Aug. 29, 1974: City council kills plan for MacKinnon Ravine freeway route
You can walk, run and bicycle on the scenic pathway that runs along the north side of the river, west of Groat Road, and you can toboggan in winter on the hill below the Royal Alberta Museum because of one vote.
That’s how close it came when Edmonton city council voted 6-5 to kill plans to run a $4-million free way through MacKinnon Ravine.
City crews had started clearing, dumping, filling and levelling the land almost 10 years earlier for a road that was to have linked River Road at the Groat Bridge to Jasper Place at 149th Street, near Stony Plain Road. It was going to be called the Jasper Freeway and was part of the METS (Metro Edmonton Transportation System), a proposed network of roads converging in the river valley, giving suburban drivers easy access to the downtown core.
Groat Ravine was the first to be paved in 1955, with the MacKinnon, Mill Creek and Quesnell ravines to follow.
Public protests involving such groups as the women from the Save Our Parks Association — many of them neighbourhood housewives — fought the controversial project every step of the way. They satin trees, they blocked roads to the construction site, they lay down on the ground in front of bulldozers. Their children moved survey stakes from their proper positions and harassed drivers with BB guns. An effigy of the city’s chief engineer was found hanging from the 142nd Street Bridge one day.
Crews cut all the trees in the base of the ravine and sculpted the land to make it suitable for a roadway, but paving never started. Protesters weren’t able to save many of the giant pines that had been around longer than Edmonton had been a city, but in the end they were able to preserve MacKinnon Ravine as a people place.
Attempts to revisit city council’s decision in 1983 wilted under public pressure and the city abandoned plans to build the Jasper/ MacKinnon Freeway for good.