SASKATOON: CITY OF MUD HOMEtown Reflections

You can’t have spring without mud. It’s not so bad now that the roads are paved and the alleys are all graveled. But this is a comparatively new development. Back in the days of Saskatoon’s great expansion in the 1950s and early ‘60s, the streets in the fringe districts were still mostly earth-surfaced. When spring arrived, the thawing earth turned them into boggy, impassable mires. Sidewalks were usually the first bit of streetscaping to be installed in new areas, sometimes even before the streets were graded, and drivers frequently took to them to escape the soulsucking mud. Or they parked blocks away and walked in.

Urban Submersion

And if it wasn’t the mud, it was the water. Come spring, low-lying areas of the city turned into lakes, dotted with little islands where homeowners watched and worried about their basements caving in. Mayfair, North Park and King George were particularly prone to flooding in the early days. As the city expanded after the Second World War, we added new trouble spots in places like Varsity View and South Nutana.

A problem was that we tended to fill in the low spots so we could build houses on them. The land on which Saskatoon now sits was once potholed with sloughs, with drainage channels and ravines running down into the river. But we filled in the ravines and leveled the sloughs, leaving the water with no place to go. To combat this, we dug

BY: JEFF O’BRIEN

drainage ditches and later, storm sewers. Every spring there was a flurry of activity as City crews worked to clear the ditches and thaw out the storm sewers, using coal fired “steam wagons” to melt the ice in the catch basins so they’d drain properly.

But storm sewer construction always played catch-up to residential growth. And even where they did exist, they sometimes weren’t enough. This is true even in modern times. A fast thaw, a late snowstorm and heavy rains can overwhelm even the best designed systems. Most long-time Saskatoon residents have at least one story about watching people paddle canoes down city streets.

Nowadays, instead of filling in the sloughs and wetlands, we incorporate them into new neighbourhood design as a way to help prevent flooding. An even newer innovation are the “dry ponds” the City is building in flood-prone older neighbourhoods. These are designed to collect water that would otherwise pour onto the streets during intense rainstorms. The first of these, in W.W. Ashley Park, opened in the fall of 2022. Eight more are planned.

The Spring Break-Up

The first, most-eagerly awaited sign of spring in Saskatoon was always the Spring Break-Up, that moment when, with an almighty “Crack!” that could be heard across the city, the ice on the river broke and started to move downstream. “The Big Show!” the newspaper called it, an “annual treat” as people crowded along the bridges and riverbanks to watch the great masses of ice tumbling downstream with the spring thaw.

But the spring break-up also caused problems. In the very early days, the winter ice regularly took out the old railway bridge (where the Buckwold Bridge is now). This was the only way across the river and in 1904, travelers in Saskatoon were stranded for weeks while they worked to fix it and repair the line between here and Regina. Ice dams downstream could also exacerbate the spring flooding. The worst year on record was 1908. At their peak, flood waters that year were so high they eroded the riverbanks behind the Traffic Bridge abutments and lapped against the underside of the bridge deck itself.

Thanks to hot water pumped into it from the Queen Elizabeth Power Plant, the river here no longer freezes solid, and so the spring break-ups (like winter ice roads) are nowadays things of the past.

The Spring Clean-Up Campaign

The other fun consequence of living in a place that gets 36 consecutive months of winter each year is the accumulation of garbage on our streets and lanes. This isn’t a new problem here, and like the spring break-up, the official spring clean-up was once an annual tradition in Saskatoon.

Even today, Saskatoon can look pretty rough when the snow melts. But compared to 1907, we’re amateurs. That year, the newspaper warned repeatedly that the “frozen heaps of garbage and slops” littering the city, along with piles of manure and nightsoil cleaned from privies would soon start to melt, with dire effect on public health. Stung to action, Saskatoon launched a city-wide clean-up campaign that saw nearly 250 wagon loads of garbage hauled from yards and lanes and taken out to the nuisance grounds.

The spring clean-up campaign became a yearly ritual as we worked together to clean up winter’s accumulated wreckage. City crews hauled rubbish from the streets and lanes, cleaned up city properties and took away rubbish brought out from people’s yards

Tailor

Healthyhomes

and basements.

Partly it was about civic pride, the attainment of “a beautiful and homelike city” as the newspaper noted, reporting on the campaign in 1913. To that end, people were also urged to do needed repairs. A new coat of paint, new boards on the fence—the kind of work that keeps a city looking neat and clean, and organizations like the Kiwanis Club once sponsored contests to identify Saskatoon’s best kept streets.

Pretty But Practical

But it wasn’t just about keeping Saskatoon pretty. A clean city was a healthy city, and Saskatoon’s

Medical Health Officer was a staunch proponent of the spring clean-up. As an added incentive to residents, inspectors from the City Engineer’s office and the Fire Department also fanned out across Saskatoon during the clean-up, and the Health Department was kept busy thereafter sending out notices to property owners.

One such warning, sent to a Nutana homeowner in 1942, noted among other things the accumulation of manure over the winter, “the whole causing a generally untidy and dirty condition of the property.” Indeed.

Flies were high on the Medical Health Officer’s hit list. One goal of the spring clean-up was to remove their breeding places before they could multiply in the warm weather. Of particular concern were back yard privies, which health authorities waged war on here for decades. In 1923, nearly half of all Saskatoon homes lacked running water. By the 1960s, there were still thousands of these “unmodern” homes here, where water was delivered by the barrel and toilet facilities consisted of a little house at the back of the lot next to the alley. These were cleaned out by city scavenger crews through a hinged flap at the back. In the winter, they sometimes had to be pried open with a crowbar, often breaking in the process, so that come spring, they swarmed with flies.

With no handy drain to pour them down, cooking slops and other, less pleasant wastes, were often disposed of by heaving them out the back door. There, they would accumulate over the winter, turning the yard into a germ-infested morass come spring. To combat this, health officials recommended pouring liquid waste into a wooden frame in the back yard where it would freeze, rather like a small, lumpy, backyard skating rink. In spring, the ice could be broken up and hauled away before it melted.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come Again?

There are still those who dump old furniture in out-ofthe-way places, or who can’t be bothered to properly secure their loads on Circle Drive. But the anti-litter campaigns of the 1960s and ‘70s really did make their mark, and Saskatoon today is a far, far cleaner place than it once was. Even in spring, when it sometimes looks like it was hit by a very messy bomb.

The City does its part— sweeping the streets and cleaning up Circle Drive every year. The community associations also sometimes sponsor back alley clean-up campaigns (with help from the City). But the city-wide appeals for everyone to pitch in—to fix up and clean up—are a thing of the past. We each attend to our own parts (to a greater or lesser degree) but for the rest of it, we seem to have decided that the winter accumulation of garbage is Somebody Else’s Problem which, if we wait long enough,

Somebody Else will clean up for us.

It may be that the time has come again for each of us to take responsibility for the city we live in, working together to make it a better place for everyone

Jeff