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.
Chapter 8
The Thomas Mawson Plan for Calgary
The conjunction of gardens, horticulture, and town planning defines the philosophy of the City Beautiful, whereby social ills can be solved by introducing parks and gardens throughout the city. This kind of architectural determinism has its roots in Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy of social reform and utilitarianism, where “the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the measure of right and wrong.” Legislation’s only use to society is the maintenance of pleasure rather than pain, and to that end, when the industrial city began to be problematized as a behavioural sink that results from overcrowding, the shape of the city became an important condition of this greater happiness — reform of the city and its institutions will lead to the reform of the people in those institutions.
Although Bentham is mostly known now, via Foucault, for his Panopticon prison of 1791 — a drum of stacked cells, a prison of maximum surveillance — such utility can be seen a century later in something so seemingly innocuous and dreamy as Mawson’s Calgary plan. And today, although behavioural determinism is felt to be discredited as a social hypothesis, it still exists in urban renewal theory, believing that problematic areas of the city can be reinvented, problematic people relocated, and undervalued land reinvested in. This is precisely the thinking that underpins the Mawson Plan.
When Mawson, an English landscape architect, met Calgary in 1911, probably at the invitation of the Calgary Horticultural Society, formed in 1906, the city had a population of 44,000 — an increase of 960 percent over the 4,000 inhabitants of 1901. Growth was stupendous, unthinking, and expeditious. The Bow River flooded regularly in places; in others it had sawmills, railway yards, and shacks. The downtown centred on the CPR station, the Palliser Hotel, and the sandstone banks and buildings of 8th Avenue, eight safe blocks away from the Bow River.
Figure 8-2. In direct contrast to the reality of the CPR station forecourt shown in chapter three, the company space has been transformed into a civic space: lawn, trees, and a clock tower. No longer is the station faced by scrappy hotels and wooden buildings. Rather, there is an imposing six-storey symmetrical set of buildings flanking Centre Street on the north side of 9th Avenue. The CPR owned this property, and the Marathon Realty Tower was built there in the 1970s, illustrating again the difference between a corporate urbanism and a civic urbanism: different values, different spatiality.
Thomas Mawson. The City of Calgary Past, Present, and Future: A Preliminary Scheme for Controlling the Economic Growth of the City. London: Thomas H. Mawson & Sons, 1912.
Figure 8-1. This is the most telling redirection of Calgary away from the landscape of the CPR on 9th Avenue. This, for Mawson, was to be the Civic Centre, a series of plazas and monuments on Centre Street leading to a low, wide bridge over the Bow River. There is a discussion about incursions into the Bow River in chapter 25 with the River’s Edge project, where eddies and quiet channels can be cut to increase riverbank frontage and to tame the flow of water into an amenity. However, Mawson’s inclusion of rowing eights indicates that he saw the Bow as something like the Thames, rather than the blue-green glacier-fed river it is.
Thomas Mawson. The City of Calgary Past, Present, and Future: A Preliminary Scheme for Controlling the Economic Growth of the City. London: Thomas H. Mawson & Sons, 1912.
Mawson proposed an image of Calgary on the Bow derived almost directly from Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. This world’s fair was designed by Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted as a Beaux-Arts vision of the new American city: white, symmetrical, splendid, and neo-classical. It was an argument for comprehensive city planning over piecemeal, haphazard development driven by land speculation, as was the modus operandi in Calgary. The discourse of the City Beautiful was one of sight-lines and axes, uniform buildings, monuments and flanking public spaces; there was no room for the kind of rhizomatic, anarchic growth based on the self-interest found in a boom town on the Canadian prairies. It seems to have been floated as a material vision to which Calgary could aspire, as it is difficult to conceive of the social and political structures that would have been needed to facilitate Mawson’s plan. To enact such a plan would take a Napoleonic force, as happened in Paris in the 1850s under Haussmann, when the old city was buried under ceremonial boulevards, plazas, monuments, and avenues suitable to an imperial capital.
The Mawson plan came at the end of Calgary’s building boom, which was succeeded by the First World War, the difficult 1920s, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. By time the next building boom occurred, coinciding with the oil boom associated with the discovery of the Leduc oil fields in 1947, demolished European cities and imperialist ideas were no longer considered models — the U.S. was. And it was a postwar American model, not the 1791 Beaux-Arts plan of Washington D.C., but rather the postwar American