Unbuilt Calgary. Stephanie White

      The Civic Centre proposed a number of block-long low-rise megastructures that included a performing arts centre, the existing Calgary Public Building (the original Government of Canada building on 8th Avenue), and the Burns Building, a white terracotta office building built in 1913, which, while beautiful, was also rundown and full of small offices and artists’ studios. The original city hall building was also meant to stay. It did come to pass that the Calgary Centre for Performing Arts occupied the entire block between 8th and 9th Avenues and 1st and 2nd Streets East, incorporating both the Public and the Burns Buildings. This was in the future, however.

      Harold Hanen is a difficult architectural figure in Calgary’s development. Calgary-born, he ended his career as a great conservationist and was instrumental in the protection and restoration of several historic downtown buildings and Stephen Avenue. This avenue was the original commercial section of 8th Avenue lined with two- and three-storey sandstone and brick buildings built largely between 1900 and the First World War. While Hanen was an employee of the City of Calgary in the 1960s, he introduced the +15 system that now connects most of the downtown with a series of semi-public enclosed bridges at the second storey. The +15 system has been debated ever since. On one hand, it winterizes the city in accordance with Winter City precepts, introducing a weather-protected semi-public retail environment that breaks down the isolation of individual tower blocks. On the other, it guts the importance and the liveliness of the traditional street and public open retail space — the sidewalks and storefronts of the city.

      Figure 10-2. Street level views of the massing model, showing the Burns Building (top) in its new context, and below, the central atrium (also see figure 10-4).

       Canadian Architectural Archives, University of Calgary.

      Figure 10-3. The massing strategies for the 1978 Civic Centre are very sculptural. A five-story block, for example, is stepped and carved into a complex ziggurat kind of building. Step-backs allow more light and sun at street level, and they provide roof terraces and break up the scale of what is proposed as very large buildings. This view, by the placement of the old City Hall and the Burns building, shows how much this scheme offered to east downtown. It would have been a critical joint between east and west.

       Canadian Architectural Archives, University of Calgary.

      Figure 10-4. This could only be the 1970s. This multi-storey atrium bears a close resemblance to Toronto’s Eaton Centre, which had just opened, in 1977. This particular space was meant to be threaded into the then-new +15 and +30 walkway system meant eventually to connect all downtown buildings through multiple levels — a three-dimensional street grid.

       Harold Hanen fonds, Glenbow Museum and Archives, M8906-261.

      Hanen’s proposed Civic Centre was straight out of the urban renewal textbook of erasure of historic patterns in favour of civic spatial reorganization into new quasi-ceremonial “gathering spaces.” The Civic Centre took four blocks, excavated the central portion for an enormous plaza, and arranged the buildings into a west-facing U-shape. A smaller plaza faced east, continuing 8th Avenue more or less unchanged. Although this plan was rejected, not for its spatiality but for its supposed cost, two parts of it were built: the Calgary Centre for Performing Arts and the Calgary Municipal Building, which dead-ended 8th Avenue before its time.

      Both of these plans — the +15 system and the Civic Centre — magnified social polarities in the downtown core. The +15, like the underground malls of most Canadian cities, had the effect of abandoning the ground-level streets and sidewalks to everyone not allowed to use the +15: panhandlers, homeless people, buskers, kids, anyone with dogs, and the poor without reason to trip along the corporate atmosphere all run into private security personnel. In cities without such an alternative pedestrian system, everyone must rub along on busy sidewalks, a clear Jane Jacobs–type definition of a vibrant urbanism. The argument put forth in support of +15 systems is that Calgary’s weather demands enclosure, a strangely wimpish reasoning given Calgary citizenry’s intense fitness regimes that have people cycling the bike trails into downtown all winter and spending their lunch hours jogging or power-walking those same trails, summer and winter alike. There is a more convincing economic argument, though, in that retail space is doubled: a Starbucks on the street, and one fifteen feet above; two floors of retail mall space rather than just street-level shops. The ultimate illustration of the multi-storey potential of the +15, +30, and weatherized atria is found in this 1978 proposal — a riot of commingling inside, echoing the celebratory plaza outside.

      Before the Municipal Building, the Calgary Centre for Performing Arts, and the 1988 Olympic Plaza across the street from City Hall, 8th Avenue east of Centre Street was a small-scale strip of pawn shops, tailors, junk stores, and coffee shops. City Hall was fronted to the south by a formal park of parterres and benches. In the next block east was the St. Louis Hotel and an eclectic mix of little stores, a gas station, a corner store, some light industrial, a fish market, and a delicatessen. None of it was worth preserving for its architectural quality, but it was evidence that east downtown had been a viable, if lower economic level, community, with 8th Avenue East as its little Main Street.

      Figure 10-5. This drawing, EV Pedestrian Concept Design Study, shows a +15 8th Avenue extension over the present parking lots and LRT open chasm, depositing people directly onto the block that contains the St. Louis Hotel. The roadway directly behind the Municipal Building becomes parkland; in fact, the whole two-block-wide 8th Avenue section is heavily treed, a quiet oasis behind the civic machine of the Municipal Building.

       Harold Hanen fonds, Glenbow Museum and Archives, M8906-261.

      However, by this time, in the late 1970s, Calgary was in the throes of its second oil boom, awash with disposable income and both embarrassed by and impatient with anything and anybody not participating in the boom. All downtown housing was levelled in preparation of massive high-rise development facing the Bow River; east downtown was gone. With the 1982 crash, it was left as one huge six-by-five-block gravel parking lot, a state in which it remained until 2009 and the advent of the East Village development plan. The destruction of the east downtown Calgary infrastructure, such as it was, was made easier because it had been cut off from the rest of downtown by the sheer eight-storey mirrored glass cliff that was the back of the 1985 municipal building. Out of sight, east downtown didn’t even have sentimental value and was soon out of mind. It became a prostitute’s stroll, the Safeway became a food bank and then was torn down for more parking, and it passed the 1990s as a drug-fuelled, homeless blot on the downtown core. A set of incongruous senior citizens’ apartment blocks facing Fort Calgary and a brave loft-condominium tower were marooned in this social wasteland.