->->a frisky mood. Meanwhile, international
herds, worried about environmental instability in some of their
traditional whelping grounds, sent large contingents of their
Money to Calgary as well to ensure the survival of the species.
The result was an orgy of financial interaction which spawned
a lot of Money in a short while and a lot of buildings for the
shelter of Money. Unfortunately, the migration also put severe
pressure on the environmental amenities at Calgary creating doubts
about its suitability for future breeding fiestas.
A sub-species of Money called Man is less well-suited
to survival because it is somewhat slower and more cumbersome
to move. Unlike Money, Man forms certain attachments to place.
Nonetheless, Man must follow the lightning migrations of Money
to survive. Some Men enjoy this process, but most detest it and
are in a miserable mood during such periods. When Man arrived
in Calgary after the 1970s migration of Money, he found what he
usually finds when he arrives. While much was happening to make
Money feel comfortable, not enough was happening to make Man feel
that way. There was not enough shelter for Man nor the pastimes
he was used to in his old home. And, whats more, the tribe of
Men already living at Calgary, who were thriving nicely off the
influx of Money, were not pleased that more Men had come to share
in the surplus.
Generally speaking, both tribes, the old and the new,
were more prosperous but less happy. The new tribes longed for
the old sod where they had been before the Money left, and the
old tribe was also a little homesick for the way their place had
been before the Money and the new tribe had come.
The Money meanwhile was feeling a familiar wanderlust.
The fodder on the new breeding ground was getting badly eaten
down and there were rumours about other breeding grounds with
better groundcover in other parts of the world Just when the new
tribes of Men were getting used to their new home and forming
attachments to it as is Man's wont, and just as the old and new
tribes of Men were beginning to intermarry and get along, the
Money began to flow away. Man sadly faced the ancient fact that
soon he would have to go as well.
At the peak of the boom, 3000 people a month were arriving
in Calgary. Office buildings and high-rise apartments were flying
up on the downtown floodplain, and flying up to all-new heights.
The Calgary Tower, constructed in the '60s to be our city super-symbol,
was already facing the prospect of being dwarfed.
Old Calgary, what little was left, was being smashed
down by the city block to make way for the new. If you were a
downtown office worker, driving to work as most office workers
do, you would seldom use the same route two weeks in a row as
streets were blocked for destruction or construction.
The pressure to accommodate the boom was such that
there really wasn't time for master-planning. The buildings were
approved on a more or less ad hoc basis, with little thought given
to the views, to the relationship of any one building to the rest.
The result was Manhattan-ish. Streets became sun-obscured
for most of every day. What little light reached the ground ping-ponged
down off the windows of buildings standing opposite each other.
Back in 1922, Bob Edwards wrote: 'When Solomon said there was
a time and a place for everything, he had not encountered the
problem of parking his automobile." What would Edwards have
made of '70s Calgary, when, if you weren't fortunate enough to
have a reserved company parking stall, you had to play Lotto with
thousands of other harried drivers cramming expensive parkades
or circling blocks in a vain search for a dozen feet of unoccupied
curb? In the frenzied '70s, there was no shame in arriving late
for a meeting. All. you had to say was, "I was looking for
a parking spot", and all in attendance would nod gravely.
Calgary had sped up in more ways than miles per hour.
People walked faster, moved more often, changed jobs more frequently;
they even talked faster. In a city that had once been given to
leisurely story-telling, people became impatient with such things.
Tell a joke longer than one line and people would look at their
watches. Conversation had to be meaty, concise; the point had
to be arrived at quickly so the listener could be off to his next
appointment.
The born-and-bred Calgarian was beset by an even more
extreme case of the traditional loneliness. If two "true"
Calgarians were introduced, they practically embraced. The meeting
had the same quality of amazing coincidence it would have had
on a street corner in Tripoli. A Calgarian arriving at a party
was often asked what part of the East he came from. When he said
he was from Calgary, he might observe disappointment in the eyes
of his host. The purpose of many parties was to wax homesick and
run down Calgary. With a Calgarian in attendance, the spirit was
dampened.
Tired of defending their city, Calgarians developed
a sedge mentality. They retreated behind privately held opinion,
within stockades of unassailable and happy memory.
On the positive side, there was an enormous feeling
of excitement in Calgary during the '70s. This was the nerve centre
of incredible industrial exploits. The orders to build drilling
islands in the Beaufort Sea, to suspend drilling or go deeper
on an offshore well in far away Davis Strait; these instructions
originated on a telephone in Calgary. Politicians and technocrats
from the East were making pilgrimages to Calgary as the roles
of mountain and Mohammed reversed.
THE BUST In 1982, the huge recession that had much
of the rest of the world in its grip finally located Calgary.
There were a number of things that combined, some would say conspired,
to end the boom: the federal government's National Energy Program,
the failing cohesiveness of OPEC, Reaganomics, a world oil glut.
Whatever the cause or balance among causes, the boom in Calgary
suddenly stopped and went the other way. The microscopic vacancy
rates shot up-to 20% for office space downtown. Full employment
turned into 15% unemployment. The trains going East were suddenly
much fuller than the ones coming west.
For those with a long enough memory, it was hard not
to think of the Great Depression. The similarities for Calgary
were striking. Again the stock market had taken a plunge; again
an above average number of Calgarians were on board at the time.
THE SILVER LINING An era of dire predictions has begun
in Calgary. Pessimism is as obligatory as optimism was a few years
ago. For those of us who resisted the old optimism, there is a
tendency to ignore the present pessimism just as adroitly. We
are more inclined to take stock of the situation, to see if it's
really as grim as so many would have us believe.
First, a person should take a good look at the city
that oil built. Forgetting for the moment the small that used
to be beautiful, it has to be admitted that large can be beautiful
too. Driving into downtown along ninth avenue with the setting
sun at your back, the reflecting gold and silver of the glass
office towers is spine-tingling, pure. Our knobbed obelisk, the
Calgary Tower, stands in the middle like a red flower trying to
keep its blossom in the sun.
Outside of downtown, looking in, especially in late
summer when the sky is angry red or in the spring when the thunderheads
are glowering, the forest of skyscrapers is inspiring. The buildings
look very much like they belong.
The building cranes that used to perch vulture like
across the skyline have thinned. They have taken wing and perhaps
at this moment are hovering over the Maritimes looking for a suitable
place to land. Their near absence in Calgary allows the city to
look complete at last.
Great booms and great busts put dangerous strains on
a city to be sure, but each boom also bears giant children that
characterize the city long after the particular economic surge
has subsided.
In a park downtown, a family of lanky aluminum figures
circles on the grass as if in ancient celebration of the seasons
or the sun. This "Family of Man" first did its dance
in the U.K. pavilion at Expo '67 in Montreal. The family's change
of venue came about because a construction company did well off
a couple of city contracts and decided to show its thanks by donating
the family to Calgary. Many Calgary monuments have come about
in this way.
Eric Harvie, an Ontario native who profited mightily
in the Leduc boom of '47, has repaid the city of Calgary in several
large-scale projects. After making his fortune, he turned collector
and endowed the Glenbow Foundation to sort the treasures he had
gathered from around the world. In 1966, the Harvie family donated
the collection to the Province of Alberta, and it is now housed
in the Glenbow Museum downtown. Linked to the Convention Centre
complex, the museum contains 250,000 square feet of floor space,
100,000 of which is for exhibition.
The Harvie fortune has also endowed Calgary parks:
Century Gardens on 8th and 8th, and the Devonian Gardens, a two
and a half acre indoor park within Toronto Dominion Square. Thanks
to the latter conquest of climate, Calgarians can eat lunch in
summer warmth and greenery every month of the year and, if they
care to in winter, they can step outside and go for a skate a
couple of storeys above the level of cars and hubbub.
With a similar sense of public spiritedness, Sam Nickle
bequeathed funds toward the building of the Nickle Arts Museum
at the University of Calgary.
The general revenues from our boom times have created
more aspects of identity.
St. George's Island in the Bow River could have been
a prisoner of war camp, a dog pound or an isolation hospital.
All three suggestions were made. But, in 1929, it became a zoo
instead. In 1936, it also became a dinosaur park when Finnish-born
John Kanerva started building his life-sized dinosaur replicas
on the island. The 90 foot, 65 ton brontosaurus, Dinny, is the
instant stuff of postcards and has long been part of the city's
folklore.
The '60s and '70s were particularly fertile periods
for monument building. The 626 foot concrete Calgary Tower was
erected complete with revolving observation tower and restaurant.
The eighth avenue or Stephen Avenue Mall was denied to the automobile,
preserved for the pedestrian. Heritage Park and the Centennial
Planetarium, built in the '60s, provided havens of calm for refugees
from the '70s.
In a city occasionally accused of not being "green"
enough, it is hard to see this lack for the trees. On both sides
of the Bow River, under a canopy of these invisible green things,
Calgary runners and bicyclists race for miles in pursuit of the
level of fitness enjoyed by that mythical elderly Swede. The perfect
resting place at the end of such a run or ride is the Inglewood
Bird Sanctuary, several acres of pond and forest chiming with
birdsong.
On both sides of the Elbow River, from the Bow to the
Glenmore Reservoir, there is an interlinking chain of parks and,
beyond the reservoir, is the Weaselhead, a piece of isolated wilderness
within the city where the meander channels are dammed by beaver
and the wetlands are fringed by giant spruce. Farther south, along
Fish Creek, a truly massive park has been set aside, miles of
mature cottonwood rich in rabbit and deer.
This sort of protective dissertation could go on, at
the risk of chauvinism. It could go on and on and guarantee chauvinism.
Perhaps it's best to stop short of that fate with mention of just
one more of prosperity's giant children: the Saddledome, Calgary's
colosseum.
As the post-OPEC boom went silent, the swaybacked Olympic
Saddledome was rising on the city skyline, a drunken but graceful
figure eight of massive proportion. In a city that has had a love
affair with sports since the polo teams of the British aristocracy
first galloped back and forth in present day Hillhurst, it is
somehow fitting that the latest and most hectic boom should be
capped off with a sports palace. Calgarians are mad sports fans
and the fact that Edmonton had a colosseum and a winning hockey
franchise when Calgary had neither was almost too much to bear.
In a city that is in a mood to look back and be pessimistic, the
Saddledome is very helpful symbolism. It has its eyes peeled resolutely
forward.
In fact, sports may prove to be our partial salvation.
The 1988 Winter Olympics are scheduled to be hosted by Calgary
and it's hard to think of a more formidable proof of the city's
living future. Cities are somehow gauged by whether or not they
have hosted a world sporting meet. Again, that delicate parity
between Alberta cities was badly disturbed when Edmonton not only
got the Commonwealth Games but staged them with skill and panache.
By becoming an Olympic City, Calgary can bridge this chasm and
- touch wood-inch a bit ahead.
THE HUMAN WEALTH In counting Calgary's blessings, it
would be repeating a common error to dwell on the place while
forgetting the people. The human wealth given to this location
by history, corralled here by growth, is formidable. In politics,
Calgary has produced Premiers and a Prime Minister. In athletics,
Calgarians have won glory scaling up mountains and skiing down
them. In fact, there are few arts or sciences at which Calgarians
have not made themselves known.
To look at the city's people in a more general sense
and say, Calgarians are this or Calgarians are famous for that
is more difficult. It used to be said that Calgarians were very
friendly, and I'm sure, by the older Calgarians I know, that this
was true. Newcomers to the city claim it may not be as true any
longer. It seems that high crime rates, boomtime crowding and
criticism have left us in a more defensive than welcoming mood.
A generalization that still can be made is that city
life hasn't cost Calgarians their taste for the country. Part
of the credit for that has to go to the country of course. It
is beautiful in any direction and the city empties into it every
weekend. What this does for the people, I believe, is inject sanity.
Whether they fish or ski or birdwatch or look for fossils in the
badlands, the frictions and tensions inherent in city life are
smoothed. The urbanite slakes his basic thirst for an unpaved
world and is more pleasant to deal with come Monday morning. But
don't expect any soft dealing; it seems likely from the Calgarian
record that fresh air sharpens the business sense as well.
On the occasion of the city's 75th birthday, Carl Nickle
described Calgary as a "wide-awake little city in the foothills"
Since that time, Calgary has swollen from a little city to a big
city; it has overflowed the foothills and spread far into the
prairie. It has grown so fast that it has perhaps outgrown its
sense of who it is. Into that identity gap, those from outside
have readily poured impressions.
If Calgary is due for one of its quiet times, between
booms, one of the advantages could be that not as many people
will be focussing their baleful eyes upon it. An opportunity to
smell the roses could turn into a chance to consolidate and appreciate.
It is said to be impossible to love that which is constantly changing.
With a chance to stay the same for a time, Calgary may find that
man's natural tendency to warm toward his place will begin to
operate here again.
-Fred Stenson
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