Galleria concept was a tunnel too far
Galleria’s collapse leaves city taxpayers on hook with frozen land, walkway to nowhere
Castles in the air are beautiful things.
Building upon them, on a foundation of dreams and wishes, is a lot harder.
The Galleria, a.k.a. the Edmonton Downtown Academic and Cultural Centre, was one of those airy fantasy castles.
This week, it all came crashing down.
The Galleria Foundation board announced late Wednesday that the project is “suspended” — and now, city taxpayers are left to pick up the pieces.
The original $1-billion plan had called for a 40-storey office tower, a retail complex, a heated outdoor glass-roofed plaza the size of Churchill Square, 350,000 square feet of classroom and rehearsal space for the University of Alberta’s music program, a 1,700-seat opera house and three other smaller theatres.
It was to be located north of 103A Avenue, across from City Hall and next to the new Royal Alberta Museum.
It was a lavish plan. The glass roof on the open-air Galleria alone was expected to cost $35 million. The luxury underground pedway, with “high value finishes” and moving sidewalks was to cost $30 million to $40 million.
The Galleria was pitched to city council as a kind of magical, musical perpetual motion machine.
The promise was that the lease revenues from the offices, shops and restaurants would, in turn, fund a foundation which would, in turn, fund the operations of the theatres.
When it became clear that there were no major private commercial tenants to anchor a 40-storey skyscraper, the plan was scaled back to an $850-million version, a first phase without the tower or the opera house, but with a 650-seat theatre and a 200-seat recital hall. But even that plan hinged on charging the University of Alberta $300 million for leasehold space. It already required finding major commercial tenants, and on prying millions of public dollars from the city, the province, and the federal government.
It didn’t happen.
No one from the Galleria Foundation would agree to speak with me this week. The foundation’s website has been purged. Its email returns an auto-reply answer.
Is the Galleria dead or merely resting ? Will the people who donated to the project get their money back? No one was able to tell me.
While the province and the feds declined to support the project financially, Edmonton city council was considerably more gung-ho.
In 2016, the city signed a memorandum of understanding with the Edmonton Galleria Foundation. Under the agreement, the city was to contribute $58.3 million to the project.
That included giving away the land where the old Edmonton Reuse Centre was located, a parcel worth $8.3 million, for $1.
It also included kicking in $7.5 million for the cost of that very, very special luxury pedway.
Well folks, there is no Galleria. I doubt there ever will be.
However, the city has already spent $4.5 million on building the shell for a deluxe pedway to nowhere.
Will the pedway ever be finished? If so, at whose expense? And where will it lead?
No one from the city was able to answer that question on Friday.
As for that prime $8.3-million parcel of land? The city has no immediate way to get it back. If the Galleria doesn’t start construction by 2025, the land will revert to the city. But until then, it belongs to the Galleria Foundation, which means the city can’t develop it or sell it to anyone else for the next seven years.
It’s a mess. And it’s a waste — time and energy and money that could have been invested in smaller-scale infrastructure the local arts community actually wants and needs, on things that actually meshed with the needs of U of A music students.
Andrew Sharman is the University of Alberta’s new vice-president of facilities and operations. He was never part of the grand Galleria madness. Sharman says the university’s fine arts programs do need bigger, better spaces. But instead of spending $300 million on the
As for that prime $8.3-million parcel of land? The city has no immediate way to get it back.
Galleria, he’ll be spending $15 million of university money (and raising more from the community) to renovate and restore Convocation Hall in the old Arts Building, one of the most beautiful heritage structures in the city.
Sharman says his priority is to refurbish buildings already on campus. It makes more sense, he says, to rent the Winspear for larger university concerts, than build a new concert hall.
“Even if there were dollars around, why would you do it?”
A very good question. I don’t want to slight generous philanthropists such as the Kipnes family, who’ve given so much to the city and wanted to give more. But there are so many better ways to help local creators, to support the university and to animate the downtown core. I hope our community leaders and our politicians can find them.