>>REVIEW
HISTORIC WALKS OF CALGARY
Harry M. Sanders
Red Deer Press, 384 pp.
Harry Sanders is not a native Calgarian. That is hardly surprising. A lot of us have come from elsewhere and settled here. Some come by choice. Others, like Sanders, come with their parents. Time passes. They grow up and decide to stay. Lives are lived. Buildings built. Some get torn down. Others are abandoned. The landscape itself changes. More time passes. People forget what the city once looked like. What happened before gets forgotten.
The city, so it seems, has no history. It is dull and uninteresting – or so the self-propagating myth that is the downside of civic boosterism goes. If you can maintain the illusion that we don’t have a past and should focus on the future, then it is easier to claim that we are a progressive community and sweep away things that don’t fit with our particular image of what Calgary should be. By denying that we have a past we make it easier to destroy what remains of it.
Sanders is in a good position to debunk this myth. An archivist, currently with the Glenbow Museum and formerly with the City of Calgary, he has spent well over a decade immersing himself in local history. Moreover, he is genuinely enthusiastic about the subject and it shows.
There are 10 different walks in his new book, Historic Walks of Calgary. They take you through most of the inner city, into districts like Mount Royal, Kensington, Erlton, Ramsay and Inglewood. My favourite walk goes through Victoria Park. This is likely just nostalgia. When I was a kid, we would visit my aunt and uncle’s house there and often play on the nearby Stampede grounds during the off-season. At the time, we had to walk four blocks to get there. Today, thanks to Stampede expansion, we would just have to cross the street – that is, if the house were still there. It was torn down two years ago.
My aunt and uncle’s old house wasn’t much and, now that it’s gone, it’s almost like they weren’t there. But they were. And that is the point that Sanders is trying to make. The buildings may be gone but the stories that accompany them still exist. It’s the stories that constitute our past and our heritage as well as the buildings. Indeed, the buildings don’t have meaning unless you know the stories of the people associated with them. As far as possible, Sanders seeks to provide the back-story to the buildings and places that he takes the reader to in the book.
A city without old buildings is antiseptic, lacking in charm and grit. Fortunately for us, we still have some left. Sanders takes us to them on his rambles. We even visit the oldest existing building in Calgary – it’s made of wood and survived the fire of 1886. If you want to know more, you’ll just have to get the book. It will give you a new perspective on Calgary and some wonderful stories to tell people who say we have no history and that nothing ever happened here. |
Copyright ©2005 FFWD. All rights reserved.