Walk down Stephen Avenue in downtown Calgary and look up at the sandstone lintels above the second floor windows. On the building at 118 8 Avenue SW, the carved letters spell out TRIBUNE BLOCK. The building was constructed in 1892 by J.G. McCallum as a purpose-built commercial home for the Calgary Tribune newspaper, one of the early western Canadian newspapers. The Tribune Block is one of the surviving sandstone commercial buildings from the period that defined downtown Calgary, and the name carved in the stone is a direct connection to the newspaper culture of the early city.
The Calgary Tribune itself
The Calgary Tribune was founded in 1885 as a weekly newspaper. It was one of several competing newspapers operating in early Calgary, along with the Calgary Herald, the Calgary Albertan, and several short-lived publications. The Tribune was a Conservative-leaning paper that competed with the more Liberal-aligned Herald for readership in the railway-era town.
By the early 1890s the Tribune was successful enough to commission a purpose-built building on Stephen Avenue. The Tribune Block was designed to house both the newspaper’s editorial offices and its printing operations, with retail space on the ground floor for additional revenue. The building was completed in 1892 and the Tribune occupied it for several years.
What the building includes
- Two storeys of cut Paskapoo sandstone in the Romanesque Revival style.
- A street-level commercial frontage divided into multiple retail bays.
- Editorial and printing space on the second floor.
- The TRIBUNE BLOCK name carved into the sandstone lintel above the main entrance.
- A modest cornice and pediment on the roofline.
The Tribune Block is one of several similar sandstone commercial blocks built on Stephen Avenue between 1886 and 1900 in the wake of the great fire. The architectural character is consistent with the broader Stephen Avenue National Historic Site streetscape.
What happened to the newspaper
The Calgary Tribune merged with several other early Calgary publications through the 1890s and early 1900s and eventually disappeared as an independent title. The Calgary Herald absorbed many of the smaller competitors and emerged as the dominant Calgary daily by the early twentieth century. The Tribune Block continued as a commercial building under various ownership and tenants long after the original newspaper had stopped publishing.
The building was given Municipal Historic Resource designation on March 23, 1998, and is listed on the Canadian Register of Historic Places as Site ID 9283. The building remains in commercial use today.
A heritage buff opinion on the Tribune name
The connection from the Tribune Block to the modern Alberta Tribune is worth saying out loud. Newspapers come and go. The names recycle. The Calgary Tribune of the 1890s was a Conservative-leaning weekly that took on the political and commercial powerhouses of the day from a different editorial angle than its competitors. The Alberta Tribune of the 2020s does similar work with a different medium and a different audience. The throughline is the willingness to publish from the centre-right side of the country with a serious editorial voice.
The 1892 building is a useful reminder that newspaper buildings used to be built in stone to last. The Tribune Block was built to be permanent in the same way the Imperial Bank Building down the avenue was built to be permanent. Both buildings still stand. Both still serve commercial purposes. The newspaper that originally occupied this block is long gone, but the building it built outlasted the publication by more than a century.
If you walk past the Tribune Block today, the carved name on the lintel is the easiest physical connection to find on Stephen Avenue between the modern city and its newspaper origins. The stones remember the newspaper, even if the readers no longer do.
Related reading from the series. Stephen Avenue and how Calgary built its sandstone spine. The Imperial Bank of Canada Building and how Calgary got its first real bank in 1886.
