Development Derailed: Calgary and the CPR , 1962–64

aCknowle Dg e m e nts I would like to thank the people at the City of Calgary Archives.As always, they were very accommodating in helping me locate documents and guiding me to sources I might otherwise not have consulted.My special thanks and appreciation go to Rod Sykes.He made his private files available to me and consented to their transferral to the University of Calgary Archives following the completion of this manuscript.Blessed with an incredible memory, he was unfailingly patient and generous with his time and extremely helpful with his comments and observations.I especially appreciated his neutrality regarding my interpretation of events as they pertained to the CPR. De ve lopm e nt De r aile DWhat was missing in this exciting maelstrom of change in the 1950s and early 1960s was a vision for the future.The change had come too quickly.For instance, in terms of providing housing, the city was simply playing catch-up and transferring more and more power to private developers.23 Even an awareness of urban renewal was late in coming.A booster-type mayor with limited experience in urban issues was at the helm for most of the decade.City councils mostly comprised stolid conservative businessmen steeped in the practice of guarding the public purse.24 Although a more dynamic executive was in place by 1960, one ready to assume leadership, its members, too, were fixated on freeways and redevelopment.According to a contemporary planning consultant, planning in this period was all about aggregate growth and the need to accommodate and promote it.25 The City of Calgary's planning philosophy through its first general plan clearly reflected this blinkered The BaCkground To The ProPosalThe project was so ambitious that its scope alone was enough to make up for any lack of vision.While the long-range value of the project reached into the hundreds of millions of dollars, the CPR's willingness to invest $35 million within seven years represented a mind-boggling commitment.To put this figure into perspective, it was about three times the city's annual capital expenditures and not much less than the total civic revenues for 1962.30 When the idea for the project was suggested in 1962, both daily newspapers could scarcely contain their joy.The Albertan thought it was "too good to be true" while the Calgary Herald labelled it as "a plan of great vision, of great imagination, of great value . . .a plan that will make history."31 Even The Globe and Mail was impressed.After noting that "Calgary is a guinea pig for developments in other cities," it congratulated Calgarians for having "a straitjacket removed."32 Calgary and the Canadian Pacific Railway were bound together by time.The railway company had laid out the townsite in 1884 and, over the years, had continued to play a major role in the city's physical and economic development.Its transcontinental line enters the city from the southeast, crosses the Elbow River west of 8th Street East and proceeds westward through the downtown between 9th and 10th Avenues.Beyond 14th Street West, it follows the south bank of the Bow River out of the city.In the 1960s, Calgary's 536-acre city centre was (and still is) compressed between the CPR right-of-way and the Bow River to the north.Commercial expansion had been following a westward pattern since rapid urban growth had begun after 1947.The right-of-way was a limiting factor to commercial development to the south, and it restricted traffic access to and from the fast-growing southern residential areas.On the south side of the tracks along 10th Avenue, a line of old warehouses and other structures presented a stark and ugly contrast to the city's emerging skyline north and west of the railway.The CPR wanted to reverse its declining revenues from prime urban property in the downtown area.From 1958 to 1962, total carload traffic on its roughly 170 miles of trackage in the city had dropped from 67,214 to 59,972, with the downtown percentage falling from approximately 20 percent to 17.9 percent of the total.This trend was expected to continue.In 1962, of the carloads that originated in the downtown right-of-way, 83 percent were from three customers, with the largest, Robin Hood Mills (at 57.9 percent), destined for relocation.35 The consolidation of the CNR's presence in Calgary via increased trackage was another worrying factor.Since opening its new industrial subdivision at Highfield in 1954, the CNR had lured forty companies, or three thousand carloads of business, from the CPR, including McCoshams and Martin Paper Products.36 Noting that Highfield had fifty unused acres of fully serviced land, a senior official with the CPR noted, "It's just going to get worse."37 The City of Calgary's most degraded area was parallel to the railway right-of-way in the east end.By the mid-1950s, the area to the east of Centre Street, and particularly that adjacent to the right-of-way, was deteriorating in value and appearance.For example, between 1946 and 1963, construction on the seventyseven acres in the two leading business districts west of Centre Street totalled $87.5 million.On Canadian Pacific property (ninety-nine acres), it was $5.9 million.By 1963, the value of construction in the two leading business districts was over $1 million per acre compared to $59,000 per acre on land adjacent to the right-of-way.38

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