Calgary’s downtown has the world’s longest network of elevated hallways and bridge connecting buildings. Beginning in the 1960s, it’s grown to around 16 km (nearly 10 miles) of designated path and enclosed bridges over city streets.
Imagine a second city, built 15 feet above the ground, entirely climate controlled year round. It has benches, tables, chairs, restaurants, shops, and the occasional green plant or water feature.
The Plus 15 was the subject of a year 2000 film by Canadian filmmaker Gary Burns. Called waydowntown, it’s about a group of office workers who make a bet on who can go the longest without setting foot outside, since the Plus 15 makes this somewhat possible.
24 years later, the network has evolved: grown in length, and almost certainly changed in character, especially post-covid. The office vacancy rate hovers around 20%, and the city has put a lot of money into office-to-residential conversion (this is extremely challenging, especially with skyscrapers built in the late 20th century, like almost all of Calgary’s). Here is an excellent video on why it’s such a difficult task.
Since I’m chronically online, I browse reddit a lot, and found this post about the possibility of a run through the Plus 15. It would be great fun for the novelty, but it was pointed out that the nature of the network–where each building is privately owned, while the bridges are public, and the hallways are public easements–would make it an absolute nightmare to organize.
My biggest question, though, was… how scenic would a tour through the Plus 15 be? Would it be full of unexpected surprises? Would it be a level of nothingness to rival the Worst Hike in the World? I needed to find out.
I managed to convince my friend Luke and [other] Jon (who, in turn, convinced his brother Chris) to take a little walk with me. It would be simple: every single path and bridge in the Plus 15.
At 11am on December 20th, we set out from Calgary City Hall. It would be a largely rambling walk, more exploratory than record-setting.1
We head off going north, crossing a bridge over 7th Avenue and the C-train tracks. The trains run on the street in a dedicated transit street.2 We’re then greeted by a sign that says “No video or recording”, which is surprising, because it’s nothing more than a bland corridor and dusty empty display cases. Luke tells me that the building used to be the booking facility for the police, where people who were arrested were “perp-walked”. So the sign makes a little more sense.
Taking the little spur into Bow Valley College’s campus, it dead ends, we snap a pic, and backtrack to head westward. The Castell building, the former Central Library, houses a surreal and eerie hallway. The deserted route is enclosed on both sides, with only frosted windows that face into the building (currently occupied by the University of Calgary’s architecture school). The few bright colourful splotches on the wall do nothing to distract from the generally depressing vibe.
The term “liminal space” is very popular today, at least in my circles. Wikipedia calls them “[…] empty or abandoned places that appear eerie, forlorn, and often surreal. Liminal spaces are commonly places of transition […]”. We’d quickly find that the Plus 15 was full of these liminal spaces, even on a workday. Many of these places we saw today were perfectly forgettable.
We cross a bridge, then go inside, then outside, then inside, then cross a bridge. Other than some memories from Luke and Jon, there’s truly nothing going on: no one in sight, and only a locked door to a sad-looking rooftop patio.
Here, we have to go outside to continue onward. We leave the Andrew Davison Building (at one time, the main cop shop, and today, suspiciously devoid of signs or signs of dilapidation), and cross the street to get to the park where there’s an open-air bridge where we can continue on.
There’s a big sculpture in the park, usually called the Family of Man, of a bunch of giant naked people holding hands or whatever. It sits in front of the derelict education centre, once home to the public school board. Strangely, the Calgary Board of Education (CBE) still uses the statue as their symbol, and even more strangely, the fun story of the statues is almost completely forgotten. Here’s a link to a CBC story on it; basically it was made by Spanish sculptor Mario Armengol for a “Britain and the World” exhibit at Expo ’67 in Montreal, then bought by a mysterious businessman, donated to the city for the tax write-off, and then assembled in front of the education centre based on best guesses, where the anatomical correctness caused a stir. Finally the CBE adopted it as their logo, before abandoning the area for a new building south of downtown in 2010, leaving the building vacant for the last 14 years. But the statues are still here.
We duck into a hotel to continue onward to the Harry Hays Building, the home of the federal government in Calgary. It’s a rather unassuming, fairly low building, off to the side of downtown near Chinatown instead of being close to the oil company headquarters or the halls of civic or provincial power. Other than getting passports renewed, there’s really not much there for the average person. Hitting the end of the line, we turn back.
Next is the “First” building, formerly the Telus building, and before that, the AGT (Alberta Government Telephones) building. Stripped of all its neon signs today, I remember it best for Christmas lights that are turned at night: cartoony trees and a flickering candle. Today it appears to be less desirable space, and it’s fairly quiet.
The next three hours are a blur of extremely uninteresting hallways, repeating cafes and restaurants, and a variety of holiday displays. We have entered the downtown core: where all the money from the oil pumped up north ends up. The ambience is best compared to that of an airport: you have plenty of windows, but are cut off from the outside world. Uniformed security guards are everywhere, so you don’t need to watch your possessions too closely. The climate is completely controlled, and the environment is immaculately clean.
I start taking pictures of wet floor signs and variations of the flooring3 to keep from going crazy. We pass by several repeats of local and international chain restaurants. Similarly, the lunchtime crowd I see in the hallways seem to merge together into a mass of humanity. I poke Jon whenever I see someone wearing a fun sweater, because a deviation from the norm is really that noticeable. Everyone around us dressed in business casual or similar: High heels abound and button downs, blazers, and brogues are the norm.
On second thought, an airport is more interesting because of the wider cross-section of humanity you see: there are far more families and seniors, and people passing through from all over the world. Sure, it’s a school day, and it’s fairly cold and icy outside (fairly few residential buildings are connected to the Plus 15, and Bow Valley College students don’t seem to venture far in the network), but people-watching is much more fun at the airport because of the sheer variety. Here, it feels like a repeating loop. Not boring per se, but something that takes far more effort to see beauty in.
We stop for lunch, and jokingly ponder when the impeccably dressed security guards dressed in blazers will ask us to leave. It may be casual Friday, but I came ready for a warm weather hike: jean shorts, t-shirt, bucket hat, hiking boots, and stick out pretty obviously.
Also noticeable is the abundance of small, family-run, non-chain Asian restaurants in the +15, and their unusual opening hours: one is only open Mon-Fri, 10-3. They are entirely reliant on the work lunch crowd, and must have been hit hard during the pandemic when many offices worked from home. I think about how remarkable it is that I am seeing these restaurants for the first time–I used to work on the east end of Downtown, and usually walked outside on the city streets.
Highlights here include a low door to a parking garage (“parkade” in Calgary parlance), and a helpful guy wearing a jacket saying “information technology” down the sleeve telling us that it was dead beyond this hallway. He was right. The west part of downtown feels moribund, with empty storefronts everywhere. The foot traffic drops off to almost nothing.
Amec Place might be a rare bright spot, for how sheerly anachronistic it feels. There’s a lobby with a kind of glossed up tile you don’t really see anymore, and planters and a fountain break it up. So far, we’ve seen a few green walls, but they turn out to be illusory: real plants, but preserved and not living.
Part 2 coming soon!
- I thought about doing some planning to find the optimal route, since the problem very much resembles a classic problem for computer scientists: the Chinese postman problem (named in honour of, but not using the name of, the Chinese mathematician Meigu Guan), which, is solvable rather simply with a few caveats. I’ll add a post about my attempt to find an optimal route using the R programming language. ↩︎
- the talk of the town is currently the proposed Green Line, which is hard to see in any other way than the provincial government holding the city hostage, but that’s for another day… ↩︎
- It’s mostly tile, with some carpet. I don’t recall any terrazzo. ↩︎
Leave a Reply