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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“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)