Enoch Sales home sold to CMLC, but its fate remains unknown
Heritage activists say city must do more to protect ‘extra special’ landmarks
The recent sale of a 113-year-old mansion in Victoria Park has reignited passionate pleas to save one of Calgary’s only remaining examples of the stylish homes that graced the once ritzy neighbourhood long ago.
“I will legitimately tie myself to the front of that building before that building gets torn down,” area Coun. Evan Woolley said of the socalled Enoch Sales house.
For at least a decade, wood has covered the windows and doors of the two-storey Queen Anne Revival-style home on 12th Avenue, built for successful businessman Enoch Samuel Sales in 1904.
The yellow residence on a large parking lot near Macleod Trail is not legally protected as a municipal historic resource and has, in recent years, been rocked by flood and squatters, and fallen into disrepair.
Earlier this month, the Calgary Municipal Land Corp. (CMLC), a subsidiary of the city, purchased the nearly two-acre piece of land and the Enoch Sales home that sits on the parcel from an undisclosed numbered company.
Susan Veres, a senior vice-president at the city’s land agency, said it’s yet to be determined how the Enoch Sales home will fit in a new master plan for Victoria Park, set to be unveiled later this year.
“We’ve just completed a structural report on the house, which says there’s no structural soundness to the building at all,” Veres said.
“We’d like to see, somehow, the house form a new vision for the block, but I can’t tell you what that means yet. I don’t know if that means we make it structurally sound, we move it, we keep elements or components of it, I can’t say yet.”
Woolley is adamant the home needs to be saved.
“The City of Calgary has done a terrible job of protecting our heritage assets,” the Ward 8 councillor said.
“We’ve lost so much of our heritage already. What we do have is extra special. It needs to be protected as part of our history.”
For at least a decade, there’s been talk of saving and moving the large home, which was sold after Sales’ death in 1930 and later served as a boarding house, then a series of apartments.
Renderings from 2012 for a new city park, adjacent to the Enoch Sales house, included images of the yellow home moved onto the park and redeveloped into a cafe.
City spokeswoman Erin Martinez said while the park was redeveloped in 2015, the privately owned house doesn’t play a role in the green space.
Developer Dan Van Leeuwen, a former owner of the lot and the house, was quoted in local media in 2011, 2012 and as recently as 2015, discussing a plan to move the house a few dozen metres west and restore the mansion into a restaurant or office space.
“It’s been a long road for the Enoch Sales house and we hope it’s one that leads to preservation and not the landfill,” said Chris Edwards, the vice-president and co-founder of the Calgary Heritage Initiative.
“We think it’s important as the city grows to leave some physical and architectural clues as to what sort of community existed before.”
Woolley said the piece of history sits on a massive lot and, “there’s no way we can’t make a redevelopment of that site work with that house on it.”
CMLC is the same group steering the revitalization of the once blighted East Village and Woolley said one of the group’s first acts of building credibility in that neighbourhood was to protect and restore heritage buildings.
“It would be a shame if CMLC’s first endeavour in this community was to tear down an important heritage asset,” he said.
While no figures on the sale have been made public, the address where the home sits was most recently assessed at $3.9 million.
It’s been a long road for the house and we hope it’s one that leads to preservation and not the landfill.