Calgary – Day 7

Today was a walking exploration of downtown Calgary. We walked somewhere between 13 and 17 km. My Strava said 17 and Patti‘s Apple Watch said 13. She might’ve paused, and I have GPS squiggles adding distance in some of the places where we went inside.

I had identified 10 things that I wanted to see. I put them on Ride with GPS as points of interest, and then created a walk that would take us to them in as efficient manner as possible. As we saw other things that were of interest, along the way, we looked at those, as well.

Memorial park wasn’t on my list, and is a large beautifully landscaped park with a public library in it, and restaurant, that took up an entire block. It reminded me of Bryant Park in New York City, which has the New York public library at one end, and a park at the other end, and also takes up an entire city block.

Next on our list was to have a look at The Bike Shop. They had an excellent selection of bikes, clothing and cycling equipment, but we left empty-handed.

We carried on to MEC and had a look around there, but also escaped without spending any money.

Calgary has done a great job of separating pedestrians, cyclists, cars, and trains at this underpass, and making it inviting with sculptural elements, trees, and colourful lighting in the underpass.

I couldn’t resist taking more pictures of this mural when we turned the corner.

We were heading for Stephen Avenue Walk, a 4 block section of 8 Ave SE that has been pedestrianized.

Calgary has a gallery of public art on their municipal website which has been helpful. Montreal has an excellent one, too. These are good resources if you enjoy public art.

The CORE shopping mall runs adjacent to it. It is a four-story mall and half of the top floor is devoted to public gardens called Devonian Gardens.

After visiting the gardens, we returned to Stephen Avenue Walk.

There was an enormous, loom shuttle, ribbons, and spool art piece outside the mall called Novus Texturea by Gordon Skilling and Jolie Bird. It consists of more than 4 km of straps, 8 km of thread and more than 400 hours to put together.

The crowds were phenomenal for a Tuesday afternoon. There were many restaurants with patios, but also many retailers had displays set up outside. I suspect, but don’t know, that this is related to the upcoming Calgary stampede.

Many of the beautiful old bank buildings have been re-purposed.

There are many beautiful murals downtown.

This piece of public art by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa is called Wonderland.

The nine downtown stations of the LRT are a free fair zone. Just as we approached the Centre Street stop a train was arriving so we rode one stop to City Hall.

This is the old City Hall with a much larger modern extension behind and to the right.

This is Olympic Plaza.

This is Calgary Central library. Construction began in May 2014 with a feat of engineering: the LRT line bisects the site and was encased with concrete foundations, walls and roof panels, and a permanent foundation for the new central library above, was formed. That project took until September 2015 and 99% of the project was completed with the LRT line in full service. The library opened in November 2018.

The wooden archway, framed with western redwood cedar from British Columbia, creates a pedestrian passageway between downtown and the East Village.

This art piece is called Trio, with a third piece on the other side of the library, and was created by Christian Moeller. The piece bobs up and down like a drinking bird.

This is celebration Square.

This area is known as the East Village, and we had planned to have lunch at Sidewalk Citizen, but it closed at two and we were too late.

So we went to lunch at Good Earth nearby.

We sat on the patio and had a view of a public art piece which I had on the walk, called Device to Root Out Evil, by Dennis Oppenheimer. It was rejected by Stanford University as being too controversial, and exhibited at the 1997 Venice Biennale, an international cultural exhibition, before coming to Calgary.

This piece was across the street, but I couldn’t find any information about it.

This piece called Bloom, by Michel de Broin, is on St Patrick’s Island, which is accessible by yet another active transportation bridge. It is made of street lights which “blossom at night softly, lighting the island and watching over it”.

This busy section of the Bow River trail has separated cycling and pedestrian infrastructure.

Calgary was flooded in 2013 in the largest flood since 1897. As much as $6 billion in financial losses and property damage occurred across southern Alberta. Due to that Calgary City Council approved the spending of $150 million for flood mitigation and resilience projects. These walls are meant to protect against the 2013 level flood of the Bow and Elbow Rivers, and to protect Chinatown, East Village, and Eau Claire communities.

We found this piece of public art in the neighbourhood of mid and high-rise buildings in Chinatown.

We had coffee at Café gravity, where they had a grassroot art installation to serve as a memory of all indigenous women and children that have been murdered or gone missing.

I suggested we get the bus back after coffee, but we missed the bus stop and so just kept walking. Because of that, we saw a few things we hadn’t seen yet, including the Harley Hotchkiss gardens, in Courthouse Park, and this mural as we approached the apartment.

One block away from the apartment the bus caught up with us.

My feet and hips were quite tired, so we returned to the apartment to relax until we cooked ourselves dinner.

Tomorrow we plan another day of exploring by foot on our final full day here in Calgary.