If you want one piece of Calgary that explains how the city grew up, you walk Stephen Avenue from Centre Street to the Bow River end. The strip you are walking is a National Historic Site of Canada, designated in 2002, and it preserves more commercial sandstone architecture from the 1880s and 1890s than any other surviving street in western Canada. The boom that built downtown Calgary built itself on this avenue first.
The fire of 1886 changed the building material
Stephen Avenue had been the working main street of Calgary since the Canadian Pacific Railway crossed the Bow in 1883. The earliest buildings on the avenue were wood frame, fast-built, and flammable. On November 7, 1886, a fire wiped out most of the south side of the avenue between Centre and 1 Street West. The city council passed a fire bylaw within months requiring new commercial buildings in the downtown core to be built of brick or stone.
Calgary’s geological luck was the Paskapoo Sandstone formation. The sandstone came out of local quarries along the Bow at relatively low cost, in workable sizes, with a colour that aged well. Within ten years of the fire, Stephen Avenue was a continuous run of two and three storey sandstone storefronts. Many of those buildings are still standing.
What the avenue holds
- The Alberta Hotel from 1888, one of the earliest large hotels in the west.
- The Imperial Bank of Canada from 1886-87, designed by Frank Darling and John Pearson.
- The Burns Building from 1912, anchoring the east end.
- The Calgary Public Building from 1930 at the east end of the avenue.
- Dozens of smaller sandstone storefronts between Centre and 4 Street SW.
Why Stephen Avenue earned the NHSC designation
Three reasons drove the 2002 designation by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada. First, the concentration of intact sandstone commercial architecture on a single street is rare in Canada and almost unique west of Winnipeg. Second, the avenue documents the commercial transformation of a railway-era frontier town into a regional financial centre. Third, the buildings are still in use. The avenue is not a museum strip. It is a working commercial corridor with restaurants, shops, and offices behind the original façades.
The site is listed on the Canadian Register of Historic Places as Site ID 7774. The protection covers the streetscape and the heritage value of the building façades, not just individual properties.
What this avenue still teaches
The heritage buff take. Most Canadian cities have one main street that defined the early commercial era. Almost all of them have been gutted by 1960s and 1970s urban renewal. Stephen Avenue is the western Canadian exception. The reason it survived is partly geological (the sandstone aged well), partly economic (the buildings stayed commercially useful), and partly political (Calgary made a deliberate choice in the 1980s and 1990s to preserve the strip rather than redevelop it).
The street still works as a commercial corridor today. The architecture is still doing the original job. That is a quietly impressive case of a city earning the heritage status it now has. The avenue is the best place in downtown Calgary to see what the city looked like when it stopped being a frontier town and started being a city.
Related reading from the series. The Hunt House and the oldest building still standing in downtown Calgary. Fort Calgary and how a Mounted Police post became the city of Calgary.
