2024 Heritage Calgary Awards

Winner of the 2024 Heritage Calgary Award,
Advocacy & Volunteerism:
Crescent Heights Community Association

The Crescent Heights Community is located just north of the Bow River between Edmonton Trail and Centre Street North. The community is home to the largest concentration of heritage homes north of the Bow River. It is also home to a significant tree canopy with many trees, like the homes, nearing 100 years in age.

In response to ongoing redevelopment and the loss of both older homes and trees, the Crescent Heights Community Association set out to help the City of Calgary design Heritage Guidelines to help prevent further loss of these assets.

A big part of this project was to engage residents in the understanding of the community’s history. The Crescent Heights Community Association created lawn signs about the Heritage Guidelines, hosted a Jane’s Walk through the neighbourhood to discuss the community’s heritage and homes and hosted an event where 400 people turned out to learn more and see 100 paintings of local heritage homes painted by an artist and community resident.

Heritage Calgary sat down with Dan Evans from the Heritage Subcommittee of the Crescent Heights Community Association to learn more about the initiative and its success.

Can you describe the main goal of your initiative and the inspiration behind it?

The real goal for the Crescent Heights Community Association Heritage Committee's work is really around making sure that people both acknowledge and appreciate the heritage character of Crescent Heights. So we do that through education, making sure that people understand what we mean by heritage, what the assets are in the community and the different ways in which the character can be preserved.

We also do that through engagement, whether that's engaging politicians in conversations around what tools can be put in place from a planning point of view to help preserve heritage or whether it's engaging the community at events where we explain what the heritage guideline areas are. It could also be putting up lawn signs, there are lots of ways of making sure that people really understand what's going on.

What makes this project or site particularly significant to the local community and its history?

I think one of the reasons why this is so important to the local community here in Crescent Heights is we feel like we walk around every day and realize the rich heritage that exists here in the community. We worry that not everybody sees that so clearly and not everybody appreciates how important that is to the character of Crescent Heights and the overall environment in Calgary.

We understand, as a community, that without action now, we're just going to wake up in 25 years and it's going to be too late. You can’t recreate history, and if you try, it just won't turn out the same. Without a small group of people just trying to do something, then what happens is heritage accidentally disappears and that's really what we're trying to avoid here.

How has this initiative helped engage the public or specific groups, such as youth or residents, in the project?

Our focus was really on residents of Crescent Heights, but also on developers and politicians. So from a resident's point of view, we're very fortunate that Crescent Heights is quite an engaged community to begin with. We have a very active community association. We do events on a regular basis that are well attended.

So really communicating what we were doing became fairly easy. I think that part of what surprised us about this initiative is how interested people actually were. We thought that, from a resident's point of view, it was going to be a bit of a heavy lift to get people to care about heritage, but it actually wasn't at al

And then I think we got really lucky with the work that Jackie (the artist) had been doing on her own to document all the heritage homes in Crescent Heights. So people were naturally really curious about what a hundred paintings of heritage homes would look like. And then we took advantage of things like Jane's Walks, which also already has a bit of a following. So what we tried to do is really take advantage of things that were already happening and put a little bit of a heritage spin on it.

What challenges or considerations did you face in preserving or promoting local heritage through this initiative?

I think that the biggest challenge that we faced was the fact that for as many people that care about heritage preservation, there's a group of equal size that have just never thought about it before. A lot of those people are developers who are looking to build in the community. So we do our best to try and educate them about the heritage guidelines and also provide them information about how they can align with what the intent of the guidelines are.

So I think that although we've got everybody nodding that yes, heritage is important, sometimes in the execution as we manage development of the community, it creates challenges.

Why is it important for people to understand and appreciate the history and heritage of this particular area?

I think that quite often heritage and the historical evolution of a community is around us and we take it for granted. And so I think that by simply asking people to look up in our busy world and in a world, where we're all staring down at our phones, to look around and appreciate the heritage that we have and the character of our community, awakens something in people and they start to appreciate what they really have.

When you look at other like major historic centres like Quebec or New York we seem pretty young and pretty undeveloped. That's not even looking, you know, over at places like Europe. So I think that it's tough to appreciate that something 100 years old is still a super important part of your history.

Looking forward, how do you see this project continuing or evolving in the future to engage more people or further preserve local heritage?

I think that we are very pleased with the momentum that we have right now. There's a lot of things that we've been doing, which have gotten some traction that we want to keep doing. So, for instance, as people move to the community we communicate with the realtor and make sure that they understand it's a heritage guideline area and what the restrictions are around building.

People coming into the community then understand that and presumably the people who are investing in the community and buying homes appreciate that part of the community. We intend to continue to do events like we've been doing, whether that's helping people understand the heritage guideline areas or the process around heritage designation and general celebrations of heritage. I think the event was such a success last year. We're looking at doing something similar again next year.

The Heritage Calgary Awards celebrate the diverse heritage of our shared home. Every second year we honour those who have made efforts to identify, preserve, and promote heritage in Calgary to help enrich our communities.