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After serving the City of Edmonton for only 60 years, the city's original Beaux-Arts-styled sandstone Court House was unceremoniously demolished in 1972 to be redeveloped as a shopping mall. Home today to the Edmonton City Centre mall, which was briefly known as Edmonton's flagship Eaton's department store, the site once hosted one of the city's grandest Edwardian edifices.
Designed by Allan Merrick Jeffers on behalf of the Alberta Department of Public Works, the Court House was constructed between 1912 and 1913 and stood proudly at the southwestern corner of 100 Street and 102A Avenue until 1972. Jeffers was an American-born architect responsible for the Provincial Legislature Building, among a long list of high-profile contracts in Edmonton and Calgary.
Seen above during the 1950s, the view of downtown Edmonton is strikingly different than that of today. The Old Court House (centre-right), along with the old Post Office (back-left), and several other long-lost structures are set amidst the first few modern interlopers to the landscape. The young city was only a few decades past its founding, and already in the process of shedding its past.
Over the summer of 1972, work crews set upon the task of demolishing the old Court House, and the elegant Beaux-Arts edifice was reduced to rubble in a matter of months. Though it is now seen as a terrible loss to the urban fabric of the city, the feeling at the time would have been one of excitement, as the demolition of the stuffy old Court House to make way for an exciting new mall was a sign of the city's youthful exuberance.
Truly a throwback to another era, the Court House had not kept up with the times. Its columns, marble floors, and gilded decorations were seen as old fashioned, and the breakneck pace of urban renewal that Edmonton had reached by the 1970s was by then too overheated to take a pause to consider what might be gained by saving the historic structure.
Replaced in kind by the Brutalist-style Law Courts building, seen in the image above, the old Court House building itself was physically replaced by the Edmonton City Centre mall (below), so its erasure led to two immediate drastic changes to the urban landscape.
Today home to a smattering of big-box stores and the offices of CBC Edmonton, the Edmonton City Centre mall has been a downtown fixture since its debut in 1974. The 43-year-old commercial block is nearly as old today as the 59-year-old Court House was upon its demise in 1972. While the jury is still out on whether or not the new structure has served the city as well as the old, there are likely few who would argue against the notion that the loss to the city from a heritage perspective was one of the greatest crimes committed in the name of progress, the scar left by its demise still present to this day.
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