This 19th century guy with 'unchecked arrogance' started the Calgary parks we know and love

Set up a microphone, ask Calgary residents about their favourite place in the city, and you'll likely hear about park after park.

That's what we heard when CBC Calgary and the Calgary Public Library recently set up an interactive exhibit on Calgary's neighbourhoods; the latest event in our ongoing partnership.

We thought we'd get a tour of the city. Instead, we got a tour of parks!

Nose Hill, Carburn Park, Prince's Island Park … pretty much any dog park. People shared memories of seeing the northern lights, riding bikes and even a spiritual connection. 

"The Bow River, the flowing of the river, is like meditation. I go there and sit near the river and find myself," said Calgary resident Inderjeet Kaur. 

The City of Calgary says it maintains about 8,500 hectares of parkland and natural areas.

So why does our city have so many gorgeous parks? 

We called up a couple of historians and here's what we discovered.

William Pearce and the early zeitgeist

Apparently William Pearce, a man of "unchecked arrogance" and a great vision, is the first person we have to thank for our parks.

Pearce, according to local historian John Gilpin, "had a singular ability to irritate just about everyone he came in contact with." 

Gilpin researched this local history for the 100th anniversary of the City of Calgary parks department in 2010. He dedicated several pages of the publication to Pearce, who in the 1880s was an inspector for the Dominion Land Agencies.

Pearce was a strong character in the right position at the right time. Even before he bought his own estate in Calgary, he was setting aside the land to save for parks. That includes what's now the bike path along the Bow River and Memorial Drive, the area where Shaw Millennium Park is now on the west side of downtown, and the three Bow River islands that include what's now the Calgary Zoo and Prince's Island Park.

He got those islands leased to the city to protect them from railroad development, and then kept needling the town council to spend the money, and to plant trees.

A year before he died in 1930, Pearce donated his own property at a big bend in the Bow, where today you'll find Pearce Estate Park.

Calgary would have a much more grey, concrete city without him. 

But of course, he wasn't alone. An idea was spreading across North America — the City Beautiful movement — that happened at the right time for small-town Calgary, says Josh Traptow, head of Heritage Calgary. 

Architects and reformers on the east coast of America were pushing back against overcrowded conditions, and here it was even easier to take action.

"We had so much land, right?" said Traptow. 

"Calgary was a prairie town. Finding native grasslands was a pretty easy thing at the time … and that whole beautification and grandeur of green spaces was a popular thing in the '10s and '20s."

Bowness Park comes from this era, when the town council promised to help a developer by building out the streetcar line in exchange for Bowness Island. And both Erza Riley and James Shouldice donated large tracts of land for the parks that now carry their names. 

That was the early legacy Calgary could build on for the tough time that followed as the world went to war.

Forging a path in dark days — William Reader

The hero in those dark times was a fellow with the same first name but more charisma than Pearce. It was William Reader.

The historian Gilpin says he'd love to write a biography just on Reader.

This guy started out as a simple gardener, working on private gardens for big names like the businessman Patrick Burns. Then he became secretary for the new Calgary Horticultural Society and finally took on a role as parks superintendent, a job he held during the First World War and then through the Great Depression.

Reader worked passionately at this job for nearly three decades. 

"He felt that both parks and recreation facilities would have a real strong impact on making a society healthier and better," said Gilpin.

"What he would do is, if there was a development and there was a small patch of leftover land, he would grab on to it and create it as a park. He basically was desperately trying to create parks in the '30s in the midst of an economic depression, when most people were thinking about other things."

You can still see his legacy in the idea of the pocket park, in the spacious parks for the inner suburb neighbourhoods like Killarney and Crescent Heights, in the first park skating rinks, the first city-owned golf course and the many playgrounds that citizens helped Reader add to what had been simple green spaces.

The city provided him a cottage just north of the Union Cemetery, and he used the property as a living laboratory to see what plants would grow best in Calgary's dry climate.

That home is now a cafe and beside it is the Reader Rock Garden, a Provincial Historic Resource. 

But of course, Calgary still had a lot of growing to do as a city.

The years of protest — Fish Creek and Nose Hill

It's actually impossible to capture the history of park development in Calgary with just a couple of names. 

After Reader, the next big park developments followed the Second World War, when Calgary's population was booming. The population almost tripled between 1950 and 1970. New suburbs opened quickly, and developers were closing in on several key pieces of land. 

But many residents worried about flooding and the loss of green space. In the south, politicians and planners talked for years about creating a park in Fish Creek but balked at the cost and kept postponing.

Finally Rosa Gorrill, a private citizen involved with her community association, stepped up to rally other community associations and start the back channel lobbying to get the job done. They convinced Peter Loughheed's provincial government to buy the land for a provincial park in 1973. 

At the same time, there was a major fight in the north end. Nose Hill's proximity to the old airport and its location right under the flight path had protected it from development for decades; then the airport runways moved. 

Within a year, developers had their subdivision plans in front of council.

But Calgarians loved this big flat-topped hill already. It was a "public battle cry unlike anything the city had ever experienced," said Gilpin, to quote again from his history of Calgary parks.

The Calgary Field Naturalists' Society and 10 community associations banded together to save the area from development. Within three years, the city created a massive natural park with some of the most panoramic views of the city.

Terry Hawitt and the story of many

This is a story about one man. But it's actually a story about many because of all the hundreds of volunteers who followed him to create something unique to Calgary. 

Terry Hawitt was a geologist and a guy with determination.

"It takes people who don't just go with the flow, right? They're willing to do things differently, not take no for an answer.… Terry would never give up," said Sheila Taylor, who leads the Calgary Parks Foundation and knew Hawitt as a personal friend and mentor.

In the 1980s, Hawitt focused attention on one more patch of downtown proposed to be used for nothing but parking. It was at Centre Street and Fourth Avenue S.W., the site of the former James Short School.

He rallied local businesses and raised $750,000 to create Harmony Park instead, a small oasis of green with shade, flowers and benches in the heart of downtown. 

But that's not all. Through this process of fighting for a park, he and others found the inspiration to create an organization to help more people create parks in the future. 

That's the Calgary Parks Foundation. It was founded in 1985, and to date, it's helped Calgary residents and businesses raise more than $250 million for more than 100 park spaces across the city. 

"The idea was that everyday Calgarians could raise funds, organize and build parks and support places in their communities," said Taylor. "There is no other foundation in Canada that does what the Parks Foundation does. We are quite unique. We raise funds, we grant funds, create these places."

Hawitt died in 2021. A lookout dedicated to his memory is scheduled to open overlooking Sandy Beach in the Britannia neighbourhood of southwest Calgary in mid-July.

His legacy lives on, said Taylor.

"One thing that Terry liked to say to me was that if you have a good idea, people will always support it," she said. "And I can think of so many projects that started with just an idea that seemed pretty good."

Thanks for all the parks

So there you have it — a few big names, and a multitude of others stepping up for something they believed in.

That's who is behind all these parks across Calgary.

And that's who you can thank next time you realize your favourite Calgary hangout is a park.