Walk down Stephen Avenue in downtown Calgary and look up at the rock-faced sandstone front of the building at 118 8 Avenue SW. Carved into it are the words TRIBUNE BLOCK. J.G. McCallum is listed as the builder of this 1892 building, which was raised as the purpose-built home of the Calgary Tribune newspaper. The name in the stone is a direct link to the newspaper culture of the early city.
The Calgary Tribune itself
The Calgary Tribune was founded in 1885 by Thomas Braden, a local journalist who had also helped launch the Calgary Herald in 1883, according to the Canadian Register of Historic Places. From 1889 to 1892 the paper worked out of a wood-frame building on the same site.
In 1892 Braden built the Tribune Block with backing from the Eau Claire and Bow River Lumber Company and James A. Lougheed. Money trouble followed. The lumber company took over the building in 1893, and Braden gave up financial control of the paper while staying on as editor.
What the building includes
- A three-storey Romanesque Revival building with a two-storey rock-faced sandstone facade
- A ground-floor storefront
- A checkerboard-patterned parapet
- The TRIBUNE BLOCK name carved into the sandstone
- Rounded windows on the upper storey
The Tribune Block sits on Stephen Avenue Mall, part of a National Historic District, among the sandstone commercial blocks that went up after Calgary’s 1886 fire.
What happened to the newspaper
The paper changed hands several times and was renamed the Alberta Tribune. William Davidson took control in 1902. In 1906 it became the Morning Albertan, which printed from the building until it was sold in 1907. The Tribune Block stayed in commercial use under later owners and tenants.
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.
The stone outlived the paper that ordered it
Newspapers come and go, and their names get reused. The Tribune that Braden launched in 1885 ran for a time under the title Alberta Tribune before it became the Morning Albertan in 1906. The building that housed it is still there, more than a century after the last of those mastheads came down.
The 1892 block is a reminder that newspaper buildings were once built in stone to last. Other sandstone blocks from the same decade still stand along the avenue, and the Tribune Block is among the easiest to read from the sidewalk.
Walk past today and the carved name on the front is the plainest physical link on Stephen Avenue to the city’s newspaper origins. The stones remember the paper, even if few readers 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.
