Bonnybrook Homes
Deep inside an industrial park, in Calgary’s Bonnybrook neighbourhood, it’s something strange and unexpected. Here among all the trucking firms, metal working shops and compounds full of cannibalized vehicles; here between busy Ogden Road and the sewer plant, it’s a couple small houses side by side. Tucked away behind a fence, well hidden and with one further obscured by a billboard they’re easy to miss. It’s been a long time since they were lived in but still they look the part of the single family dwelling. Just old, teenie-weenie and run down.
As hard as it is to imagine among all the noise and grime (and if the wind’s right, poopy smells), this area was mixed-residential at one time.
These buildings were last by used a “finance everyone” used car dealership, but on our last visit were empty. There was at the time a big for sale sign on the property, suggesting their days are numbered. Not much use for stuff like this…the land yes, the buildings, hell no.
Research points to them being from the 1930-1940 period but at best info is sketchy. The city is silent on the matter. There were other houses on this block, as we found out, perhaps eight or nine in number, all long gone. Mostly back then the area was open fields, with occasional pockets of industrial buildings and a fair number of residential properties scattered about with few developed roads. Quite the contrast to today.
North towards those huge grain terminals, in the Alyth neighbourhood nearby, there’s some more houses, some lived in, some used as offices and some we’re not completely sure of. To see them go here…Industrial Park Living.
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.
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Date of adventure: April, 2019.
Location: Calgary, AB.
We’re in Calgary’s Bonnybrook industrial.
What a strange place to find some old houses.
That first building looks like an old railway bunkhouse to be honest.
You’ve seen one in a similar configuration?
In Saskatchewan actually. I believe it’s a GTP/CN style.
Interesting, we’ll browse the internet to see if we can find one like it.
There’s a few in one of the industrial areas in south Edmonton as well. At one point, about ten years ago, they were still occupied. Haven’t driven that way for quite some time…..
There’s others a few blocks over, one or two that looked to be lived in. For some reason we’re drawn to these industrial areas, but I can’t understand how one could live there.