Progress

The view from the front doors of the Westin Hotel on a warm winter day is bleak. On all sides unrelieved concrete blocks crouch under an overcast sky. Rotten snow rings the bases of torpid trees and encrusts abandoned concrete flower boxes. The brown sludgey street vomits dirty slush onto the sidewalk with every passing car. Having managed the Westin’s valet services for thirty years, Ken knows this view intimately. He’s seen it every winter since 1979, back when the hotel was new and the downtown was nearly finished its last great growth spurt.

“Tourists always comment on how modern a city Edmonton is,” Ken says, pulling open the door for a guest. “And it is. Partly it’s because there was barely anybody living here even a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago the fur trade was just finishing up. And partly it’s because for a long time nobody thought there was anything here worth saving. In the sixties and seventies, if it wasn’t modern, we didn’t want it. It wasn’t until the eighties that we started valuing our past. But by then it was too late for a lot of buildings. Like the post office. The only thing that’s left of it is the clock over there.”

In the Westin’s front yard, a quartet of rusting metal posts rise out of the cement to a negligible height. Balanced atop them, encased in the same brown metal, clock faces display the time to the four compass points. Below, the clock’s internal workings rest motionless in a Plexiglas box a few feet above the ground. A plaque proclaims this contraption of metal poles and caged iron parts a clock tower, the clock the last remnant of the old post office. Visions of the Peace Tower and Big Ben dancing in my head, I can’t imagine anything looking less like a clock tower. But then I can’t imagine anyone tearing down one of Edmonton’s first great landmarks to build a hotel either.

I grew up in this town and work just a block away, but until I talked to Ken the only old post office I knew of was on Whyte Ave and had an okay bar in the basement. I’d never heard of anything like that downtown. Ken shows me to the plaque beside the clock tower. It’s only partly legible; at some point water crept through the Plexiglas window and stained the paper below. The picture is still clear, though, and I see a stately white stone building topped by a cupola tower on its northwest corner. Ken tells me that clock tower dominated the city skyline for years. When it opened in 1910, the daily Bulletin called the post office “majestic” and “palatial.” It’s hard to equate those words with the minimalist structure before me.

A few nights after my visit with Ken, I exit the city archives and head back downtown. A wintry night is a good time to explore downtown Edmonton. The temperature has dipped again. It’s eight o’clock, and I am the only soul in Churchill Square. The odd car prowls the perimeter as I trek across the concave concrete surface of the square, and the LRT doors occasionally disgorge a pedestrian or two.

I head south on 100 Street, past the Stanley Milner Library and across 101 A Street. The clock tower stands at the corner; I sighted its neon light from the square. Beyond the clock stands the Westin, its brown brick façade and rounded corners conspicuous among neighbouring concrete towers. A taxi pulls up and a doorman pulls open the door. From the other side of the drive I glimpse rich carpet and lush woods before the door swings closed.

Tonight I read a 1942 editorial arguing, even then, for the preservation of Edmonton’s old buildings. “One of our faults is living too much in the past: another is not living sufficiently in the past,” it read. Twenty years later, Edmonton’s mayors dismissed that warning. They proclaimed the old post office a "monstrosity" that had “no great value.” One official said when the traditional is not compatible with the modern, the traditional must go.

I had asked Ken if he thought the city should have preserved the old post office. He laughed and said if it did he’d be out of a job. But as he turns to help a guest, I imagine the clock ensconced at the top of a cupola tower, displaying the time for all the city to see.

Reading my local

I put A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry on my list of books to read before I die a number of years ago. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about my home turf, as it were. Or close enough. Two of my siblings went to "O'Connor" High School, I played soccer within that track on my community league and high school teams, and fished soccer balls out the front yards of those row houses.

What does it mean to have a local literature? The comments Neil's teacher left on his essay address this concern. "Your choice of topic and treatment show a lack of seriousness. Hopefully, you will one day find a theme worthy of your talent." Writing the local, especially when that local is Edmonton, is worthless. Good writing tackles great ideas and great cities.

Fruit, by Brian Francis, is a book also described as being about small ideas. Here's a synopsis: "It’s 1984 in Sarnia, Ontario, and 13-year-old Peter Paddington is mortified. He’s overweight, has few friends and a crazy family and, to top things off, he’s just sprouted a pair of talking nipples." Despite its unusual topic, Fruit was the runner up in the 2009 CBC Radio's Canada Reads. It beat out novels by David Michael Adams, Michel Tremblay, and Gil Adamson, and was beaten in the end by Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes. These other books were for the most part about big ideas, but Fruit held its own and nearly won the contest.

A worthwhile topic doesn't need to win awards. A well-written book about ice fishing on Lesser Slave Lake might appeal to only a small population of readers, but if it provides for them a sense of their own connectedness to their community, it's done good work. And if it's written as well as McGillis's book is, all the better.

Despite the best efforts of certain Russian novelists to the contrary, a worthwhile book is not determined by how big it is, inside or out. A worthwhile city isn't either.

What's your story, Calgary?

If you ever listen to 630 CHED on a weekday morning, you will hear a noticeable change in tone between 8:50 and 9:10. One minute you're being extolled to buy tickets to the Full House Lottery or advised to avoid Groat Road southbound, and then the top-0f-the-hour news clicks on. In the time it takes to learn about the latest gang troubles, Afghanistan updates, and city hall shindigs, the station transforms from Edmonton's source for news, sports, and weather together to a rurally-oriented Conservative kumbaya singalong. Why the 1 million citizens of Edmonton are entreated to shop at UFA and buy crop insurance is beyond me.

Actually it's not. Between 9 and 11 the program is beamed in from the Corus Radio station in Calgary, complete with commercials. (Why the 1 million citizens of Calgary are entreated to shop at UFA and buy crop insurance is open to question too.) The show's host is so completely entrenched in Alberta conservativism he denies the human contributions to global warming and has a signed poster of Stephen Harper tacked to the ceiling above his bed. I don't make this stuff up. (Actually I do.) Maybe all you folks who come from rural areas can tell me if the ultra-conservative (to me) sentiments frequently displayed on this show are well-received in rural Alberta and Calgary.

Goyette points out that the rivalry between Edmonton and Calgary and the cities' divergent politics are neither recent phenomena nor artificially constructed. She says it started with the trains running through Calgary and got an update when the capital and the university went to Edmonton. I've always thought it had to do with more Americans living in southern Alberta as well as natural jealousy on the part of Calgarians for Edmonton's supremely excellent hockey tradition.

I realize my understanding of the Edmonton-Calgary dynamic is shaped very much by a "history of events" and not a "history of people," as I think Sylvia put it today. After having read Edmonton In Our Own Words, I feel I have a much more nuanced understanding of Edmonton's history, traditions, politics, and people. This is Edmonton telling itself what kind of place it is, and what kind of people have peopled it. I now feel it's only fair for Calgary to have its own say. Does Calgary have a book that fills the same function? Is there a tome that can tell me what shaped Calgary into the conservative-voting, cowboy boot-wearing, head office-luring city it appears to be? Is there a record of what Edmonton's southern sister looks like under all the makeup and paint of stereotype?

Calgary, what's your story?