Article Database - Forsaking the Past of an Edmonton Landmark

Reprinted from Real Estate Weekly (Edmonton), September 21, 2000, with additional material from a related article from July 13, 2000

The decision by Edmonton City Council last week to allow severe alterations to the facade of the Hudson’s Bay Company building downtown — a municipally designated historic building — sets a dangerous precedent. By a nine to two vote, councillors voted to allow O & Y Enterprise Real Estate Services to proceed with plans to remove much of the Manitoba Tyndall limestone and Quebec black granite to make way for more windows.

The decision says that, in Edmonton, designated buildings are protected — until a developer decides changes are needed. Then the protection is worth nothing more than the paper on which it is printed.

This from the same City Council who last year yanked the Rossdale Power Plant off the “A” list of the Register of Historic Resources, and which nearly scuttled plans to designate Hangar 14 a historic resource but backed off when it became clear that the public was clearly behind such protection.

“What’s next?” wonders Kathryn Ivany, past president of the Edmonton & District Historical Society. “What does the Register of Historic Resources mean? What does municipal designation mean? You cannot alter the facade of a designated resource and then say it is historic.”

Ivany is exactly right when she declares windows are not the problem. A lack of vision is.

The same lack of vision and respect for the past, so prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s, stole most of downtown Edmonton’s built heritage. They fell one by one — the Courthouse, the Post Office, the Tegler Building, the Strand Theatre, McDougall Mansion and a hundred more. Now citizens decry the lack of character downtown and wonder what went so dreadfully wrong.

Have we learned nothing? “Apparently not,” answers Councillor Michael Phair, one of only two councillors (Dave Thiele was the other) to vote against the plan. “This council seems unable or unwilling to make the connections that the reason the downtown is in trouble is because of its lack of human scale, its lack of people-friendly spaces, its lack of old buildings. Here we are, talking about punching holes in one of the few historical buildings left. Windows will not solve the problem.”

What particularly galls Phair is that council seems willing to ignore the precedent their decision sets and also that the building’s previous owners received more than $1.6 million in tax concessions in exchange for historical designation. That money is long gone. Now the integrity of the history that remains — precious fragments of Edmonton’s past on Jasper Avenue — seems destined to follow it into the history books as well.

You might wonder why we should care. Well, let me share some of the building’s significance.

For more than 55 years, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Jasper Avenue outlet was one of Edmonton’s great gathering places. I remember, as a kid, wandering the commodious place with my mother, awestruck by the exotic, magical offerings, the constant flow of masses of people and escalators that were destined to get me into trouble. Every day, hundreds of people would say, “Meet you at the Bay,” and they would pause for coffee in the basement cafeteria or a friendly chat around one of the doorways.

The store didn’t have the elevator operators or the classic brick of the vintage Woodward’s store on 101st Street and 102nd Avenue, but it had a lot of character and a lot of style. Opened in 1939, the store was an immediate hit with downtown shoppers.

Yet the story this building tells begins much earlier than that. The Hudson’s Bay Company has been part of the history of Edmonton since 1802, when it relocated Fort Edmonton to the Ross Flats.

As the oldest joint-stock merchandising company in the English-speaking world and the oldest business institution in North America, the story of the Hudson’s Bay Company parallels that of many Canadian communities. If there hadn’t been a Hudson’s Bay Company, there wouldn’t have been a Fort Edmonton. There wouldn’t have been an Edmonton — at least not where the city is today.

The company established its first store outside Fort Edmonton in 1890, on Jasper Avenue at 98th Street — a central location in the fledgling town. A new two-storey outlet, a wood-framed, affair opened in March 1893 on the northeast corner of Jasper Avenue at 103rd Street — part of the very site now occupied by the current structure. After Edmonton was incorporated in 1904, the Hudson’s Bay Company yanked down the wooden store and erected a three-storey brick building on the same site.

The arrival of the Grand Trunk Railway propelled further need for expansion and, in 1911, a fourth storey was added to the structure. The next year, a six-storey annex was added north of the brick store and a five-storey brick warehouse constructed beside it. Business was booming.

In 1926, the company acquired the remaining one-storey buildings on the Jasper Avenue frontage between 102nd Street and 103rd Street, and plans were formulated for a grand expansion. The Great Depression intervened to delay the project, but finally, in December 1937, plans were announced to erect the present building in three stages, beginning with the eastern corner and progressing westward towards the old brick store.

The new outlet was designed by the Winnipeg firm of Moody and Moore and constructed by Bennett and White, an Alberta contractor responsible for 1929 additions to the Calgary Hudson’s Bay Company store and the city’s Glenmore Dam (1930-31). The project came in with a final cost of $1 million — a princely sum for the day.

A report prepared for the city planning department by consultant Dennis Person notes the building is one of the few surviving local examples of the Moderne or art deco-influenced styles of architecture. Built of reinforced concrete and faced with black Quebec granite and Manitoba Tyndall limestone above, the structure exudes permanence and grace.

The most exceptional exterior feature is the large carved panels situated over each entrance. The panels, depicting scenes from the early history of the Hudson’s Bay Company in Edmonton, bring the building’s historical wealth to life.

A story in the November 5th, 1939 edition of the Edmonton Journal noted that each of the carvings took two weeks to complete. One panel illustrates the ship Nonsuch, the first vessel to sail from England to Canada on a Hudson’s Bay Company trading expedition. Another features a York boat, a diminutive flat-bottomed boat for river travel. The other two panels depict a fur trader and a farmer.

In response to Edmonton’s post-war oil-driven boom, a third storey was added in 1949. In 1955, a three-storey extension to the north doubled the size of the building. At 90,000 square feet per floor, it was now the largest Hudson’s Bay Company shop in Canada. Two carvings. depicting a Red River cart and buffalo, were included over the pair of new entrances.

In 1967, the property was assessed for tax purposes at $3,226,000, making it the most valuable single piece of privately held real estate in Edmonton. The interior was renovated in 1974 and 1980 but the three facades remain unaltered — as they must be under the Municipal Historic Resource designation granted in 1989.

Council has directed the city administration to craft a bylaw to limit historical designation to the facades depicting the history of “the Bay.” The councillors who voted for what they’re billing as a “compromise solution” will say that the changes won’t void the historical designation.

Kathryn Ivany disagrees. “Whenever you tamper with history, you impair its integrity. The building is significant because it is intact. You don’t just protect a few panels and say you’ve done the job.”

History in Edmonton tells that these “compromise solutions” never come down on the side of preservation and respect. Shame on the nine councillors who voted with no respect for the future. Windows won’t cure that.

Lawrence Herzog has been telling the stories of Edmonton people and places for more than a dozen years through his regular heritage column in Real Estate Weekly. His book, Built On Coal: A History of Beverly, Edmonton's Working Class Town, appeared on Edmonton’s best-seller lists for many weeks.

Real Estate Weekly is published by the Edmonton Real Estate Board to advertise properties for sale through member agencies. Each issue contains at least one, often several, articles on heritage buildings and issues in Edmonton and district.

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