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The nice thing for out of towners is it looks almost like it JUST got demolished ahha. So they just assume it’s in process. Not an abandoned landfill site from an incompetent developer.
Oh, let's not forget that it was only about 30 years ago when there was hay bailed on the lot at 109th and 104th. Now THAT was embarrassing to explain to visitors!
...and it was a stones throw from a piece of public infrastructure affectionately dubbed the "Rat Hole"...
30 years ago we had a shooting range in actual downtown. 30 years ago we were grunting out the cheapest possible strip malls right in and around downtown and calling it revitalization. 30 years ago our violent crime rate in the core was at its historic peak, and walking 104 street after dark was a spectacularly bad idea (not that there was any reason to walk on 104 street, and it was quite the repellent environment). 30 years ago we'd only barely gotten the LRT across the river. 30 years ago we were still demolishing the old industrial brick buildings to make parking lots. 30 years ago we still had this thing cutting right through the middle of downtown a block from where this park is going. I experienced this downtown and remember it, but it never ceases to amaze me just how spectacularly bad things used to be. I've gotten frustrated sometimes with how slow things seem to change and how limited some of the improvements have been, but it's also just been a huge amount of work for us to come back from this.
I have good news for you then. MacLab's The Parks is going to plug directly into Corona LRT, apparently where the entrance just to the west of Audrey's Books is.
At least the cars looked wayyy cooler back then.
Well, yeah. They came in colours.
So that is why 105th street is so monstrously wide. Thanks for the photos, I had no idea this existed.
I remember going over it when I was first learning to drive and it was just a miserable experience, especially in winter. God forbid you wanted to use the pedestrian walkway with the death stairs. It's so weird to me that people get nostalgic for downtown of the 1980s, because after the oil bust hit, well... these pictures are really emblematic of the downtown of the day, especially since we did the thing Calgary does in its core where 102 Ave was a wide one-way going east and 102A/103 Ave was a one-way going west all of the way from Jasper Ave east of Boyle Street to the industrial wasteland along 109 street to promote traffic flow, and neither was any kind of good place to walk but at least cars went zoom (map date is actually 1977, but this didn't go away until the mid 1990s). It was just assumed everyone was going to use the pedways, which you might as well because after the oil bust hit, there really wasn't much to downtown outside of that whole cluster from the old HBC to City Hall, and even then only if you stayed south of 103 street. And as much as people romanticize how Churchill Square used to be, it was framed in on all directions by monstrous stroads.
