111 Places in Calgary

111 Places 1_ 10th Street Wave

Catch a wave in a prairie town | 10

2_ 12 Mile Coulee

Commune with bison - in a safe way | 12

3_ Alberta Boot Co.

Customize dream cowboy boots | 14

4_ Aquila Books

Polar passions and Western Canadiana | 16

5_ Avatamsaka Monastery

A plethora of Buddha statues | 18

6_ Baitun Nur Mosque

Explore one of Canada’s largest mosques | 20

7_ Battalion Park Geoglyphs

Stone memorials honour WWI soldiers | 22

8_ Beltline Cannabis Calgary

Retro touches at modern marijuana dispensary | 24

9_ BUMP

A project that matches artists and buildings | 26

10_ Big Rock Erratic

A glacial hitchhiker lands in a prairie field | 28

11_ The Bookscalator

Watch your books take an unusual ride | 30

12_ Boss Tattoos

Get inked by a pastor | 32

13_ Botanical Gardens of Silver Springs Shakespeare would be pleased | 34

14_ The Bow

No second fiddle for second tallest building | 36

15_ Bow Habitat Station

Intel for budding ichthyologists | 38

16_ Bow Passage Overlook

Remembering the historic flood | 40

17_ The Caesar’s Birthplace

Canada’s signature cocktail launched here | 42

18_ Calgary Brewing & Malting

The connection between buffalo and beer | 44

19_ Calgary Canoe Club

Urban paddling options | 46

20_ Calgary Courts Centre

Take a fast, free ride | 48

21_ Calgary Tower’s Carillon

Downtown’s secret soundtrack | 50

22_ Centennial Planetarium

Brutalist treasure hides a new art haven | 52

23_ Centre Street Lions

Big cat keeps watch from a park perch | 54

24_ Chicken on the Way

Say hello to a roadside rooster | 56

25_ Chinese Artifacts Museum

Singing fish basins and terracotta soldiers | 58

26_ Chinese Cemetery

Broken gravestones for mistreated pioneers | 60

27_ Cold Garden Beverage Company

Gnomes, pink flamingos and plastic greenery | 62

28_ Cougar’s Den Taxidermy

Museum-quality work by a wildlife artist | 64

29_ Crescent Heights Stairs

Cardiovascular workout with a killer view | 66

30_ Crown Outdoor & Tactical

For all your prepper needs | 68

31_ cSPACE King Edward

New life for ancient boiler room doors | 70

32_ Dark Table

Truly enjoy a meal and the company of others | 72

33_ Diamond Dolly’s Bridge

Early Calgary’s best-known sex worker | 74

34_ Douglas Coupland’s Northern Lights

Skyscraper’s take on the aurora borealis | 76

35_ Douglas-Fir Trail

A drunken forest for tree huggers | 78

36_ Eamon’s Bungalow Camp Sign

Last trace of a 1950’s gas station / motel | 80

37_ Edward H. LaBorde Viewing Area

The no-hassle zone for planespotters | 82

38_ European Club “Oak Leaf ”

Traditional Russian saunas come with beatings | 84

14__ The Bow

No second fiddle for second tallest building

The Bow is a 58-storey, 236-metre-high (774,000-foot) skyscraper designed by architect Norman Foster of UK-based Foster + Partners and configured in the shape of a bow (hence the name). It may now be the second tallest building in Calgary – after Brookfield Place inched 11 metres (36 feet) higher – but it’s still the third tallest in Canada and a destination in itself if you’ve never been there before. There are two compelling reasons to visit: Wonderland and Alberta’s Dream.

Nothing says a city has arrived quite like a sculpture from world-renowned Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, best known for the Crown Fountain in Chicago. Calgary’s moment came in 2012 with the unveiling of the Wonderland sculpture in The Bow’s spacious south plaza. You can climb into and interact with the white, stainless steel mesh head of a girl. Large heads and see-through materials are P ­ lensa’s trademarks, and this 12-metre-tall (39-foot) piece has two convenient, door-sized openings. “I believe the architecture of our bodies is the palace for our dreams,” Plensa has said about ­Wonderland. From inside, you can peer through the mesh and marvel at the downtown high rises that are home to Calgary’s corporate sector.

Hardly anyone realizes that Wonderland was commissioned by the Encana Corporation, an energy company now known as Ovinitiv Inc., one of The Bow’s two main tenants. The other tenant is C ­ enovus Energy, an oil and natural gas company.

In addition to admiring Wonderland, go seek out the second sculpture by Plensa at the back of The Bow. Alberta’s Dream is a bronze self-portrait of the Barcelona-based artist hugging a live tree, with his back to the glass and steel office tower. Known locally as The Tree Hugger, it’s covered in the names of Alberta communities, including Calgary (straddling the shoulders) and Edmonton (across the chest).

Plensa does variations on both sculptures around the world.

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Address 500 Centre Street SE, Calgary, AB T2G 0E3, www.bowcalgary.com | Getting there CTrain to Centre Street or 1 Street SW (Blue or Red Line) | Hours Unrestricted | Tip The Chocolate Lab in nearby Chinatown has artisan bonbons, chocolate tablets, baking bars and in-store drinking chocolate (202D Centre Street SE, www.chocolatelab.ca).

15__ Bow Habitat Station Intel for budding ichthyologists

There’s a human-sized model rainbow trout in the Bow Habitat Station that’s known as the “Inside and Out Trout.” It “swims” in the air above several boulders, and its left side is open to expose its innards. Press buttons to learn the intricacies of its 10 most important parts, starting with gills, brain, heart, liver and kidneys.

Absorb details about its digestive system, spinal cord, swim bladder, gonads and anus. The right side of the model fish is enclosed to showcase its “outers” – mouth, fins, eyes, gill covers, lateral line and nares (nostrils).

The Bow Habitat Station in Pearce Estate Park, along the banks of the Bow River, unabashedly celebrates the fish of Alberta. The Inside and Out Trout is in the Discovery Centre, along with 12 freshwater aquariums full of local fish, like prehistoric lake sturgeon. The Sam Livingston Fish Hatchery, named for the prospector, pioneer, farmer and innovator (see ch. 111) is here, too. It recently renovated its water treatment system for the first time since 1973 to reduce water consumption and energy use and to protect against current and future diseases.

The station raises six species to stock in Alberta lakes and ponds, supporting sportfishing by taking the pressure off native fish species.

If the hatchery isn’t running tours, you can at least view the action through big windows.

The gift shop stocks everything from Fishin’-Opoly to pocket nature guides. You can also rent gear to fish outside in the Kids Can Catch Trout Pond. There’s no bait allowed – it’s strictly catch-and-­ release, and adults need fishing licences. Stroll through the interpretive wetland down to the Bow River, where rainbow and brown trout were deliberately introduced. Now flourishing, they draw urban anglers. Those anglers are politely asked to stop the spread of nuisance rock snot algae by cleaning their boats, gear and waders.

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Address 1440 17A Street SE, Calgary, AB T2G 4T9, +1 (403) 297-6561, www.bowhabitat.alberta.ca, bow.habitat@gov.ab.ca | Getting there Bus 1 to 9 Avenue | Hours Tue – Sat 10am – 4pm; May 15 – Oct 31, Sun 10am – 4pm | Tip Fish Tales Fly Shop sells all the gear you’ll need, and it also links people up with guides so they can fly fish on the Bow River. The 55-kilometre (34-mile) stretch just south of Calgary is renowned for trophy-sized rainbow and brown trout, but there are popular spots downtown (Unit 626, 12100 Macleod Trail SE, www.fishtalesflyshop.com).

67__ Multicultural Free Library Take a free book, leave a free book

Pakistan-born Syed Najam Hassan came to Canada in 2009 with his family of book lovers. He remembers the challenges of learning a new language, improving his skills and finding books in languages other than English. He also noticed neighbours, especially seniors, struggling to travel to libraries and register for library cards. So he erected a multicultural Little Free Library in his front yard in Saddle Ridge in 2018, where people can donate or take free books. Three wooden, red-and-white library boxes are typically full of books in Urdu, Punjabi, Arabic and Tagalog, as well as English. Patio tables hold the overflow, and lawn chairs encourage people to gather.

“To my pleasure,” Hassan reports, “I saw people not only taking advantage of the offer of books and a place to read, but also seniors enjoying the chance to socialize and to sit and read. Hassan’s library is on the online world map of Little Free Libraries. More than 90,000 boxes in 91 countries have been registered with the American non-profit organization that trademarked the term after launching the book-sharing concept in 2009/2010 in Wisconsin.

The little library connected people and gave them the opportunity to meet and talk to each other. “Newcomers had a great, informal opportunity to learn English and even professionals also sometimes benefitted from the busy community of people donating books and taking and enjoying books,” Hassan says.

The community-building Hassan, who runs his own non-profit called the Love With Humanity Association, has helped launch multiple multicultural libraries in nearby communities. He added a Mini Outdoor Community Food Bank to his yard in 2019, with one side to donate non-perishable food and the other to take items.

It’s free and accessible 24/7, and the motto is, “Keep a blessing, leave a blessing.” The lieutenant governor of Alberta attended the grand opening.

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Address 75 Saddlelake Way NE, Calgary, AB T3J 0J1, www.lovewithhumanity.com, info@lovewithhumanity.com | Getting there Bus 159 to Saddlebrook Drive & Saddlelake Way | Hours Unrestricted | Tip The Children’s Reading Place transformed a heritage home in Inglewood into a place where parents and caregivers can bring kids to read and take home a free book. There’s a Reader in Residence / House Mother here too (Unit 105, 105 12 Avenue SE, www.calgaryreads.com).

68__ Nile Supermarket

Alberta’s largest African & Middle Eastern store

International Avenue (technically 17 Avenue Southeast) is the city’s culinary and cultural centre. One of the most popular and fascinating spots to shop and eat here is Nile Supermarket, which has been part of Calgary since 2000 and is owned by Somali-Canadians Mudhir Mohamed and Zulekha Noor. The one-level space houses a supermarket, a halal butcher, a tiny café, a tailor and a mobile shop under one roof. “It’s like a mini Walmart in the African community,” says Simba Creative’s Sylvester Ndumbi, who handles marketing for Nile.

The back half of the shop is filled with clothes, cosmetics, incense burners, perfume, bangles and other jewellery. But the one item that really jumps out here is the snazzy, bejewelled shoes for men. As Sylvester explains, the owners make frequent buying trips to Africa, Dubai and China. “Africans take dressing very seriously, especially on Sundays and on weekends – and at special events. Your normal stuff doesn’t cut it.” The shoes resonate especially well with stylish and flamboyant Francophones, known as sapologists or “les sapeurs,” who are mainly from Congo but also Cameroon and the Ivory Coast.

Colourful clothes, meanwhile, “scream attention,” says Sylvester, and are “clothes you can put on and tell what you are.”

On the food front, this is the spot for diverse eats, such as Ethiopian injera, Nigerian jerk beef and Sudanese sweets. The café is known for its goat meat dishes and plump samosas – the latter are handed out whenever the monthly International Avenue Business Revitalization Zone’s “Around the World in 35 Blocks” tours stop by, and at the annual Calgary Stampede breakfast. Don’t miss scrambled egg-stuffed malawah, sweet and flavourful Somali pancakes.

The shelves are filled with staple food from Africa, Egypt, Iran, Iraq and Syria and even unique items, like a chewable Miswak toothbrush twig.

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Address 4002 17 Avenue SE, Calgary, AB T2A 0S7, +1 (403) 244-1909, www.nilesupermarket.ca, info@nilesupermarket.ca | Getting there Bus 87 or 440 to 17 Avenue & 40 Street | Hours Daily 10am – 9pm | Tip Prairie Records has almost nothing to do with records and everything to do with cannabis, which is legal in Canada for recreational and medicinal purposes. The International Avenue shop plays music and creates cannabis signage that looks like album covers (4420 17 Avenue SE, www.prairerecords.ca).

69__ NMC’s TONTO Gawk at the holy grail of synthesizers

Music aficionados call it TONTO. To the uninitiated, that acronym stands for The Original New Timbral Orchestra, the world’s first and one of the largest multitimbral polyphonic analog synthesizers.

It was made in 1968 by musician and producers Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, who created a universal language for different synthesizers to communicate with each other. The co-creators showcased TONTO with Zero Time, a pioneering electronic music album under the band name “Tonto’s Expanding Head Band.” In the 1970s and 1980s, everyone from Stevie Wonder and the Isley Brothers to Joan Baez, the Doobie Brothers, Quincy Jones and Randy Newman used TONTO. So did the cult classic film Phantom of the Paradise.

TONTO is probably most famous for creating the iconic baseline for Stevie Wonder’s Superstition.

TONTO now lives at Studio Bell: Home of the National Music Centre in the East Village. “I needed to find a home for TONTO that would survive me and where it could be used,” Cecil said after the National Music Centre acquired it in 2013. It was lovingly restored by leading electronic instrument technician John Leimseider in Calgary and then given a five-day launch celebration in 2018 and used on new recordings with First Nations electronic music duo, A Tribe Called Red. The 1,500-square-metre (160,000-square-foot) building features nine curved, interlocking towers with five floors of interactive exhibitions that tell the story of music in Canada and house four Canadian music halls of fame. TONTO is kept in a connecting building called the west block and can only be seen on the weekly Backstage Pass tour, which includes a visit to the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio and a look inside recording studios where artists and innovators gather to make music. Tour guides are all professional musicians who demo TONTO, the “crown jewel” of the music and technology collection.

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109__ Wrestling at the Legion Family Fridays with real Canadian wrestling

It seems like an unlikely partnership. Twice a month, the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 1 rents space to Real Canadian Wrestling (RCW) for a Friday night show. Advance tickets are $20, $25 for ringside seats. At the door, all seats are $30. Seven matches over about three hours will involve 12 to 18 wrestlers. Matches might be singles (one on one), tag teams (two on two), triple threats (three on three) or battle royales (with 10 to 20 people). Each wrestler has a persona, like Heavy Metal, the long-haired rebel from Memphis (actually Edmonton), or the Canadian Goose, a masked superhero from the Canadian wetlands. “It’s whatever your imagination comes up with,” explains Steven Ewaschuk, RCW’s owner and promoter. “Our shows are like a male soap opera. If you miss one episode, you’re lost for the rest. I like to call it The Young and The Wrestlers.”

The costumes might be pleather, vinyl, cloth or spandex. Anything works, as long as it matches the character, like Brice “The Slammer” Sova (pictured). The average crowd is 300, but there’s room for 400. The outcomes of the matches are pre-determined – this is sports entertainment, after all. But the blood, bruises and injuries are very real. Ewaschuk broke his neck and blew knees when he wrestled as Steven Styles, “the big good guy that everybody loved, fighting for what was right in the world.”

RCW is the next evolution of Stampede Wrestling (see ch. 72), the professional wrestling promotion run by Calgarian Stu Hart and his family off and on from 1948 to 2008. Ewaschuk grew up watching wrestling Saturday nights in Edmonton with his dad. He learned to wrestle at Hart Dungeon in Calgary, started his own promotion in 2003 and also runs two training schools with help from his dad and kids. It takes a year to get wrestlers ready for their first match.

RCW runs up to a dozen shows a month, mainly across the West.

All ages welcome.

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Address 116 7 Avenue SE, Calgary, AB T2G 0H5, +1 (587) 938-6750, www.facebook.com/ rcwrestling, realcanadianwrestling@yahoo.ca | Getting there CTrain to Centre Street (Blue or Red Line) | Hours Select Fridays 7:30 – 10:30pm | Tip As Legions evolve to stay relevant, the Kensington Legion Branch 264 opened in 2017 in a new, four-storey building. Visit the public 1918 Tap & Table restaurant (1918 Kensington Road NW, www.kensingtonlegion.ca).

110__ YouthLink Calgary

Black Friday at the Police Interpretive Centre

A wall of casings shows the shocking number of rounds fired during a lethal day known as Black Friday. The December 20, 1974 gun battle started with a deranged-looking man threatening a storekeeper and ended after more than 130 officers rushed to the notorious glue sniffer’s property. They fired 67 tear gas canisters and exchanged almost 1,000 bullets. Detective Boyd Davidson died, and seven other officers were wounded before Philippe Gagnon was killed coming out of his converted garage.

The Black Friday tragedy prompted police to work out new ways to approach high-risk situations by creating a tactical unit and incident command and training negotiators. The sobering display includes photos, a newspaper page and a documentary featuring retired officers who were there that day.

YouthLink Calgary Police Interpretive Centre is a not-for-profit museum geared towards kids and families, but it’s compelling for everyone who’s fascinated by crime. It opened downtown in 1995 and moved to cutting-edge digs attached to police headquarters and near the airport in 2015. There are 50-plus interactive exhibits and areas devoted to bullying, online safety, healthy relationships, drugs, gangs and forensic science. Do things like geek out in the forensic lab, or put your head in a riot officer’s helmet and hear what it must be like for them.

There’s plenty of evidence, crime scene photos and storyboards.

Read about historical crimes, like the unsolved 1948 Floorboard Mummy case, where a man doing home improvements found mummified remains under his floorboards.

Find out about Calgary’s most dangerous intersection (Deerfoot Trail and Memorial Drive East) and examine a crime-fighting robot, police car, spike belt and display case full of guns. And don’t miss the cell block-themed washrooms.

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