Once more, the Province of Alberta forsakes its architectural and cultural heritage in search for some quick savings.

Beginning in 1920, the Hudson’s Bay Company embarked on a campaign to make a small model community north of downtown Edmonton.

Sex-work, backroom deals, claims of conspiracy, and one of Edmonton’s most colourful characters led to an all-out brawl between an Alderman and Mayor during a meeting of City Council in August 1914.

This Modernist apartment tower, one of the first built west of downtown, has been an Oliver icon for sixty years.

Edmonton was one of the last major cities in Canada to build a monument remembering the Great War. Its citizens banded together to change that — the memorial they erected is a solemn and dignified cairn for its war-dead.

An architectural oddity, Hillcrest School was one of the last built by the ill-fated West Jasper Place School Board.

Named for the small hill it sits on, this pioneer cemetery, once located far northeast of Edmonton, is now surrounded by suburban homes.

Singing songs and carrying banners, the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical American union, helped organize Edmonton’s forgotten labourers for a strike in September 1912.

Relocated to Fort Edmonton Park in 1992, this California-style bungalow is a good representative example of the Craftsman style.

This small Depression-era school was twenty years in the making.

This masterful slice of spiritual Modernism lays hidden in the Eastend neighbourhood of Fulton Place.

Named for a pioneering Baptist missionary, this McCauley church is one of Edmonton’s most unique.

This humble property, demolished in 2022, represented a more modest class of home and occupant for the once-opulent Highlands neighbourhood.

That December 10,000 Albertans gathered to protest the government’s handling of the Great Depression — it became “the biggest single manifestation of class conflict in Alberta during the entirety of the 1930s.”

This distinctive Westend property was once home to noted Chinese-Canadian painter Lee Kow Yuen.

They may not be as well remembered as Veronica Foster or the Bomb Girls, but Edmonton’s streetcar conductorettes helped the war-effort and broke down barriers all the same.

This small building, once home to meatpackers and stockyard labourers, will soon give way to a highway overpass.

Out of Town Distractions:

Unemployed labourers from Edmonton and Northern Alberta built this make-work mountain pass in Jasper National Park.

“It was known as the CN Tower a decade before Toronto had one of its own.

And, for a time, it reigned supreme as Edmonton’s tallest building at a full 27 storeys.”

Government cuts and University policies have condemned one important piece of Alberta’s agricultural heritage to the waste basket of history.