The rise and long, depressing fall of Calgary's Eau Claire Market
CBC
Two weeks ago, as the HBO's made-in-Alberta The Last of Us had locals gleefully playing weekly rounds of "Hey! I recognize that set location," a clever Twitter user combined photo editing with a wicked Calgary inside joke.
The tweet marvelled at how set designers made Calgary "look like a post-apocalyptic wasteland." Attached were images of the show's main characters wandering through Eau Claire Market, the downtown shopping centre that has lumbered along — zombie-like, some will say — for nearly 30 years.
Days after that bit of Calgary gallows humour, Eau Claire Market's demise was written into its saga. The concrete edifice by the Bow will be vacated next year and torn down so the city can build a Green Line LRT underground station.
Sure, some Calgarians will miss the cinema, or that Thai stand in the food court, or have fond memories of the market's more bustling early days.
But its demise was long overdue, including in the eyes of site owner Harvard Developments, which has been planning to wipe it out and build anew since at least 2006.
It's quite the cautionary tale, the rise and long drawn-out fall of Eau Claire Market. It's a project launched with so much optimism in the 1980s — Calgary's Granville Island! — opened in the early '90s, and the cause of civic hand-wringing pretty much ever since.
The reasons it perennially struggled are many.
But there's a moral at the centre of this drama.
Hoping to plunk down another city's really cool element into Calgary is the prelude to a disaster.
The dream began in 1984. Calgary's economy was in the dumps, and the massive bus barns in Eau Claire had just closed in favour of transit garages farther from the core.
There was opportunity for this large swath of prime land, in between the corporate downtown and Prince's Island Park.
Civic leaders looked at those big vacant buildings and thought one thing: market. The revival of public markets and farmers' markets — or "festival markets," in the era's lingo — was sweeping North America.
In 1983, Edmonton had refashioned its bus barn off Whyte Avenue into a farmer's market that thrives to this day. But then, even more so than now, Calgarians were none too keen to draw inspiration from what Alberta's other city was doing.
What got Calgary boosters' attention were the former industrial brick buildings along False Creek in Vancouver. Granville Island was redeveloped in 1979 into a cluster of restaurants, cultural and retail facilities, anchored by a fresh food market.