History
Old Strathcona was once a municipality separate from Edmonton, achieving town status in 1899 and city status in 1907. The City of Strathcona amalgamated with Edmonton in 1912. A large part of the popularity of Whyte Avenue is due to the historical character of its buildings, many of which are one hundred years old. The oldest building is the Strathcona Hotel, built by the railway when it arrived in 1891. Early construction used mostly wood, but this changed in 1902 when the Town of Strathcona passed a bylaw requiring the building of brick buildings in the downtown core to prevent the outbreak of a major fire. Much of the current brick buildings were erected during the 1910–1912 boom that brought thousands of settlers to the Edmonton area from eastern Canada, Britain and continental Europe, U.S. and other parts of the world. Whyte Avenue in the early 1890s was dominated by primitive shack homes and quickly-built pioneer stores, some so primitive, they were built of logs. Within a few years these early structures were replaced by more substantial woodframe two-storey buildings or, in the case of the Ross Block, by a brick building even before the town's anti-fire bylaw.
In 2005, Edmonton City Council sent a letter to the Province of Alberta requesting heritage status for the area, and the new status of Provincial Heritage Area in 2007.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“... the history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)