A LIVING LINK

Bridgeland-Riverside has a colourful history
1901 to 1925:; Life in old city neighbourhood seems to go at slower pace
By Valerie Berenyi, Calgary Herald
December 27, 2010 6:24 AM

Want to know how the "ethnic" side of Calgary grew up? Take a trip back in time through Bridgeland.

One of Calgary's oldest inner-city neighbourhoods, this northeast community retains elements of an Old Country village. Here you can still see seniors hanging laundry on the clothesline or gardening in their vegetable plots. Much has changed with condominium development on the site of the former General Hospital -- built in 1908 and imploded by Ralph Klein's cost-cutting government in 1998 -- but the tidy, modest houses on tree-lined streets remain. Life seems to go at a slower, quieter pace here.

Marshall Libicz is a living link to that past.

Born in 1922 at the General Hospital, he's the son of an ethnic Ukrainian who'd moved to Canada in 1912 after leaving Galicia, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A hale and hearty 88-year-old who loves to garden, Libicz remembers his childhood Bridgeland as largely rural.

People kept chickens, tended market gardens and grazed cattle on vacant prairie land. Milk came, not from the local grocery store run by the father of Alberta's recently retired lieutenant-governor Norman Kwong, but from a neighbour's dairy cow.

A streetcar line rumbled along First Avenue, ridden by working men coming home from the Dominion Bridge Co., Riverside Ironworks and the CPR rail yards, "all smeared with grease," says Libicz.

"I remember when Bridgeland-Riverside was just about all German," he says, referring to the neighbourhood's proper name, and some of its early residents.

Indeed, the community has two distinct areas: Riverside is generally considered to be the flats below the old hospital site; Bridgeland is located above it.

Geography played a role in shaping this unique community: the Bow River frames the area's southern edge and a steep crescent-shaped escarpment, carved by retreating glaciers, envelopes the community to the west, north and east.

From the late 1880s to the turn of the century, members of the Blackfoot Tribe camped in the area and kept a close eye on the fledgling town that was springing up on the south side of the river.

The north bank of the Bow opened up after Langevin Bridge was built in 1882 and the First Nations people gave way to a flood of European newcomers after 1905.

While earlier Anglo-Saxon immigrants had settled in residential areas developing south and southwest of downtown, Germans, Italians, Poles, Hungarians and Ukrainians made the north side their new home. The flatlands of Riverside, a.k.a. "Germantown," were dominated by ethnic Germans from Russia. Italian, Ukrainian and other immigrants settled in Bridgeland.

They left their indelible imprint on the community's houses, churches and businesses, many of which remain and make the area so appealing. There's the pretty, onion-domed Russian Orthodox Church of All Saints overlooking Bridgeland and the striking St. Matthew Lutheran Church in Riverside, to name but two.

Other colourful residents in the early 20th century were Gypsies, who parked their caravans along the north bank of the Bow River until 1927. Even spicier, the area was infamous for its red-light district.

"Numerous brothels also operated in Riverside before the community's 1910 annexation to Calgary," writes Douglas Stinson in an essay posted on the Bridgeland-Riverside Community Association website.

"Before this jurisdictional change, the area was the responsibility of the Mounties, not the city police. Following the annexation 'the women from across Langevin Bridge' relocated to the Nose Creek valley, outside city boundaries. This red-light district remained sheltered by the escarpment's eastern slope until the First World War, when the houses were either torn down or destroyed by fire."

Calgary annexed Bridgeland in 1907 and added Riverside to its holdings three years later. Much of the land was owned by the CPR, and the subdivision of Bridgeland was parcelled out in 25-foot lots, sold to working men through the real estate firm of Toole, Peet and Co.

Around the same time, Bridgeland-Riverside was further connected to the bustling city by streetcar lines. Real estate and land development were booming.

"(The years) 1910 to 1912 marked Calgary's biggest boom ever," says public historian David Finch. "It was huge."

By 1912, 47,000 people lived in Calgary and enjoyed the fruits of urban prosperity.

Many of the city's landmark sandstone buildings -- old City Hall, the Palliser Hotel, Memorial Park Library -- were built during this heady time.

Residents of Bridgeland-Riverside took advantage of the new urban parks located on three little islands in the Bow River, St. George's, St. Andrew's and St. Patrick's, linked together by rustic bridges and tethered to the mainland on either side by steel bridges. There was a free zoo, promenades, playgrounds with a merry-go-round, which Libicz enjoyed in his childhood. Picnicking was a popular pastime.

And there was a new fair called the Calgary Show, started in 1912 by cowboy promoter Guy Weadick. It lost money and wasn't revived until 1919. In 1923 it was renamed the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede.

Walter Chitrenky, Libicz's pal and another longtime Bridgeland-Riverside resident, recalls going to the Stampede when he was eight or nine. At the time, two ponies, a bicycle and a cocker spaniel puppy were given away in a draw for school kids.

"I wanted that pony," says Chitrenky, 80, "but it was never me."

Later, he bought a horse for $35 and pastured it near Tom Campbell's Hill. Once, it got loose and tore up a cabbage patch in a nearby market garden. Chitrenky was fined $10.

The two men chuckle about having played street hockey on the community's dirt streets, using frozen horse turds for the puck and goalposts.

As with the boom-bust cycles that endure today, Calgary's overheated economy collapsed in 1913, bringing hard times.

Annie Gale, a community activist later elected to city council (making her the first female alderman in the British Empire) observed the lack of fresh vegetables, most of which were imported, expensive and poor quality. She led the charge to establish the Vacant Lots Garden Club in 1914. Calgarians could rent a plot in an empty lot for $1 a year. The program provided food and beautified the city by ridding vacant lots of weeds, dust and garbage.

In Bridgeland-Riverside, a long section of vacant-lot gardens sprouted behind three houses on McDougall Road. Libicz said his parents, in whose home he still lives, started gardening there in the 1930s. Later, he did too -- for 70 bountiful years.

In 2008, Libicz and his friend Mike Ricketts, a 66-year-old retired military man who grew up in Hillhurst but moved to Bridgeland-Riverside 11 years ago, were instrumental in having the city declare the Bridgeland/Riverside Vacant Lots Garden a municipal historic resource. Today, they share the garden with 10 neighbours.

The year 1914 must also be remembered for the discovery of oil at the Dingman No. 1 well in nearby Turner Valley. The boom that followed was short-lived, lasting only May to August -- curtailed by the outbreak of the First World War.

The war years made for a difficult, even frightening, time for some residents of Bridgeland-Riverside.

"Antagonism towards German residents flared up in 1916, when mobs of soldiers and civilians wrecked the White Lunch Restaurant and demolished portions of the Riverside Hotel," writes historian Max Foran in his book Calgary An Illustrated History (James Lorimer & Co., 1978).

"It was city council policy between 1916-18 to employ only British subjects and to dismiss all individuals born in alien territory."

After the Great War, life returned to relative normalcy, only to be interrupted in October 1924 when a subsidiary of Imperial Oil drilled below the Dingman well and struck it rich again, tapping into a major oilfield, and igniting natural gas and yet another boom.

"(For years) they were flaring gas in Turner Valley and if you looked to the southwest, there was a glow in the sky," says Libicz, an eyewitness to Calgary history in the making.