Dead Venues-Rev sign

Dead Venues – Fall Update

Places

As we progressed we became less concerned with the facts we’d originally envisioned as part of the project—the in-depth information about the specific details regarding the venues themselves—and shifted our focus to memories, which were fragmented, but also vivid and colourful.

Photo © City of Edmonton Planning

The Story of Sylvancroft

Places

Sylvia said that her parents chose the name Sylvancroft to mean “wooded piece of land, because the [two-acre] property was all covered with trees and the intention was to keep as much as possible in natural wild land.” That intention has survived 100 years, even as the neighbourhood and the city around it have changed dramatically.

Westmount Public School, date uncertain. Provincial Archives of Alberta, PA 1261/1.

Westmount School

Places

When Westmount School first opened, it sat all alone, surrounded by marshland. Getting to it could be an ordeal, especially in wet weather, and makeshift bridges were often made to traverse the mud and wet. Even the streetcars that ran down 124th Street had to contend with submerged tracks at times and fantailed water from their wheels.

This cairn was erected in 1990 in the St. Albert Municipal Cemetery to commemorate the 98 indigenous patients from the Charles Camsell Indian Hospital who were buried here between 1946 and 1966.

The Ghosts of Camsell

Places

The Charles Camsell Indian Hospital operated in Edmonton roughly between 1946 and 1967, when the existing building was torn down and replaced with a new provincially-run general hospital. After that facility was shut down in 1996 and remained vacant, the empty building got a reputation for being haunted.

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