The Lights Are On…
Time has run out for these homes. Forgotten and empty the land on which they sit is slated for redevelopment and soon they’ll be reduced to a pile of splinters. The “gentrification monster” (thanks Micheal), insatiable in appetite, rears its head here in the Calgary community of Bowness. Nothing stands in its way! It’s called the Sunnyside Redevelopment Project and takes in a block of houses, including those shown here, along with the very expansive Sunnyside Garden Centre property. The latter was a Calgary institution for a good hundred years and just recently, and most unexpectedly, closed.
Expect trendy condo blocks and boutique (read: expensive) shops to take their place. It’s how it always plays out. These two dwellings date from the mid-1950s as do most, about a dozen in total, on the block and are pretty typical of the era. BIGDoer HQ is housed in something similar. A couple homes down the street still appear occupied. Hold outs fighting expropriation maybe? Or late to move?
The lights are on, if you look close, but do not indicate habitation and instead are for benefit of mitigation crews removing yucky stuff (asbestos we’re told) prior to the bulldozers being called in. The tarped windows, which accounts for the dimness of the illumination shining through, are a dead give away I guess. We could hear work going on inside. Since we photographed them a couple months back, the pair in front have since been demolished. The others won’t be far behind we suspect.
A very cool vintage gas station…
Retro Service Stations: Lakeview Husky.
Short Subjects: reports that for any number of reasons are brief in nature. They might be updates to older articles, previews of posts planned or not yet published, brief snippets of things that don’t fit in anywhere else or subjects that are so obscure that information on them can’t be found. Or sometimes we just ramble on about Lord knows what.
If you need any more information on what we talked about here, by all means contact us!
Date of adventure: January, 2019.
Location: Calgary Bowness @ Sunnyside Redevelopment Project.
Doomed houses, with the lights on.
So sad to hear Sunnyside Garden Centre has closed. My grandpa dealt there for many years with his work as a gardener and after he retired.
Doubly sad considering they’ve been around for so long. But all things must go eventually I guess. Thanks for commenting.
Sad to see, especially hearing they’ve been recently lived in.
Yes, that’s the worst part. They were still habitable.
Where in Bowness and why?
By Sunnyside Garden Centre, and the land’s being redeveloped. Come a year or two, it’ll be condos and shops.
I’m assuming this is by Sunnyside? I heard they are redeveloping that whole area.
Yes, that’s the place. Soon it’ll be shiny new condos and shops.
Ugh! We need to do what Quebec does and force people to give good reason as to why they are sending perfectly fine solid homes to the landfill.
There should be some kind of accountability. They’re dropping like flies.
I was in Vancouver for a while this past fall. Entire blocks sitting like this. Demolish, fancy new home, $$$$. Or apartments etc.
I’ve been following what’s been going on there. Yikes! They’re demolishing houses left and right there and it seems few people even care.
Take a drive down 36 street SE in Calgary, between Memorial Drive and 17th Ave. Same thing. Vacant houses, many of which are, all boarded up.
I know, it’s depressing. So many old houses are being lost to redevelopment.
Too bad they didn’t sell the houses to move.
Seems it’s easier and cheaper to just bulldoze everything, sad as it is.