Historic Walks of Calgary

With its towering steel and glass skyscrapers, its endless modern suburbs, and its collective focus on the future, Calgary propagates its own greatest myth: that it is a city without history. But native archaeological sites, a reconstructed Mounted Police fort, and hundreds of historic homes, warehouses and commercial buildings that have escaped the wrecker's ball record the development of a nineteenth century cattletown into a twenty-first century metropolis.

Alternating boom-and-bust cycles created their own legacies, providing architectural examples of the pre-First World War real estate boom, a late 1920s economic recovery and the petroleum wealth that flowed after the Leduc oil discovery of 1947. Illustrated with over 300 contemporary and archival photos.

Harry Sanders was born in 1966 in Drumheller, Alberta, where his father owned and operated the Whitehouse Hotel. Spending his early youth in and around this old hotel gave Harry a lifelong appreciation for heritage buildings, and this influenced his decision to study history and to follow a career as a local historian.