It’s a last-ditch effort by a group of Calgarians to save to save a heritage building set for demolition as part of the Green Line LRT expansion in the city’s southeast.
The 110-year-old Ogden Block building currently sits vacant, but the hope is to find a tenant to make use of the city-owned building to give it new life.
Residents with the Millican Ogden Heritage Group rallied outside the building on Tuesday to try and drum up support and raise awareness of its looming demolition.
“We want this building to be the cornerstone of community revitalization in Ogden,” Millican Ogden Heritage Group chair Bonny Warveck said.
The City of Calgary purchased the site in early 2021 and the building was scheduled to be torn down to serve as a staging area for construction crews on the Green Line LRT project, which is slated to run behind the Ogden Block.
An LRT station is planned to be built just north of the site as part of the Green Line.
However, demolition was temporarily halted due to public outcry, with calls for studies into the building’s past.
Ogden Block was built in 1913 by two men of Chinese descent and was used for a commercial laundry business.
“Which was extremely rare at the time for people of Chinese descent to be in a small village like Ogden was at the time,” Warveck said.
“There was a lot of racism, of course, but many people who were here from the Chinese community tended to be in Calgary.”
The building was also used as a boarding house, a polling station in the vote on prohibition, and additional space for the Ogden Military Convalescent Hospital for injured soldiers returning home from the First World War.
Apartment units were opened upstairs in 1919, and the building was used for rental units in more recent years.
After several assessments, Ogden Block was found to be historically significant and structurally sound, and it was added to the Calgary’s Inventory of Evaluated Historic Resources.
“It has been found to have historic value,” Heritage Calgary CEO Josh Traptow said in a statement.
“It would be great to see it either retained or commemorated through the Green Line and the Ogden station that is set to be built near the site.”
While there has been formal acknowledgement of its heritage value, the building does not have the legal protections of being designated a Municipal Historic Resource.
“I’ve told the Green Line team, I will chain myself to the bulldozers,” Ward 9 Coun. Gian-Carlo Carra told reporters.
Carra is supporting the group rallying to save Ogden Block, and has a proposal which he hopes will see the building spared from demolition.
The area councillor has floated the idea of offering tenancy of the building to a non-profit profit or developer at no-cost until 2030, which opens the door to have it as part of plans to revitalize and redevelop the area when the Green Line is complete.
“We can take this building off the Green Line’s hands until 2030, get a good use in there, and then post-2030 have a thoughtful conversation about what comes next,” Carra said.
“Either this building continues to stand, or it gets amalgamated as an adaptive re-use into a larger building lot.”
According to Green Line officials, a structural assessment determined the building could be moved to a different location, but found it was too expensive of an undertaking.
Adam Noble-Johnson, a community relations lead with the Green Line, said officials have heard safety concerns from the community about the vacant building, but the project team is open to hearing proposals about its future.
But the building’s fate depends on the plans of the to-be-selected developer of the future LRT line.
“There’s been a noted interest in trying to find an interim use for the building, we don’t know what that’s going to look like, Green Line is open to that,” Noble-Johnson said.
“Ultimately, we don’t know what our eventual contractors plan is going to be for staging and construction.”
Noble-Johnson said the land where Ogden Block sits would be sold to a developer when the Green Line is complete with the hopes it becomes a “transit-oriented development” project.
He also noted that nobody has come forward to Green Line officials with interest in the building besides the residents trying to preserve the building.
“Regardless of what the outcome is, we’re committed to making sure that we’re honouring the history of that building and finding some way to commemorate it,” Noble-Johnson said.