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

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.

“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.”

Downtown Edmonton’s C.I.B.C. stands as the city’s last pre-Second World War banking hall still used for its original purpose.

In the words of Todd Babiak, our old central library “is one of the icons of a lost Edmonton, a phantom Edmonton, a victim of the boom-and-bust psychology that has defined the city since its earliest days.”

It might not look like much, but beneath the ol’ Hub Hotel’s pockmarked walls and faux-stone facade hides the remnants of Jasper House, the first brick building between Vancouver and Winnipeg.

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.

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.

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.

To some it’s a Modernist masterpiece. To others a “12-storey middle finger to the legislature.” Whatever you think, you won’t have much longer to argue — this tower’s reached the end of the line.

The story of modern-day Edmonton is intrinsically linked with ‘the Bay’. Their former downtown store serves as a monument to their role in building the city.