At the center of West Ritchie is 81st Avenue (between 102nd and 100th Street), a commercial street that feels far removed from the routine bustle and three-to-four storey brick structures on neighbouring Whyte Avenue. At one end of the avenue is an empty lot (at the corner of 102nd Street), being transformed into a 4-story residential and retail structure of modern elegance. The transformation of the space represents an Edmonton that is welcoming more people and new homes into our oldest communities. On the other end (at the corner of 100th Street), on the north side of 81st Avenue, a German church tower soars up above the other objects in sight, providing a landmark speaking to the history of settlement in the area.
In the fragments of space between these two points, small shops with clean utilitarian facades harmoniously, but not intentionally, form what appears to be the main street from the American West in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Many of the local business owners who operate inside these square-topped, billboard-like buildings cater to the artistic and unconventional tastes of Edmontonians in the neighbourhood. The facades of their shops form a continuous line that once drew a neat path to the Strathcona Canadian Pacific Railway Station.
page 40 of the Strathcona Redevelopment Plan by the City of Edmonton.
As more and more families settled in West Ritchie, the social infrastructure necessary to bring people together to a common space had surfaced. In 1902, a block north of Immigration Hall, on 81st Avenue, the Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church was founded as a wood frame structure. It was replaced in 1914 by the red brick building seen today. Local businesses, run by and sometimes catering to German-speaking people, only strengthened this distinct social fabric.
People of West Ritchie
At the age of five (1894), Adolf Minchau travelled from Russia to south Edmonton with his uncle and aunt, August and Carolina. In the years that followed, Adolf assisted his relatives on the family farm, learned the millwright’s trade at John Walter’s sawmill, and became an apprentice to a local blacksmith. At twenty-two, Adolf opened his first blacksmith shop at 7711-99 Street in 1911 that soon was replaced with a new expanded facility built at 8108-101 Street in 1920.
