Banff Trail Community Association - Calgary

A brief history of Banff Trail

Excerpt from a speech by Michael Shepherd, Emcee, given on September 19, 2009 at the Banff Trail Community Hall re-opening ceremony.

Back in 1910, the City of Calgary annexed what was to be a new area of town. In 1951 lots were sold for a new community on the edge of the city limits and Banff Trail was born! 19th Street was the trail to Banff (hence the name) and Morley Trail led to Morley, although it was nothing but a beaten down dirt path. The area was barren with nary a tree to be seen, just some brush and it was very dusty for many years as construction of homes began, soon followed by schools, stores, the University, McMahon Stadium and various other landmarks. You had to time your laundry just right, so as to not get everything all covered in dirt. There used to be an old dairy farm right where Brentwood Mall is now and that was seen as the boundary at the time.

Lots were selling for an average of $500 and after you put a roof on
your place the city would give you back $50. Gordon & Shirley Fox had a $5,000 mortgage for their place on Capitol Hill Crescent. In a lot of cases people had to pay contractors large down payments before they started construction, unless they built a 3 bedroom house, then it wasn’t so bad. The logic behind this being it would be much easier to resell a 3 bedroom place to another young family if repossession came into play. The Parks Department brought in trees as did individual owners who sometimes were given wrong information and purchased WAY too many for their property, and ended up looking like great neighbors by giving several trees and bushes away.

Banff Trail was one of the last areas of Calgary where the lots were
purchased directly from the City and not from a developer. Folks would line up for 3-4 days in advance outside City Hall, upon hearing lots were to be tendered. Shifts were taken by family members to keep their spot in line, bringing lawn chairs, sleeping bags and shaving kits. Someone came up with the idea of a numbering system- so that people could take washroom breaks and not lose their place in line and it was honoured quite nicely! This system, though long and arduous, did allow those in line to get to know their future neighbors before basements were even dug. It was the last time that the City allowed this as even the Mayor at the time, Don McKay, got tired of having to step over people resting on the steps as they went in to work. The Mayor was even heard to say “This is the last time we’re doing this”, and I believe it was.

I was talking to long time resident Doreen Hammond the other night
about Banff Trail’s beginnings and she shared this story for us. She
said that she and her then fiance had come out to survey their lot and seek out the right steel spikes that would mark off their property. They paced things out and marked their future property, and began to dig their basement. All was good, until one night when Doreen’s fiance had the awful feeling that they have been wrong in their pacing and were digging in the WRONG lot! Living on pins and needles until the next day after work when they could re-pace out the property lines, they suffered, only to find they were correct in their calculations and all was well. It would have made a great “How do you do” if they had been wrong & dug their future neighbour’s basement instead.

At this time the closest place that had phone service was the Wig-Wam Service Station, and since you had to have roads and a sidewalk in order to receive Postal Service’s mail was picked up at the Drug Store on the corner of 19th St & 20th Ave. Roads, sidewalks and lawns often weren’t in place until a few years after a home had been built. Building something out of nothing was the common thread for those who first settled in Banff Trail, and that kinship cultivated a very close-knit neighbourhood and a Community was born!

It didn’t take long for this community to band together for what they believed in. In the early years Confederation Park was known as “The Gulley” and ALMOST became a landfill at one point until concerned community members spoke up loud enough and the City was forced to move it elsewhere — Spy Hill to be exact.

Community needs a place to meet

55 years ago, in 1954, the Banff Trail Community Association was created to attend to the many needs of its people, many of whom were young families just starting out. Their children were looking for social & sporting activities that went beyond playing in “The Gulley” and using cardboard as sleds down snow covered mounds of construction dirt. Hockey & skating rinks popped up and in 1956 the first version of this fine hall that stands before you was built. There was hockey & figure skating in the winter as well as Winter Carnivals in February with plenty of hot chocolate. There was baseball in the summer. Parents were called upon to tend to the ice as well as volunteer as coaches and referees. Long time local resident John Watson’s garage was used as a hockey storage area and his wife Doris recalls one summer where a couple of young baseball players, blond twins in Grade 6, by the by, came and rang her bell saying “Um, the coach said we could come here to get glasses and some water”. That’s the kind of community Banff Trail was. The basement of the hall was used as a Kindergarten until the early 70’s when it was finally included in the curriculum of the City’s schools.

Parents needed a social outlet as well, outside of their children’s activities. Square dancing became popular very quickly and out of that came the Banff Trailers, a dedicated group of residents whose passion for dancing earned them a spot in the Opening Ceremonies of the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics. Evening Crib tournaments have been going strong for years and through that group, new table-tops were installed on the buildings’ many long tables and re-wiring was done to accommodate nightly adventures in the Center. Bake and Craft sales led to the formation of the Ladies Auxiliary in 1962 where first President Madeline Gablehaus and her Band of Merry Wives helped organize various events to raise funds for the Community Association. This was done primarily through catering for functions ranging from Weddings to Funerals, but they also held garage sales, crafts and bake sales including the yearly Bazaar at North Hill Shopping Center. In 1967 on Friday nights and Saturday afternoons, the hall was turned into a movie theater with a rented projector and films, complete with fresh popcorn; all for an admission price of 10 cents! This soon proved to be very popular (except for the few times that films were forgotten in cars and such), so popular that the movie theaters complained and had the City put a stop to it. Movie nights were replaced with monthly pot-luck dinners and slide shows from members’ foreign vacations, and the hall remained busy.