Snow sits on a brown swivel office chair in the backyard of the last house in Calgary’s downtown. A discarded mattress leans on the stucco back wall. Above it, something baseball sized has crashed through the thin frosted window pane. Around front, the stairs are a worn crumble, glazed in ice. Somebody has removed the house numbers, 933, and boarded up the door. The plywood won’t be coming off the doorway until wrecking machines claw the house into rubble, marking the end of a home that’s stubbornly withstood change all around it since 1941 — and the passing of an era as old as Calgary is. The house at 933 5th Avenue S.W. hails from when downtown living in Calgary didn’t mean a shoebox condo and a thumbprint balcony. Stand-alone houses ringed the sandstone James Short School on Centre Street, and McDougall School on 6th Street. Over decades and successive oil booms, the Great March of Progress laid waste to several of the old Edwardians and Craftsman homes in favour of apartment blocks and office towers. As everything else in the core was knocked down and craned up, the brown shingled bungalow at 5th Avenue and 9th Street endured. Defying the odds and real-estate economics, 933 hosted BBQ dinners and kitchen table birthday cakes and front-yard election signs, right up until a year and a half ago. “I’ve said: I hope they tear it down before I go,” said Bob Quinton, one of 933’s first tenants. The home is now targeted for eventual demolition by its landlord — city hall’s corporate properties division — and the civic assessment rolls published this month do not include a single-family residential home in the downtown business district. City assessment counts one active house in East Village, another in Eau Claire, and a couple on sleepier streets in the Downtown West End dominated by apartments and car dealerships. A high-end jeweller occupies a vintage brick two-story on 6th Avenue. But as for family houses in the commercial core, with 20,000 cars rolling by daily, 933 is the lone holdout. It’s got no heritage value, and isn’t attached to any boldfaced names in Calgary’s history. But through its residents over eight decades comes the story of rapid urban change as 933 stood still. 1940s-1950s “It was two-way streets then, and with boulevards, because I remember walking down the street to see Johnny Gillis,” Bob Quinton says. Quinton was seven when his parents settled in the grey stucco house in 1947. Tree-lined patches of lawn buffered him from passing cars as he ambled down the sidewalk to school, to buy candy at Rayalta Groceryat the corner, or to a friend’s. Across the street and a block away lived Sheldon Chumir, a future Rhodes Scholar and MLA. The milkman delivered bottles to the milk chute at the side door. Apples grew on the backyard tree. Dad was a realtor, so they could afford a TV. This felt like a childhood well removed from the core several blocks away, where the 15-storey Palliser hotel topped the skyline. “It’d be like living in Crescent Heights or Tuxedo Park, just a little closer in,” Quinton says.

Until it began changing. While he lived at 933, the city dismantled the tree-lined boulevards to widen 5th Avenue for car traffic. It soon became a one-way. His family moved to a new home in Mount Royal in 1958. The house stayed in the family’s ownership, as did Number 929 and 927. Bob grew up and joined his dad’s Quinton Realty, and tried selling his old home as oil head offices kept expanding the business district’s footprint in the 1960s.But the City of Calgary swooped in to secure land for its proposed LRT system. Quinton sold the three homes for $100,000 in 1969. The city’s housing arm decided to rent them out until it had better use for the land. 1970s-1980s In 1977, social service worker Mary Stewart moved in with two daughters. Number 933 was central, reasonably priced, and available through the city, she recalls. The girls walked to school two blocks away, but had to play in the backyard at rush hour when five lanes of eastbound traffic rumbled by. On weekends, youngest daughter Ruth got the run of the neighbourhood. Many friends came from nearby highrises. “We used to sneak into apartment buildings and play in the parkade — cops and robbers,” says Ruth King, now 37. McDougall School closed in 1981, for lack of kids in the transformed area. She took the bus to a Bridgeland school that no longer exists either. King never recalls feeling unsafe, though she was flashed three times in her youth downtown. She’d walk often to the Mac’s convenience store on 4th Avenue, where prostitutes waited for johns. “I always thought they were waiting for the bus,” she says. King’s family moved to a house in Eau Claire after she turned seven, and then a home in Sunnyside when her mother could afford it. King now owns a restaurant in Invermere, B.C. She’s deliberately raising her eight-year-old daughter in a small town where being “street smart” isn’t necessary. “I want her to be a kid for longer than that, longer than I got to be,” she says. 1980s-1990s While Brian Burgess and Doug Burton rented the house, the LRT to northwest Calgary began rolling along the tracks installed next door, where two other houses had once stood. “You notice not so much the train. You notice the bell, the ding ding of the gates coming down,” Burton says now. “But you get used to it, I guess.” Burgess moved in first, in 1986. This two-bedroom, 1,200-square-foot home had decent rent, a two-car garage out back, and an easy drive from the Springbank airport where he studied to become a pilot. “Because I was 23, it didn’t bother me it was downtown,” he says. His former SAIT classmate moved in a year ago. Burton’s sales job at an oil service was a four-block walk away. The truth of it, though? Number 933 was a great party house, especially during Stampede. Once when they rented a hot tub for a backyard party, 150 guests showed up. Apartment-dwellers three doors down made a noise complaint. “A young cop asked, ‘You look like you have everything under control here — how long’s this party going for? I wouldn’t mind stopping by when my time’s off,’ ” Burton says.

During the 1988 Olympics, Burton arranged five hula hoops as rings on the roof. Passersby honked their approval. After the two-car garage deteriorated and the city demolished it, office workers clambered to rent parking spaces. Neighbours charged $30 a month; Burgess and Burton charged $40. Burton always felt safe there. One time he thought there was a break-in was actually a few buddies who returned from the bar, and wriggled through the unused milk chute to get at the door lock. Casper, his white cat, roamed freely around the three adjoining backyards. Burton scattered the cat’s ashes beneath a bush in the backyard. Burgess moved away first to become a pilot in Regina; Burton and his wife left for the suburbs in 1992. “We were always kind of not feeling that great,” he said. “The air flow was minimal, because some of the windows were painted shut.” 1990s-2012 If you’ve walked down 17th Avenue S.W. or through Kensington, you know the work of the guy who rented the house in 1996. He was one of Calgary’s poster guys, plastering boards with nightclub and event posters. He’s wary of his name being used, so let’s call him Bill. A house downtown was a short walk or bike from all Bill’s poster boards. With tough competition — he once boasted of 200 customers — he sometimes had to poster the same board twice a day. Being centrally located on ground level had another professional advantage. “You’d drop posters off in the barbecue in the back and an invoice came in the mail,” says Greg Curtis of concert promoter Tooth Blackner. Curtis recalls once seeing Bill and his wife lounged in a kiddie pool in their downtown backyard, sipping on sunny day cocktails. Bill offers no complaints about the house itself. But strangers sometimes snagged his parking space, and the crime became a growing worry.“It was great when we lived there at the beginning, and then the boom hit and all the drugs came into Calgary, and all hell broke loose,” he says.While Bill lived there, the city demolished the two houses next door, but the city didn’t evict 933’s tenants to wipe the slate fully clean.The couple left in mid-2012, after 16 years in the core’s last house. When he last visited, Bill found a vacant home tagged with graffiti, the fence ripped down and sticks through the window. “We left it in great shape, and they (the city) let it go,” he says. 2012-???? The city doesn’t say when it will demolish the house, or what it will do with the land afterwards. City of Calgary corporate properties says it maintained the house while tenants still lived there, but upgrades were getting prohibitively costly and it’s now deemed uninhabitable. “With an older house, the risk of exposure to hazardous materials increases when maintenance is discontinued and that is how the property evolved to an unsafe status,” spokeswoman Akosua Oppong wrote in an e-mail. The city consolidated the 933 lot with the now-vacant lots next door in 2000. In a downtown market that will absorb seven new office towers in the next three years, land that was sold for $100,000 is now assessed at $3.4 million.