Had the tower been built on any of the proposed sites other than Centre Street and 9th Avenue, an impacted site limited by the CPR tracks to its south, it would have acted as a draw to development to the west end of downtown. Subsequent interaction between the CPR landscape and the oil and gas city resulted in a pulling away from the tracks and the old superstructure of the Hudson’s Bay, the eastern banks, ranching, and the Grain Exchange, all located on 9th and 8th Avenues and 1st Street. Oil and gas Calgary took off westwards, between 7th and 4th Avenues. The Calgary Tower was left behind in a superseded version of Calgary’s economic power base. This gives it, today, a nostalgic quality. It is no longer the tallest thing in the city and is instead more like Calgary’s mascot: friendly, familiar, and always in the corner of your eye.
[1] W.G. Milne fonds, Provincial Archives of Alberta, acc. no. 2008.0411.
[2] W.G. Milne fonds, Provincial Archives of Alberta, acc. no. 2008.0411.
Chapter 6
Seattle World’s Fair and the Calgary Tower: The Regional Context
Bill Milne’s pitch for a Calgary tower as a tourist magnet was directly linked to the example of Seattle’s Space Needle built for the 1962 World’s Fair, originally planned as a celebration of the fifty years since the Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exhibition of 1909. The idea of a festival of the West was left far behind when, in 1957, the U.S.S.R. successfully launched the first satellite, Sputnik, and all of a sudden the U.S. perceived itself as behind in the space race, the battle of innovative science that paralleled the arms race of the Cold War. As a result, Eisenhower announced his intention to prioritize the education of American children in science and technology. Quickly, John Glenn was hurtled into space, just behind Yuri Gagarin. Kennedy then upped the ante, announcing that the newly formed NASA would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. All of this had a profound effect on the architecture and the momentum of the Seattle World’s Fair, officially known as the Seattle Century 21 Exposition.
Seattle’s population had increased dramatically during the Second World War as the Boeing Company, founded in 1916 in Seattle as the Pacific Aero Products Company by W.E. Boeing, expanded its aircraft manufacturing capacity; however, it remained primarily a small company town. In 1960 Seattle it had 557,000 people. Calgary, which had also almost doubled its population during the Second World War, had 243,000 people, and did not reach 550,000 until 1980. Vancouver, on the other hand, had 384,000 people in 1960. For Calgary the Vancouver-Seattle axis had always been a powerful tourist destination. Not only was Calgary’s population of American citizens leaping ahead with the development of the oil industry, the condition of the as-yet-unfinished Trans-Canada Highway meant that the easiest route to Vancouver was through the United States on its new Interstate Highway System: I-90 going through Spokane, the radio and television hub for American stations broadcasting to southern Alberta, on to Seattle, and then up to Vancouver.
The 1962 Seattle Century 21 Exposition was huge for the United States; it was the apotheosis of American enterprise, innovation, and optimism. President Kennedy opened it by telephone, and astronauts were there. Minoru Yamasaki, who had been born in Seattle, designed Seattle Century 21 Exposition’s Science Centre — a system of steel arched webs — and on the strength of this went on to design the World Trade Centre in New York, also structurally based on bundled steel tubes. Was Calgary immune to this enormous event? Certainly not. It was infinitely easier and cheaper to get to Seattle than it was to go to Expo 67 in Montreal just five years later: For Calgary, the psychological and geographical orientation to the West Coast already existed. The Space Needle, as the centre point of the exhibition site, called collectively Seattle Center, was evidently astounding. Milne cites it and the Space Needle’s precedents, the Eiffel Tower especially, in his proposal for a similar tower for Calgary. As we know, we did, by 1966, get our tower, with its revolving restaurant, its observation deck, and its UFO imagery. It is the differences, however, that are so telling.
The site chosen for the Husky Tower is impacted. Held in on one side by the CPR main line, on the other by 9th Avenue, to the west by the Palliser Hotel, to the east by MacLeod Trail, there is no room for further expansion. The site has historical significance in its marking of the importance of the Canadian Pacific Railway to Calgary, but it did not anticipate the significant future based on oil and gas extraction; despite the futuristic appearance of the tower, its site is embedded in the early-twentieth-century story of the pre–oil and gas city. The Stampede Grounds, already an exhibition site, was never considered for the Calgary Tower. Nor was Buffalo Stadium considered as a site, probably because of its difficult site conditions: the Seattle Space Needle has thirty feet of concrete ballast beneath it, and the water table of Calgary alone would have made that difficult to achieve. A promising site at the west end of 6th Avenue had available space, as the high-rise city had not extended that far, but it was still a site constrained by the block system of Calgary streets.
Comparing Seattle’s tower with Calgary’s tower, the political conditions were entirely different. Although Husky Oil financed the Calgary Tower along with the CPR and the City of Calgary, it was a civic project. The Space Needle was embedded in a national project, that of the space race, and although initiated and paid for by local Seattle business interests, the site itself and the exposition had federal funding, thus its development was amplified by its larger political and physical setting.
The legacy of scientific enterprise still exists in the area in terms of technology and innovation: Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, Costco, and Nintendo were all developed in the Seattle area. The critical mass of technological championing from the Seattle World’s Fair influenced the city almost beyond possibility. For such a small city, Seattle has a disproportionate number of innovative enterprises, based in the legacy of that particular conjunction of local hubris, civic pride, and a national narrative mobilized by the Cold War.
Calgary has local hubris in spades and civic pride to burn, but is not, and never has been, part of any sort of powerful national narrative. This was the reality that led to the 1987 formation of the Reform Party and its slogan, “The West Wants In.” Calgary is a de facto part of Canada but was never seen as a city of influence, despite its postwar industrial base, which, the city feels, contributes greatly to the national coffers. The Calgary Tower project was destined to be local. There was not enough external help to parlay it into a scientific, or a cultural, or even an architectural legacy.
The 1964 Calgary Planetarium, another centennial project, was located adjacent to the 1918 Mewata Armoury and Stadium, at the far west end of 6th Avenue. This site, had it also had the Calgary Tower on it, would have perhaps led to a critical mass of exposition buildings. Here, the street grid runs out where the Bow River squeezes close to the CPR main line. It was also one of the early sites considered for the new hockey arena, ultimately built as the Saddledome on the Stampede Grounds for the 1988 Winter Olympics. One might have thought that the Winter Olympics was just the kind of collective event that would have an urban impact at the scale of Seattle Center or Montreal’s Expo site, or even the urban renewal process put in place in Vancouver as a result of its Expo 86. The legacy of the Olympics was in winter sports training sites rather than urban form, and its venues were scattered across the city rather than in one critical, generative site.
Chapter 7
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