Our little slice of California, with its bright stucco and red tiles, was a curio to anyone who passed by and unique in a way most Edmonton buildings couldn’t dream of being. Now another glass high-rise will replace it.

105th Avenue’s slowly gentrifying, with old industrial wastes giving way to new condo blocks. What will happen to a building like this?

2021 turned out to be a bad year for Edmonton’s built heritage. Gone with it was our “Shade of Expo ‘67.”

Shrouded by shrubs and hidden away where you’d least expect it, this enchanting piece of fantastically retro public art is one of Edmonton’s best.

Central Edmonton’s brick castle is a testament to the Great War and its impact on the city.

Building a make-work road over the sandy hoodoos of Dawson Park sounded simple enough. Instead it resulted in Council in-fighting, five years of unending construction, and political suicide.

In our rush to save the Ring Houses we’ve forgotten two others…

If you drive out to the site today, you’d be hard pressed to find the signs of cultural genocide. Where it happened doesn’t look special; it could be ‘Anywhere, Alberta.’ But long ago it was once home to the Edmonton Indian Residential School.

This bank branch might be easy to ignore, but in its plain beauty lies a great — if small — example of Modernist design.

This high school, once the biggest between Vancouver and the Great Lakes, brought recognition to a struggling town. While it’d help spur its downfall, it looked good doing it…

This Catholic school stands as the last of four similarly styled buildings erected by the Separate System during the “Roaring ‘20s.”

Out of Town Distractions

Leduc: a name synonymous with oil. Is it ironic then that the city’s most imposing landmark is dedicated to the economic driver petroleum replaced?

Despite their best efforts, an impassioned community couldn’t save this important piece of Edmonton’s German history.

This ‘blink-and-you’ll-miss-it’ piece of history clings to the monolithic walls of Commerce Place.

A beautifully functional piece of Retro-Futurism, Bay Station is a potent reminder to the lost optimism surrounding LRT expansion in the early ‘80s.

Poor, poor President Tory. One would think a building named after the founder of Alberta’s largest university would inspire its students — instead, all this building inspires is an overwhelming sense of dread and heightened anxiety.

The Transit Hotel speaks to a different time — one where the roads were dirt, horses outnumbered cars, and meatpacking was Edmonton’s big claim to fame.

Most’ll know it as a popular Montrose delicatessen, but this sausage house was once a trendsetting piece of municipal infrastructure.

Out of Town Distractions

Hiding away in Holden — the tiny Albertan village time forgot — lies one of the province’s most striking war memorials.

Designed by a Washington-based architect, and copied from a Spokane-based design, this striking Great War-era skyscraper represents Alberta’s best application of the Chicago School Style.