The people who live in Cloverdale share the neighbourhood with one of the oldest ski clubs in Canada, the glass pyramids of the Muttart Conservatory, the world-renowned Edmonton Folk Music Festival and thousands of other Edmontonians drawn to the heart of the city’s vast network of recreational trails and river valley parks that connect one end of Edmonton to the other.
Looking west from Riverdale. Cloverdale to the left with Pete Anderson’s brickyard stacks showing in 1905. (Image courtesy of Glenbow Library and Archives, Libraries and Cultural Resources Digital Collections, University of Calgary, NA-4140-86)
Anderson’s brickyard in Gallagher Flats, 1908. (Image courtesy of City of Edmonton Archives, EA-500-193)
Cloverdale in December 1933. (Image courtesy of City of Edmonton Archives, EA-160-3147)
City of Edmonton steamer near Cloverdale, 1915. (Image courtesy of City of Edmonton Archives, EA-10-1369)
Gallagher Flats (Cloverdale) during a river flood, date unknown. (Image courtesy of City of Edmonton Archives, EA-25-6)
The upstairs of this home in Gallagher Flats was used as an additional classroom when the neighbourhood’s Bennett School was under construction, 1912. (Image courtesy of City of Edmonton Archives, EA-281-1)
Children playing football on Cloverdale Community League grounds, April 1950. (Image courtesy of City of Edmonton Archives, EA-600-4135a)
Cloverdale in 1989. (Image courtesy of City of Edmonton Archives, EA-819-159)
“Cloverdale. An intimate residential neighbourhood surrounded by parkland and naturally bounded by the river and an undulating semi-circular grassy ridge.” This is how local historian Ken Tingley described today’s Cloverdale in his book “Heart of the City: A History of Cloverdale from Gallagher Flats to Village in the park.”
But Tingley says the neighbourhood was not alway like that.
“The flats were poorer…, working class districts,” says Tingley. “When I did my research for my book on Cloverdale, I found disturbing stories about the people who lived there, the conditions under which they lived. Kids played in the river. Every year, one or two would get swept away and drowned. They took their water right out of the river, which was polluted from the industry.”
At the beginning of the 20th century, Gallagher Flats (the area that is now Cloverdale) was filled with industrial, commercial and agricultural activity: there was a brickyard, meat packing plants, a dairy and lumber mills. Then, the area got devastated by flood in 1915. It became a tough, working-class residential district with a dump and an incinerator. Finally, Cloverdale transformed again to what it is today: an upscale community filled with custom homes and luxury condominiums.
There were name changes, but Tingley says that didn’t change the reality: “Walter Flats, Gallagher Flats as it was called, Cloverdale later, Riverdale… They changed these names because ‘the flats’ suggested dirt and industry and pollution.”
A thread that connects Gallagher Flats of the early 20th century with today’s Cloverdale was a transportation network that used electricity from overhead wires, and rails.
Tingley hearkens back to the beginning of Edmonton’s streetcar system in 1908.
“The original plan was to provide cheap access…” he says, “…the first fares were a nickel… for working men who could live in other places or in flats and… have a way to get to work. So the early routes went through those districts.”
With Edmonton’s streetcar system disappearing in 1951 and the new Valley Line LRT system ready to launch, Tingley feels a reverberation.
“What is interesting to me is that there is a linear line of history going on, advancements and progress,” he says. “There is also a cyclical one. we’re sort of back where we were. We had trolleys until 1951 with overhead wires. Then we went to all gas bus fleets. Now we’re right back to the same thing. We have the LRT, which is electrically motivated from above and runs on rails. It’s very similar.”
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