From the rundown Cecil Hotel to the classy Barron Building theatre, city council has been eyeing the fate of decades-old buildings as developers seek downtown space. On Historic Calgary Week, the Herald’s Dylan Robertson looks at how this booming city decides what to keep, and the people immersed in that process. In Bob van Wegen’s childhood, Stephen Avenue was a different place. Vagrants slept under verandas while multiple shops sold drug paraphernalia. “It was kind of a creepy place,” he said, recalling the ’60s and ’70s. “You’d have people walking by whispering: ‘Hash?’ ” Nowadays, locals take visiting guests for a stroll down the dynamic pedestrian mall. Original sandstone buildings span City Hall to 4th Avenue S.W., where century-old facades house fancy restaurants and boutique shopping. “Now it’s really a central point for the city, and it’s got so much heritage,” says van Wegen, an independent heritage planner who just finished a two-year term with the city. “You’d be surprised how well you can preserve these things.”

Stephen Avenue in about 1912. Courtesy, Glenbow Archives When city council moved last month toward slating the Cecil Hotel for redevelopment, many welcomed the prospect of knocking down a rundown building synonymous with violent crime.

Calgary Public Library archives. But a community of citizens, planners and historians — mobilized through two decades of demolitions and saves — are watching the site carefully. “A lot of people associate that building with the social issues around there, but it’s got some potential,” says van Wegen. “It might have to go, but we need to be sure about that first.” A rallying cry Scores of alumni protested their school’s demolition over a frigid winter in 2002. Since 1909, St. Mary’s School’s red bricks towered over the Beltline, serving as a girls’ school and eventually a pastoral centre. After nine decades of use, trustees voted to knock down the school to save on maintenance costs, rather than restore it.

St. Mary's School from a post card published by the Valentine & Son's Publishing Co. Graduates marched around the construction-site fencing with signs, demanding the board spare a school with unique attributes. A developer offered to buy the building and move it; the board declined. A preservation group scrambled in vain to get the building historical status. A wrecking ball toppled the structure in 2002. Three years later the board opened a new, larger school on the site called Our Lady of Lourdes, attaching the original tower and cornerstones to an artificial facade. “It’s a Frankenstein version of the original,” said Van Wegen, who said the school has limited heritage value. Scott Joliffe, chair of the Calgary Heritage Authority — the city’s arms-length consultation board who works with developers — calls it Calgary’s “Penn Station moment,” referring to the grand New York City terminal that was demolished in 1963 and replaced with a dreary structure, sparking greater protection of historical buildings. Months after the new school opened, the Lougheed Block’s Grand theatre was spared destruction. A sympathetic developer swooped in last-minute to preserve the window-gridded brick building, which had stooped from Western Canada’s ballet hub to an indoor golf range.

The Grand Theatre. What followed was an awakening. “About seven years ago, Calgary started to wake up to the fact that heritage in the community mattered,” says Donna Zwicker, former president of the Chinook Country Historical Society.

“There was such a boom going on and people were realizing that what’s gone is gone,” she says. A group of citizens launched the Calgary Heritage Initiative in 2005. Unlike the city’s CHA, the CHI would serve as a grassroots citizen’s advocacy group. “I didn’t really pay much attention to historic buildings before then,” says Chris Edwards, one of the group’s vice-presidents. “We’re try to be professional and not chain ourselves to doors, because it’s too late then. We’re engaging people to try to find the best-case scenario.” The group profiles historical buildings that lack designation, spreads awareness of heritage issues to hundreds through social media and counsels policy-makers and developers. One of their projects, the Century Homes initiative, targets people living in homes built around the First World War. The project helps people research the history of their homes and prepares plaques for passersby to read.

A line of 100-year-old homes on Memorial Drive N.W. “It fosters community pride. It also creates civic awareness of heritage from within,” said Zwicker. Meanwhile, a roundtable of city officials, citizen groups and 800 people curious enough about history to join a mailing list meets every few months to discuss ongoing issues, from examining the impact of last year’s flood, to preserving aboriginal sites around town. “Calgary’s heritage community really started to work in a collaborative direction,” said Zwicker. The added support has helped her group grow the currently running Historic Calgary Week to include multiple walking tours and visits to buildings normally closed to the public. Boom and bust pressures Many of Calgary’s key buildings appeared during the city’s major growth spurts. That means an abundance of quickly-built structures, which age at the same time. “Here, it’s either a boom or a recession,” says van Wegen. “It can make it hard to plan and prioritize.” And those booms mean an influx of cash, which can be a double-edged sword. “You need money to preserve heritage, so money is not always bad. But developers have their own demands when things are booming.”

The art moderne sign from the 1949 Eamon's Bungalow Camp is going to be incorporated into the Rocky Ridge LRT station. Like most cities, Calgary has a heritage inventory that ranks buildings into three classes based on their heritage value. The index lists unique attributes, preservation challenges and usage over time. In theory, the inventory lets the heritage authority have an informed discussion with developers, to negotiate what aspects of a building can be saved at a reasonable cost. “We try for development-based heritage conservation,” said Joliffe, who chairs the group charged with maintaining the inventory. “Rather than having buildings vacant and unused, developers are helping to preserve these buildings.” The city’s planning department also has incentives to offer, such as property tax breaks for companies and businesses that retain older parts of buildings. Developers can negotiate exceptions to normal density limits in exchange for restoring nearby buildings, such as the large Guardian condominium towers north of Stampede Park: its developer is paying to upgrade two nearby historic schoolhouses. The city also has a unique parking-space transfer scheme, similar to how countries trade carbon credits. Developers can sell their rights for new parking spots, because they won’t be building spots on the site of a protected building.