The +15: How Calgary Built a Second City Fifteen Feet Up

The +15 tour walks eight stops, and about halfway through it does something no other Calgary tour does: it takes you off the sidewalk and up a level. The stops read as a straight line on the map, but on the ground they alternate between two cities stacked on top of each other. The lower one is Stephen Avenue and the streets around it. The upper one is the skywalk network, and understanding why it exists is the whole point of the walk.

Why a city builds itself a second storey

Calgary winters are long, and for a long stretch of the year the downtown wind chill makes an ordinary walk to lunch genuinely unpleasant. The +15 was the answer. Opened in 1970, it is a network of enclosed, climate-controlled pedestrian bridges roughly fifteen feet above street level, which is where the name comes from. It grew into the most extensive pedestrian skywalk system in the world, linking around 130 buildings across 86 bridges as of 2022.

The system was conceived by an architect named Harold Hanen, who worked in the Calgary Planning Department in the late 1960s and won a 1970 Vincent Massey Award for the idea. The city gave developers a bonus for connecting their buildings into it, and over the following decades the network spread across the core almost building by building.

What it did to the street

Here is the part the tour lingers on. Moving downtown foot traffic into a warm, dry upper level did not just add a convenience. It subtracted something from the street. On a cold weekday, a large share of the people who work downtown never touch the sidewalk. They arrive by car or transit, ride an escalator up, and cross the entire core through the +15 without going outside. The street below empties. The ground-floor retail that survives is the retail that either serves the sidewalk directly or has an entrance into the network above.

That is why the tour deliberately spends time on Stephen Avenue, the pedestrian mall that kept its life at ground level, and on the Calgary Tower and Olympic Plaza, which anchor the walk to the outdoor city. The +15 is not the enemy of the street so much as its competitor, and Calgary is one of the few cities in the world where you can stand on a corner and see, physically, where its downtown chose to live.

The vertical landmarks

The walk is bracketed by two buildings that make the upward pull literal. The Calgary Tower opened in 1968 as the Husky Tower, the city's first great move upward and, at the time, the tallest structure in Canada outside Toronto. Twenty years later it wore the cauldron for the 1988 Winter Olympics. And The Bow, the 236-metre Foster + Partners crescent completed in 2012, is both the tallest anchor of the +15 network and the reason to look up. On its plaza stands Wonderland, Jaume Plensa's twelve-metre wire-mesh head you can walk inside, the tour's most photographed stop and a good place to understand what a boom-era plaza wanted to say about itself.

How this fits the rest of Calgary

The +15 is the clearest single expression of a bigger pattern. Calgary keeps rebuilding itself on the oil price and keeps leaving the evidence in the built environment. The skywalk is the winter chapter of that story; the Balance Sheet Skyline tour reads the boom-and-bust chapter off the towers themselves. For the full narrative angle, see Calgary: the city the oil price built and rebuilt.

The tour runs about 66 minutes over 2.6 km with eight stops, the shortest of Calgary's five routes, and the first roughly 30% is free to preview. To compare it against the others, see the best self-guided walking tours in Calgary.