Canada: Calgary

In this Alberta city, downtown is easy to get around and filled with historic and cultural attractions

Twenty years ago, Calgary was fresh off hosting the first Winter Olympics ever held in Canada. They were the memorable Games where the world got to know a Jamaican bobsled team and a cheerfully inept British ski jumper known as Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards, and where competition highlights included the “Battle of the Brians”—Boitano vs. Orser for the men’s figure skating crown.

Calgary is the largest city in the province of Alberta.

Edwards and Orser were among those who came to Calgary this winter to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Olympics. From the look of the Alberta city today, however, you’d think it was getting ready to host a huge international event rather than looking back on one long past. Cranes and partially constructed buildings hover all over downtown, in a building boom that entails the residential, corporate and government sectors. Some 2,000 apartments are under construction, as is a $350 million courthouse complex and a skyscraper named The Bow, which will be the tallest in Canada outside Toronto.

Attractions
This is a city, literally and figuratively, on the rise. And it has another milestone anniversary coming up this year: June will mark 40 years since the opening of the Calgary Tower, the 627-foot-high observation tower that’s the most recognizable structure in the city’s skyline. One section of it has a glass floor, so visitors can look straight down on the street scene below. It is, of course, as sturdy as the regular floors in the Tower but can nonetheless be unnerving when one is standing on it (the gift shop sells “I survived the glass floor” T-shirts). The revolving restaurant atop the Calgary Tower is due to reopen this summer following a complete renovation.

Across from the Tower is the Glenbow Museum, mostly a museum of history and cultures but with artworks in the collection as well. Two permanent exhibits in particular provide an excellent introduction to Alberta—“Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta” and “Niitsitapiisinni: Our Way of Life.” The former recounts the struggles and triumphs of people who shaped the province’s history in politics, industry, the arts, public service and community activism. The latter is a comprehensive overview of the Blackfoot, the First Nations people native to Alberta.

The proximity of the Tower and museum to each other illustrates one of Calgary’s great attributes, especially for tourists: Downtown is compact. Within two blocks of those attractions are the Epcor Centre for the Performing Arts, the Art Gallery of Calgary, a Hudson’s Bay department store and several hotels, including Hyatt, Marriott and Fairmont. It’s so compact, they don’t even bother charging you to ride the C-Train, Calgary’s light rail, within downtown.

Calgary's old (left) and new (right) City Halls are near Olympic Plaza, which features a skating rink in the winter.

Just a block from the Glenbow is Olympic Plaza, where the medals ceremonies were held during the 1988 Games. It’s now a park with an ice skating rink in winter, fountains and a wading pool in summer, and my favorite of Calgary’s many pieces of public art: a life-size sculpture of the “Famous Five,” the five Alberta women who fought for the rights granted to “persons” under Canadian law to be extended to women. The sculpture depicts the women—two seated, three standing—toasting their victory with a cup of tea; one holds up the October 1929 newspaper reporting the court’s ruling: “Women are persons.”

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