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:
“Bias, point of view, fury—are they ... so dangerous and must they be ironed out of history, the hills flattened and the contours leveled? The professors talk ... about passion and point of view in history as a Calvinist talks about sin in the bedroom.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
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“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)