‘Edmonton’s as big as Chicago, it just isn’t built yet’
Re: “No great triumph,” Insight, July 5 This article states the city was built by “boosters and hucksters,” which is a misconception.
Most were young men, eager to get out from under old, stratified communities in Eastern Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and continental Europe. For a young chap suffocating in his hometown, Edmonton was the answer to a prayer.
In a brand-new capital city, rising on the foundation of the fur trade and the gold rush, every opportunity was open. A young man didn’t need to wait for middle age to become a person of consequence in the community. Young believers arriving in town would flock together; six or so would rent a house, hire a cook and live a life of the college fraternity house. There were dozens of “bachelors’ halls.”
In 10 years, Jasper Avenue was lined with buildings of brick and stone.
Of course, there were other builders. At 48, my grandfather Sam Gorman came as an elder statesman among the young crowd. It was 1906, the Alberta boom was making news, and he came from Chicago for a look. In the first light of May 24, he stood on the site of what’s now the Chateau Lacombe, pondering the great valley and announcing to himself: “By God, we’re going to build a city here.”
So Grandpa Gorman sold up in Chicago and moved the seven young Gormans to Edmonton, including my mother Helen, who was then 14.
To help the city build, he went into a business he’d never tried before, builders’ supplies, and the name Gorman’s survived until a few years ago.
The real-estate boom ended in a bust when the salesmen grew Edmonton to the area of Chicago, with a population somewhat fewer than the 53,611 asserted by City Hall in 1912.
The wise grandmother of a friend used to say, “Edmonton’s as big as Chicago, it just isn’t built yet.”
But the bust gave Edmonton a legacy to build on in the housing boom of the 1950s and ’60s. The city’s biggest landowner was the city itself, holding 70,000 lots on which the first owners gave up paying taxes. The city had land to sell at cost on a commitment to build. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., established in 1946, was offering two-year mortgages at 4.5-per-cent interest and the baby boom was in progress: a perfect storm.
To adapt a familiar quotation in honour of the founders, “They builded better than they knew.”
Tony Cashman , Edmonton