Although Fort Calgary was the important beginning of the city, the Canadian Pacific Railway set up a rival centre based not on military order but on company influence. In CPR towns the potent site of power was the CPR station. Because the NWMP was not a military force at the scale of the British Army in Halifax or Victoria, and was just a police force meant to keep local aboriginal groups onside and to protect CPR interests, downtown Calgary developed an urban landscape of power that radiated out from the CPR station. The station was on 9th Avenue, and next to it was the CPR hotel, the Palliser. Across the intersection was the Grain Exchange, and across 9th from that was the Robin Hood Flour Mills, a significant landmark which stood until 1975. A block away from the Grain Exchange was the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) store, the particular terracotta design of which was based on Harrods, the famous department store in London that had opened in 1898. Across 1st street was the Bank of Montreal, the bank of the CPR and the Hudson’s Bay. This was Calgary’s component of the extended landscape of Scottish Montreal. Both the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Hudson’s Bay Company were populated by Scots. Lord Strathcona, for example, who turned the North-West Mounted Police into Lord Strathcona’s Horse, a regiment raised in Calgary for the Boer War, was Donald Smith, the financier of the Canadian Pacific and the official who pounded in the last spike at Craigellachie, British Columbia. Both the CPR and the Hudson’s Bay had Canadian headquarters in Montreal. Calgary was a link in the chain of commerce and influence that stretched from London to the Far East.
Between 1880 and 1900, Calgary existed as a company town, and the company was the Canadian Pacific Railway. Notice there was no dominating church or military presence, and City Hall was a couple of blocks away, in what was, at the time, a relatively insignificant location across the street from the market. Changes in transportation after the Second World War, such as the emergence of commercial air travel, an increase in car ownership, coordination with the U.S. trucking industry, and the building of both the Interstate Highway System and the Trans-Canada Highway, diminished the importance of the public rail services, and with that diminution came the loss of the importance of the train station. In the 1960s, passenger service was severely curtailed, and by the late 1960s, the CPR separated various branches of its operations — freight, hotels, real estate, express services, its airline CP Air, and its extensive telecommunications network — and sold most of its subsidiaries off over the next twenty years.
Figure 3-1. The front of the CPR Station on 9th Avenue. The Palliser is on the right edge of the photograph. This is an example of a busy and vital corporate urban open space, rather than a civic space such as those found in front of city halls or public parks. The forecourt to the railway station is largely used for parking and deliveries. Railway stations are double-fronted: one side faces the city and the other is the platform facing the train, where emotional welcomes and farewells are held. This street front is not emotional. It is a service space, although probably one of the largest formal open areas in the city at the time.
University of Saskatchewan Archives, Keith Ewart Photograph Collection, Railway Stations.
Unlike Winnipeg and Vancouver, both of which had huge stone neo-classical railway stations for both the CPR and the CNR, Calgary had a long, low, linear platform station. Calgary in its early days wasn’t a big player in the overall CPR network; it was really just a stop between Winnipeg and Vancouver and the link to the provincial capital in Edmonton, which was served by the Grand Trunk and Pacific Railway, later the CNR.
When, in the early 1960s, Canada’s centennial appeared on the new horizon of national identity, many cities felt that they must come up with major centennial projects by 1967 to mark the new postwar Canada, to attract tourists travelling the country in ever-increasing numbers, and, in the process, to brand their cities. Projects such as the Sudbury Nickel or the Wawa Goose, and many other celebratory markers of cities across Canada, often have their origins in a centennial project. For its part, Calgary built the Husky Tower on 9th Avenue and Centre Street, replacing the old Canadian Pacific Railway station, which was relocated underneath a shopping centre and office complex, Palliser Square, built by the CPR beside the Palliser Hotel.
However, just before this act of erasure, in 1962 the Canadian Pacific Railway hired a New York planning firm to replan their land holdings on the south side of 9th Avenue between 1st Street East and 1st Street West. At the same time, the City of Calgary commissioned the Robinson Hanson Report and the 1960 Transportation Plan, which recommended the removal of the barrier that the CPR railway tracks presented to southward downtown expansion. The CPR main line, and the CPR ownership of the block-wide swath through downtown Calgary, was like a river with a couple of bridges across it: downtown was effectively an island surrounded by the Bow River on the north and west edges, the Elbow River on the east and the CPR tracks on the south. One recommendation was to relocate the tracks to the south bank of the Bow River and allow the downtown to then flood south. This was an era when rivers and lakefronts were seen as barriers rather than amenities and were thus suitable for transportation corridors. A well-known and notorious example of this attitude underpins the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto, which, among other things, separates downtown Toronto from the shore of Lake Ontario. By 1960 the site of Fort Calgary, long gone, had become a Canadian National Railway terminal yard forming the industrial east end of downtown, bordered by two rivers and the tracks. With the removal of CNR activities, the land could easily become a freeway interchange. In the early 1960s, it was inevitable that transportation led planning, an ethos that sank deep into many cities, the results of which we still live with.
Chapter 4
Transportation-Driven Planning
With the presentation of a possible strategy for the development of CPR’s land holdings on 9th Avenue (they weren’t planning to leave their valuable, centralized site, no matter what the City of Calgary was thinking of), Gordon Atkins, a newly graduated twenty-five-year-old architect who had set up his own firm in 1962, reacted violently to these proposals. His alternative proposals occupy an enormous file of drawings in the Canadian Architectural Archives, including his design for the June 1963 cover of Maclean’s magazine on this topic, the re-imagining of Calgary. The CPR had hired a New York planner, R. Dowling, who proposed a plan for a whizzy, spaceship sort of figure to mark the location of the new station, something with the formal placemaking power of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, finished just five years earlier — Atkins was particularly vehement about this proposal:
These sketches show, in elevation, the transportation center centre as proposed by CPR’s planning consultant (R. Dowling of New York). The conglomeration of buildings is multi-directional, multi-functional, and so lacking in any statement of function or clear-cut unified expression that they become cartoonish and obvious.
That Atkins also protested the proposed removal of the barrier to southward development that was, and still is, the CPR main line had much to do with his personal background. He had grown up in southern Alberta, in Cardston, a Mormon town connected to the United States border and Utah by the Alberta Railway and Irrigation Company (later acquired by the CPR). Mormons had developed irrigation technology in Utah and were invited to settle 500,000 acres on the St. Mary River in southern Alberta in exchange for building an irrigation canal system, which was duly completed in 1900. The Waterways Treaty of 1909 divided the waters of the St. Mary and the Milk Rivers, and continues to plague southern Alberta to this day.[1]
Gordon Atkins understood dry land and the importance of railways and compact grid cities with tight borders, of which Cardston was one. He also had a new postwar American education (the University of Washington in Seattle), in which transportation planning figured largely, dominated by the influence of the American planner Robert Moses, who had advocated the channelling of traffic into parkways, tunnels, and interchanges since the 1930s. The major postwar adjustment in urban and suburban transportation policy was a shift from parkways, literally limited-access roads flanked by forest, to large concrete freeways hurling suburban commuters into downtown cores. Freeways into the centres of cities had become postwar planning orthodoxy, no doubt much debated in architecture and planning