Peace Bridge and Kensington: The Bridge Calgary Argued About

4.28·8 Stops·96 minutes·4.9 km

How Calgary spent twenty-four and a half million dollars on a red Calatrava footbridge it never let anyone bid against, argued over for years, then quietly fell for, and what crossing it reveals about a city split between oil towers and a walkable, remembering north bank.

Start · Prince's Island Park

Directions

Stops

1
Prince's Island Park
The establishing shot: an island in the Bow with the office towers behind you and the red bridge downstream, standing on the seam between two Calgarys.
2
The Peace Bridge
The protagonist: a red-and-white Calatrava helix over the Bow, the single-sourced design, the overruns, the late opening, and the rule change afterward.
3
Sunnyside: The North Bank
The far bank, the counter-downtown: a walk-and-transit neighbourhood served by the C-Train since 1987, and the community the Bow flooded in June 2013.
4
Kensington Main Street (10 St NW / Kensington Rd)
The walkable heart: low-rise, independent, deliberately everything the tower-canyon downtown is not, and the kind of place Calgary keeps saying it wants more of.
5
Riley Park
Old Calgary's green room: former Riley ranch land given to the city in 1910, with a wading pool since 1913 and cricket pitches since 1919, the settled city before the towers.
6
Poppy Plaza
The quiet counter-argument: a weathering-steel plaza of backlit water-jet-cut quotes, designed by the local Marc Boutin Architectural Collaborative, proof the city can design its own landmarks.
7
Calgary Soldiers' Memorial & the 1922 Trees
The oldest design statement on this bank: stone tablets naming roughly 3,000 fallen soldiers, and the 3,278 poplars planted from 1922, one for every local man lost in the Great War.
8
Bow River Pathway: The Pull-Back
The closing frame: the red bridge and the glass skyline in a single shot, resolving the thesis that the argument was never really about the money.

Details

Best Time to Visit

Late spring through early autumn, from mid-morning to golden hour. The Peace Bridge and the Bow River pathway are open at all hours, but this tour is written for daylight, when you can read the red steel against the glass skyline and see the memorial poplars along Memorial Drive. Weekday mornings are quietest on the bridge itself. Kensington comes alive in the late afternoon and on Saturdays, so if the shops and patios are part of what you want, aim the back half of the walk at early evening. Avoid the tour during high water in June, when the Bow can run fast and the lowest riverside pathways occasionally close.

Pro Tips

•The Peace Bridge deck is shared by pedestrians and cyclists, with a painted line down the middle. Stop two starts at the mouth of the bridge, not on the deck. Step to the side to listen so you are not standing in the bike lane.
•Prince's Island Park is reached by its own small footbridges from the south bank near Eau Claire. Stop one is written from the island looking downstream toward the red bridge, so walk to the river's edge before you begin.
•The whole route is flat and paved, easy going, but it is just under five kilometres out and back, so wear comfortable shoes and bring water.
•Poppy Plaza reads most powerfully after dark, when the water-jet-cut quotes are backlit through the rusting steel. If you can, time stop six for dusk, or return to it in the evening after finishing the walk.
•Memorial Drive is a busy road. The Soldiers' Memorial and the poplars at stop seven are best appreciated from the riverside, not the traffic side. Stay on the river side of the road.
•Kensington rewards a detour. The audio anchors on the corner of tenth Street Northwest and Kensington Road, but the independent shops and cafes run for several blocks in each direction if you want to linger before Riley Park.

Safety & Precautions

•The Peace Bridge and the Bow River pathway are shared with cyclists, who move quickly. Keep right, listen for bells, and do not stop in the middle of the deck or the path.
•During spring runoff and after heavy rain, the Bow can run high and fast, and the lowest sections of the riverside pathway occasionally flood or close. Check conditions before walking the water's edge in June.
•Memorial Drive carries fast traffic. Cross only at marked crossings and signals, and keep children close along the road-side stops.
•Calgary weather turns quickly in any season. Bring a layer and water, and note that much of the riverside route is open and exposed, with little shade outside the memorial poplars.

Read our safety guide

Travel advisory: Exercise Normal Precautions (Level 1).

U.S. Department of State

Gallery

Kensington Main Street (10 St NW / Kensington Rd)

Calgary Soldiers' Memorial & the 1922 Trees

Read the walk

The full story of Peace Bridge and Kensington: The Bridge Calgary Argued About, in words. Prefer to listen? Play it narrated, from home or on location.

Introduction

Somewhere across this river is a red steel tube that cost Calgary twenty-four and a half million dollars, opened five hundred days late, and was handed to a Spanish architect nobody here got to compete against. For a few years, it was the thing this city argued about at the dinner table. Today about nine thousand people a day walk through it without a second thought. By the far end you will understand why a prairie oil town spent starchitect money on a footbridge, and what it was quietly trying to buy.

The bridge is a Santiago Calatrava design, his only one in Canada. A red-and-white double helix, one hundred and thirty metres of glass and steel slung low across the Bow. The fight was real and specific. The design was single-sourced. Local architects never got to bid. It came in late and over budget. Afterward, city council changed its own rules to stop sole-sourcing designs like this again.

But the argument was never only about money. Cross this bridge and you cross between two versions of Calgary. On the south bank, the oil-and-office towers that pay for almost everything. On the north bank, a low-rise, walkable, remembering city of cafes and old parks. The bridge is the seam. Over eight stops and just under five kilometres, roughly ninety-six minutes of walking, we go out over the water and back. When you reach Prince's Island, begin with stop one.

1. Prince's Island Park
Welcome to Prince's Island Park, stop one, and your establishing shot. You are standing on an island in the middle of the Bow River, just north of downtown. Turn and look back south. Those glass-and-steel towers are the office core, the oil-and-gas headquarters that pay for a large share of this city. Now look the other way, downstream to the east, and find a low red arc across the water. That is where we are going. Hold both of those in one frame, because the whole tour lives in the space between them.
This island has a name and a small piece of history worth knowing. It is called Prince's Island, after Peter Anthony Prince, the man who ran the Eau Claire Lumber Mill here in the late eighteen hundreds. The mill cut the timber that built early Calgary, and this river is the river that floated the logs down to it. The island itself, all forty-nine and a half acres of it, was donated to the city by the Prince family in nineteen forty-seven. It has been the downtown's green front lawn ever since.
So this is the seam. On the south bank, a prairie city that decided to become a vertical one, a downtown of mirror-glass and corporate money. On the north bank, the older, lower, slower Calgary we will walk through in the second half of this tour. The river runs between them, and for most of the city's life there was no graceful way to cross it right here on foot. That is the problem the red bridge was built to solve, and the fight it started is the reason we are standing here. Walk east along the water now, toward the red arc. Stop when you reach its mouth.
2. The Peace Bridge
You have arrived at the mouth of the Peace Bridge. Stand for a second before you step on. Look straight down the tube. A red-and-white lattice spirals away from you, a double helix of steel wrapped around a glass roof, one hundred and thirty metres of it laid low and flat across the Bow. Eight hundred and fifty tonnes of steel. It is the only bridge Santiago Calatrava has ever built in Canada, and it is a strange one even for him. Calatrava is famous for soaring white structures. Here he went red and white, a nod to the flag of Canada and the flag of Calgary both.
Now the numbers, because the numbers are the story. The bridge opened on the twenty-fourth of March, two thousand and twelve, about five hundred days later than promised. It was supposed to be finished in the fall of two thousand and ten. The final cost came in at twenty-four and a half million dollars, up from a projected eighteen. And here is the part that made people furious. The design was single-sourced. The city handed it straight to Calatrava. No competition, no local architects invited to pitch, no Calgary firm given a chance to bid. Some aldermen tried to kill the deal outright. They lost.
Be precise about what was and was not a no-bid deal, because Calgary was. The design went to Calatrava alone. The construction was a separate thing. It went to Graham Construction on a fixed-price contract, and when the builder later came back asking for more money to cover the overruns, the city refused. Alderman Druh Farrell, the councillor most tied to this bridge, was on the record that a fixed price was a fixed price. Afterward, council changed its own rules to stop sole-sourcing designs like this in the future. They defended the choice and outlawed repeating it in the same breath. Now walk through. Take your time. Meet me on the far bank.
3. Sunnyside: The North Bank
You are across. This is Sunnyside, the north bank, and you have just changed cities without leaving one. Turn and look back at where you came from. From here the towers are a wall on the far shore, and the red bridge is the only soft thing in the picture. You are now standing in a neighbourhood of houses, low apartments, corner cafes, and a light-rail station. This is the counter-downtown, and it is the other half of the argument the bridge started.
Sunnyside is an inner-city community pressed right up against the river, directly across from the office core. It is part of the Kensington business district, and it became a genuine walk-and-transit neighbourhood in nineteen eighty-seven, when the C-Train light-rail station opened a block from here. That station is why people can live on this bank without a car and still be downtown in minutes. It is the quiet machinery under the whole idea of a walkable Calgary.
The river that gives this place its front-row view can also turn on it. In June of two thousand and thirteen, the Bow flooded, hard. Sunnyside sat right in the path of it, and the entire community was evacuated for days while the water pushed up through the streets and the storm sewers. The bridge you just crossed stood through it, red and dry above a brown, swollen river. People here remember that flood the way other cities remember a blizzard. It is part of what it means to live this close to the water.
This is the Calgary that does not show up on the postcard of the skyline. Low, lived-in, walkable, occasionally flooded, and completely at ease with itself. Walk north and west now, up toward the shops. We are heading for the main street of Kensington.
4. Kensington Main Street (10 St NW / Kensington Rd)
You have reached the heart of Kensington, around the corner of tenth Street Northwest and Kensington Road. Stop and read the street. Two, three storeys tall, mostly. Independent coffee shops, restaurants that are not chains, bookstores, boutiques, patios that spill onto the…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.
5. Riley Park
You have arrived at Riley Park, old Calgary's green room. If Kensington is the walkable present, this is the settled past it grew out of. Find a spot on the grass and look around. Big trees, open lawns, a wading pool, and, if the season is right, the improbable sight of a…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.
6. Poppy Plaza
You have arrived at Poppy Plaza, on Memorial Drive where it meets tenth Street Northwest. Slow down here. This is a quieter stop, and it wants a quieter voice. In front of you is a plaza of rusted steel and wood, roughly eighty-six thousand square feet of it, terraced down…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.
7. Calgary Soldiers' Memorial & the 1922 Trees
You have arrived at the Calgary Soldiers' Memorial, at twelve-oh-nine Memorial Drive. Stone tablets here carry the names of roughly three thousand soldiers from Calgary-area regiments who did not come home. It was unveiled on the ninth of April, two thousand and eleven, a date…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.
8. Bow River Pathway: The Pull-Back
You have arrived at the last stop, back down on the Bow River pathway. This is the pull-back, the closing frame, so stand where you can see the water and turn until you have the whole picture in one look. The red bridge, low over the river. The glass towers of downtown rising…
Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

Listen to this walk

Peace Bridge and Kensington: The Bridge Calgary Argued About

Stops