The Balance Sheet Skyline

Best Time to Visit

Weekdays, late morning through early afternoon. The thesis of this walk depends on reading the towers as working office buildings, and Stephen Avenue at lunchtime is where the downtown vacancy rate becomes visible as footfall on the street. Weekends empty the office core almost entirely, which flattens the contrast between the glass towers above and the sandstone street below. Walk in daylight so the completion dates, the setbacks, and the crowns are all legible, and so the glass reads as glass rather than as a dark wall. The Beltline end of the route, Seventeenth Avenue, is liveliest in the late afternoon and evening if you want to end on the counter-economy at full tilt.

Pro Tips

• •The route runs north to south, from The Bow down to Seventeenth Avenue, and the towers get shorter as you go. Read the height as a timeline in reverse: the tallest and newest bets are at the start, the pre-oil sandstone city is in the middle, and the diversified street economy is at the end.
• •Stephen Avenue at Stop 5 is a pedestrian mall, open to vehicles only between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. Walk it during the day and you have the street to yourself, which is exactly when the lunchtime footfall reading works.
• •The clearest single view of the lag is at Stop 3, Brookfield Place East. Stand back far enough to see both it and The Bow behind you. The two tallest towers in the city both broke ground on optimism and both opened into layoffs.
• •Downtown Calgary's Plus 15 skywalk network connects most of the towers on this route above street level. If the weather turns, you can read the same buildings from the enclosed walkways, though the completion dates and crowns are clearest from the sidewalk.
• •The oil price is the only economic number you need to carry. Everything else on the walk, the height, the floors, the completion date, the vacancy rate, is a reading off that one instrument.