City of Fragments: Part 5

    17. The Plaza Cinema was, at one time, the town’s only art house and revival cinema. Down on Kensington, just west of 10^th Street. At one time you could go down for a midnight showing of the 3D version of Jack Arnold’s The Creature From the Black Lagoon, or you could take in Linda Lovelace at another late night showing. The early evening belonged to Bogart or Hepburn or Wayne, or to films with subtitles to indicate their artistic pedigree. Seats were wonky, and the floor was suitably tacky from long years of use and abuse. From the walls stared Chaplin, Monroe, and Brando. The small intense hall belonged to the cinema until video and DVD changed the art and revival house repertoire, and ceded the task of championing the Hollywood that baby boomers grew up with to the specialist video outlet, Casablanca, way down there in the Marda Loop. Yes, we’ll always have the Plaza. We didn’t, but then came Bride and Prejudice and A Very Long Engagement and the World’s Best TV Commercials and the cinema returned – after a fashion. The serious cinema viewer can also turn to the old Uptown and the Globe, both on 8^th Avenue. But like the other arts, the cinema finds only a tenuous foothold in this city of glass and iron. Each year, for the past few years, Calgary has mounted a Film Festival, and each year since its inception it comes and goes with little or no fanfare.

    18.  Crowchild Trail, Shaganapi Trail, Sarcee Trail, Deerfoot Trail, Barlow Trail, Blackfoot Trail – these are names that evoke the land’s past and its first peoples. Somehow trails flattened with asphalt fittingly cements the relationship between the first peoples and those who came and blithely assumed they could appropriate this land for whatever exploitative reason they might have. I daresay few Calgarians now know to whom or to what these names refer to.

    19.  Stephen Avenue Mall and echoes of Texas. I was once in Waco, and I had the experience of taking the bus into the center of town at about 7:30 in the morning. Besides the driver, I was the only other person on the bus. At rush hour. I wondered where all the people were. The driver explained that some years ago a fire devastated down town Waco. As they were rebuilding the center of town, great shopping malls sprang up like mushrooms around the periphery of the city. And so once the center was ready for reoccupation, no one bothered to reoccupy; the center remained empty. The center, in other words, did not hold. The city built a pedestrian mall to encourage the people to return, but they refused. And so when I saw the beautiful Waco down town pedestrian mall, I saw automobiles swinging to avoid pots of flowers and sculptures of various kinds. Now Calgary is not Waco in that you will find packed buses and C-trains carrying employees to work down town each business day. But come 6 o’clock in the evening or Saturday and Sunday, and the people disappear, replaced by cars that occupy the Stephen Avenue Mall. Nothing could better signify the car’s hegemony in North America than pedestrian malls made for cars.

     20. Inglewood Bird Sanctuary offers the city dweller a little taste of nature, a path that circles through forest and wetlands where small creatures flit and a variety of birds fly and nest. Ducks and geese, Red Winged Blackbirds, the ubiquitous sparrow, perhaps even a chickadee or nuthatch. The watchful eye can catch a glimpse of nature’s beauty passing by on the airways or in the tall grasses or high tree limbs. Inglewood lies between the rail line and the Bow River, a small sanctuary for human families and their feathered friends. You can drive here in your automobile or take the more leisurely route along the bike path. This small area of protected wilderness serves to remind city folk that once upon a time nature was not confined between concrete barriers of one kind or another. While walking the paths here you might almost forget that this place, like every place, is not natural; it is a garden tended by the humans who continue to think that every city needs room for trees and animals, an untended variety of flora and fauna. The catch is that this patch of nature needs a sort of negative tending; it needs vigilant protecting from the very people it is meant to serve. Nature in the service of wellness. Humans watch over this heterotopic space as if it were some precious and delicate resource in danger of disappearing. And it is.

    21.  Memorial Park and the Green Room: I guess the Green Room is gone now, but some of its patrons no doubt continue to haunt Memorial Park, and I don’t mean the library. Yes, Calgary has its counter cultures, and not all of it lies beneath the Center Street Bridge or in deep night doorways on 8^th Avenue or in abandoned buildings or dank alleyways or dark parkades. The pride of Alberta is its wealth, its health, its fit-to-be-tied normalcy. No deviants allowed. No creeps and bums, thank you. We have a patrol to check the border and keep the rats from entering this place where the good life has found a place to rest. Within the heterotopic city lies another small heterotopia, the Memorial Park. That this park with its denizens of the dark should enfold the city’s oldest library seems somehow fitting. Books and assignations among the bushes. The simulated city has, at its center, the reality of the mind and body in all its variety. Now if only the Green Room would return, bringing with it the full force of a space opened by its very enclosure. A world in a grain of sand, as it were. True friendship is the opposition this city wants to eradicate. Without opposition life continues level and bland and unheeding and quiet and smooth and unruffled and white and clear and unstained. No need for bifocals here. No need for binoculars here. One day Memorial Park will go the way of the Green Room, and with each disappearance the city is the poorer.