FORGOTTEN EDMONTON
History major documents photos and stories within the walls of a forgotten Edmonton
History buff shares cityscape photos, tales
Where other architectural observers may notice an elaborate cornice, a cladding of Roman brick, an Art Deco flair, Dane Ryksen ponders the porch, and the people who perched there.
Not that the local history buff is disinterested in the art of architecture. But he’s really keen on what went on in the buildings, and particularly the homes, that he photographs for his blog, Forgotten Edmonton, and his Instagram account, _citizen_dane_.
“A building might be important architecturally, but the important thing to me is the people who inhabited it and the stories contained within its walls,” says Ryksen, 23, a history major at the University of Alberta.
Those stories pepper his social media platforms. But they also occupy Ryksen’s imagination as he strolls through historic Edmonton neighbourhoods, capturing images with his camera, and sourcing tales of those who once lived there.
A self-described “architecture nerd,” Ryksen became fascinated by the cityscape as a teenager. He remembers tackling a stop-motion movie project in junior high and thinking hard about how to construct a 1930s, gangster-style movie set complete with period buildings, entirely from Lego. While the movie project never materialized, the creative experience sparked something within Ryksen, an urge to observe, to wonder and to share.
Since Ryksen started posting more than two years ago, he has recorded roughly 200 architectural highlights found among the 38 heritage neighbourhoods in Edmonton.
You may be familiar with some of the more grand examples of Edmonton’s too-little-appreciated past, such as the Paramount Theatre, Ritchie School or Robertson-wesley United Church.
But Ryksen has also recorded numerous smaller, more personal examples of our history nestled in neighbourhoods and lovingly preserved by generations of families who have lived there. Other historic homes stand stark and alone. Paint peeling from their elegant facades, they wait to be noticed, to be remembered.
When Ryksen spots an interesting home during his travels (mostly by public transit and on foot), he snaps a shot and records the address. Then, he Google Maps the address, to see what’s noted, and thereafter, visits his favourite historical resources for more insight. The Bruce Peel Special Collections library at the U of A is a “godsend” to Ryksen. There, digitized copies of the Henderson directory (listing owners of addresses through to the 1960s) are available, along with long-defunct provincial newspapers, including the Edmonton Bulletin that often provide telling details of lives lived.
For digitized copies of the Edmonton
Journal (a major source of detailed information about the city and its citizens since 1903), he purchased a subscription to newspapers.com (an international online newspaper database).
Ryksen also relies on information from Edmonton’s city archives, providing source footnotes for each blog.
While some buildings on his blog may be found within Edmonton’s inventory of historic resources (a list of properties that merit conservation), that doesn’t mean the buildings will be preserved. Only a small number of heritage buildings in Edmonton are protected from demolition. Ryksen occasionally writes, mournfully, when a worthy building has been demolished.
But largely, he’s sanguine about the attitude of the city, its developers and homeowners, toward retaining historic character within the housing stock. Here’s what Ryksen says in a February post about the Roosevelt apartments, a fixture in Oliver since 1912, which Ryksen says is to be torn down and replaced by, yes, a condominium.
“Normally I close my posts about the city’s threatened heritage with some pretentiously lofty statement lamenting the further decay of character and the ever-increasing need to protect it, trying to offer solutions or decrying the loss of the hundreds of personal stories they encompass. But, in my two-and-a-half years of writing I’ve covered around a dozen or so demolitions, and at this point I’ve simply run out of things to say.”
Never mind. An Instagram post is worth a thousand words. Here are five examples of Ryksen’s favourite heritage homes in Edmonton, and a little about the stories they contain.
J. PERCY PAGE RESIDENCE, 10947-123 ST.
Though he wasn’t the original occupant, prominent Edmonton politician and educator J. Percy Page, beloved coach of the world-famous Edmonton Commercial Graduates Basketball Club, lived in this modest dwelling. Built in 1912, the home is not on the city’s inventory of historic resources, but is noted on a historical plaque on the Park Avenue bike lane.
MUTTART RESIDENCE, 11012-95 ST.
Also “curiously absent” from the city’s inventory of historic resources, the tired residence was home in 1915 to Jesse Muttart (uncle to Merrill Muttart of the Muttart Foundation fame). Though Muttart, a soldier and dispatch runner during the battle of Passchendaele in 1917, did not survive the First World War, he was awarded a posthumous medal for bravery.
YUEN RESIDENCE, 8915-140 ST.
This modernist home in Parkview was constructed in 1959 for its owner, Lee Kow Yuen, one of Edmonton’s most prominent Chinese-canadian
citizens. An artist, restaurant owner and devoted volunteer YMCA instructor, Yuen may be familiar to downtown dwellers through one of his pieces of public art — a relief work called Serving Youth Throughout the World. It’s located on the wall of the former YMCA building on 102A Ave.
CANTIN APARTMENTS, 11011-115 ST.
The small apartment building is a rare example of a home-to-apartment conversion built by Edmonton developer Arthur J. Cantin Sr. during the Great Depression. The Cantin is one of the last in this endangered housing species; two similar structures — the El Mirador Manor and the Roosevelt Apartments — are scheduled for demolition. The property is not listed on the city’s inventory of historic resources.
DAVIES RESIDENCE, 8903-99 AVE.
A good-news story for lovers of historic architecture, the Davies Residence once stood in Old Strathcona and was the home of Arthur Davies, mayor of Strathcona in 1905 and again in 1911. It, too, had fallen under the spell of a local condominium developer, but was later purchased by a concerned citizen and taken apart, brick-bybrick, to be rebuilt in Riverdale. Nearly 23,000 bricks were salvaged for the reconstruction.