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.