Neil Richardson, president of Heritage Property Corp., aims to restore the historic buildings along Seventh Avenue.
It’s a one-block strip with a reputation for cultivating drug habits, criminal behaviour and discomfort for passersby.
But a local developer with a soft spot for restoring historic buildings thinks he can salvage the notorious 100 block of Seventh Avenue S.W. and its crumbling historic buildings by developing the area into a thriving arts and culture hot spot.
To kick-start the revitalization, Neil Richardson, president of Heritage Property Corp., plans to spend $40 million developing a six-storey state-of-the-art automated parkade.
“What I think people forget is that this area had a pretty prominent past,” says Richardson. “We think it has a pretty prominent future.”
In the early part of the 20th century, the block was a vibrant, bustling commercial hub. The buildings housed the short-lived Calgary Stock Exchange, the city’s first candy factory and the first self-serve grocery store.
However, decades of neglect left the stretch a festering sore. Pawnshops have replaced retail stores. Illicit drugs are openly bought and sold with seeming impunity. The walls of the historic buildings are easy picking for graffiti. Many pedestrians consciously avoid the block altogether..
“When I take the train everyday and go by that block you kind of want to look away,” says Terry Rock, president and CEO of Calgary Arts Development, whose office is across the street in Art Central.
Over the past several years, Richardson restored the downtown Grand Theatre, and the Lorraine Building after it was gutted by fire in 1998. After quietly, methodically purchasing downtown property, Richardson now owns six neglected buildings on Seventh Avenue, from the Central United Church to the Palomino Smokehouse and Grill.
In 2008, Richardson received an award through the city’s Clean to the Core program for cleaning up his newly acquired properties along Seventh Avenue, which included shutting down the Stuart Block, a three-storey brick building near the Palomino.
“The rooms upstairs were really run as part of the drug trade,” says Richardson. “We got our certificate of having made downtown Calgary a little bit better for having closed the crack house. So now we call ourselves an award-winning crack house owner.”
Richardson has promised to restore the decrepit buildings and allow arts and culture groups the first rights to move in. “A heritage building is really only as good as what you do with it after you’ve restored it,” he says.
To that end, Richardson has partnered with the Calgary Arts Development, which has for several months been focusing on locating reliable and affordable spaces where artists can live, create and perform.
“It’s going to be a place where you stick your face up against the glass and wonder what’s happening,” says Rock, referring to the Seventh Avenue proposal. “That’s what its future is.”
Rock says CADA’s research and surveys suggest the majority of Calgary arts and culture organizations have an uncertain future — some less than a year — which is “just not good enough for a city our size with a large art college,” he says. “It’s not even close to enough.”
Artpoint Gallery and Studios in Inglewood could be demolished, making way for the future southeast LRT line; the Ant Hill building in Kensington, home to the bimonthly Market Collective, is slated for a residential and commercial development; the 8,000-square-metre Seafood Market in the East Village now houses 14 studios, but that too is scheduled for the wrecking ball.
Meanwhile, CADA and the city are looking at existing, unused buildings as temporary fixes, including Bud’s Used Office Furniture on Fourth Street N.E.
Rock says the block along Seventh Avenue could be transformed into one massive, interconnected arts and culture space or split into several individual spaces.
“We think that if we were able to identify arts groups that could go in there, create studios and galleries in a way that was affordable to them… they would be in perpetuity assets to Calgary,” says Rock.
The restoration of the Seventh Avenue block is “something that does need to happen,” says Maggie Schofield, executive director for the Calgary Downtown Association. “There’s an appetite in the downtown to have that block really become a vital part of the downtown core,” she says. “Certainly that would bring a lot of vitality and activity to the area.”
However, attempts to fund arts and culture spaces in the area has historically hit several stumbling blocks, says Schofield.
And this is where Richardson’s automated parkade comes into play. Development plans depict the six-storey building hovering above historic buildings. Parking customers will drive their vehicles into an elevator, and warehouse-based technology will automatically park the vehicle by lifting it into one of 360 parking stalls, safe from vandals, thieves and careless door-denting parkers. After dropping off their vehicles, customers could access one of six entrances in the back alley — which will be converted into a pedestrian friendly alley — grab a ticket and walk away.
“You don’t have to drive in looking for a stall… the system parks your car for you,” says Richardson.
The parking rates, which “won’t be any more expensive or less expensive than conventional parking,” will help subsidize the capital cost of creating the art spaces, says Richardson.
The project recently cleared one hurdle after city council approved a rezoning application earlier this month. Richardson aims to have the development permit approved within nine months and to break ground within a year.
And when the economy rebounds, Richardson plans to build a 15- to 18-storey office tower on top of the parkade. “Really the bottom line is that we’d have to wait for the market to tell you to build there,” says Richardson.
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