Join Karla Yungwirth in her city – Calgary, Alberta Canada as she visits a local Farmers Market and tours a bit of her city!
We headed around the market to see what treasures we could find.
This neat wooden cabinet, painted to look like an old television caught our eye! How neat is that?!
Next, we wandered past the old book store. Can you just imagine all the stories in here waiting to be read?!!
After that, we rounded the corner to the antique store with awesome shelves filled with treasures waiting to be discovered!
The Polaroid company was founded in 1937 and an Automatic Instant camera similar to this one below was made from 1969 to 1971, as described in an article on Wikipedia. I can imagine families carrying cameras like this one to their family picnics and special outings! So exciting!
Even though we only live about 20 minutes away from this area, it’s not a drive we regularly take. So, it was neat to see the older buildings in this part of the city. Here’s a little history of my city for you: In 1883, the Canadian Pacific Railway reached this area and in 1884 Calgary was incorporated as a town. There was a large fire in 1886 that began at the local flour and feed store and spread through the community’s wooden structures, destroying 14 buildings. After this, a law was drafted that all large downtown buildings were to be built of sandstone. In 1894, the City of Calgary was incorporated with a population of 3900, and in 1902 oil was discovered in Alberta. Today, our population is 1.3 million!
The Snowdon building was built in 1911 by Campbell Camillus Snowdon, who started one of the first oil and refining companies in Western Canada. The building had been painted white and a fire damaged a large portion of it in 1988. During recent reconstruction blasting exposed the original red brick!
This is the side view of the Snowdon building, which had included an oil warehouse, garage and office.
This building, the Blow Block was built in 1911 by a building contractor, David Blow, who moved to Calgary from Ontario, which is in the East of Canada, in 1903.
This photo from the Inglewood Historical Walking Tours booklet shows a photo of what the building originally looked like.
This Coca-cola ghost sign is on the side of the Hillier Block building – one of seven pre-World War 1 commercial structures that survived in this area. It was built in 1910 and the ground floor contained a billiards hall and barber shop, while upstairs was residential suites.
Calgary Firehall No. 1 was built in 1911 and was in use as a fire hall until 1973. This fire hall was associated with “Cappy” James Smart, Calgary’s fire chief for many years, who was instrumental in upgrading this city’s firefighting equipment and practices.
'Gypsy Travels to Calgary, Alberta, Canada' have 6 comments
April 24, 2017 @ 4:00 pm Johanne Lacombe
I enjoyed discovering your town. Thanks for sharing.
April 24, 2017 @ 4:07 pm Karla Yungwirth
Thanks so much Johanne!!
April 24, 2017 @ 8:04 pm Liz O
What a wonderful virtual trip Karla! I am adding Calgary to my “places I want to visit” list, thanks for sharing and BTW I had to look twice at the TV cabinet, it is neat!
April 24, 2017 @ 9:15 pm Karla Yungwirth
Thanks so much for stopping by Liz!! That tv cabinet is cool 😉 If you do ever come this way we’ll definitely get together!
May 2, 2017 @ 5:45 am Claudia Neubacher
What a lovely tour! Thanks so much for sharing and taking me along! Claudia x
May 2, 2017 @ 7:30 am Karla Yungwirth
Thanks for coming along Claudia!