as Halifax, originated as military camps. Laid out and occupied by the British Army in 1754, at Halifax’s heart is a parade square dominated by an Anglican church at its east end and surrounded by a series of small city blocks that were originally barracks. Halifax is still a military town, and although the Citadel is a famous tourist site, it is also Department of National Defence property. The Grand Parade is Halifax’s potent and ceremonial civic space, more so than the lawn in front of the provincial courthouse or the legislature.
On the other hand, both Edmonton and Calgary started as forts, which exist today as historic reconstruction, their sense of civic engagement sidelined to a historical curiosity, part of a deep history of little relevance compared to subsequent civic definitions. This is quite clear in Calgary: historically the conjunction of the Elbow and the Bow Rivers was an aboriginal meeting place. So many of our Canadian cities and towns started at such meeting sites, whether it be a small river meeting a large one, such as all the towns along the South Saskatchewan or the Fraser or the Mackenzie Rivers; or a river meeting a lake, as seen in any of the cities and towns on the Great Lakes; or a river meeting the ocean, in places such as Vancouver and Bella Coola. Settlement needs fresh water. Forts went where native settlements or meeting places had been because of the presence of fresh water, and the remains of forts are generally somewhere at the heart of all Canadian cities.
In Calgary the 1875 North-West Mounted Police fort at the corner of the Elbow and Bow Rivers protected First Nations from the predations of the American whiskey industry, which was making incursions into what was then the Northwest Territories, a generally unpoliced and unsettled area. Its southern boundary, unrecognized by both the Blackfoot and itinerant traders, had been established as the 49th parallel by the Jay Treaty of 1794. The purpose of the NWMP was twofold: to maintain a good relationship with indigenous peoples in the British territories and to maintain British sovereignty in the face of the manifest destiny of the United States. As First Nations compliance was necessary and even vital, forts were placed where those First Nations already had long-established bases.
When the prairies were surveyed by the Dominion Land Survey in the 1870s and 1880s, for both the route of the CPR and the preparatory division of land for settlement that the railway would enable, the location of the forts influenced the route of the railway. The linkage between military use and transportation systems is informative. During the Riel Rebellion of 1885, the NWMP travelled by CPR train from Winnipeg to Duck Lake — a trip of a couple of days rather than the two weeks it would take by horse. The quashing of the Riel Rebellion was facilitated by the CPR, a transportation system, and the linking of all the southern prairie forts by the railway and the telegraph meant that military response could be almost instantaneous. The ancient space-time continuum of