The Bay Building: The heyday of downtown shopping for four decades

Located on the north side of Jasper Avenue and filling the block between 102nd Street and 103rd Street, the Hudson’s Bay Company (The Bay) Building has been a huge part of downtown Edmonton since it opened in November 1939, just as the Great Depression was winding down and the Second World War was getting underway. It was an exciting day in the life of Edmonton, and people in droves flocked to it.

Helping people flock to this and other downtown shopping destinations were trolley buses. These so-called “trackless trolley coaches” replaced Edmonton’s aging streetcar system and had just begun servicing the city in September of 1939—a couple of months prior to the opening of The Bay. The first trolley line was along Jasper Avenue from 102nd Street to 95th Street and up 95th Street to 111th Avenue. 

From the start, the Bay Building was clearly something special. The Edmonton Historical Board calls it a rare surviving representative of local Moderne architecture “with a flat roof and streamlined facades mirroring the emerging age of technology.” 

Originally, it was a two-storey structure with a full basement and a small penthouse on the third floor. It was made of Manitoba Tyndall limestone, with black granite panels and glass block windows.

It also prominently featured six hand-carved historical figures that remain on the building to this day. 

Two are of The Bay’s coat of arms, one is the ship “Nonsuch,” the first vessel to carry The Bay’s employees to North America, while the other carvings depict a fur trader, a settler and the York boat. Noticeably absent are any representations of Métis and other Indigenous people, who played “significant roles in the success of the Hudson’s Bay Company and its acquisition of natural resources,” the Edmonton Historical Board notes.

In 1948, during the postwar economic boom, a full third floor was added to the building, including a multi-paned window on the southwest corner. Eleven years later, the building was expanded northward onto a space that was once The Bay’s livery stable, bringing the building to the size we know today. 

As David Johnston says, those decades were the heyday of downtown shopping: “In that period of time, the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, the downtown was where all the action was. You went downtown to the big department stores, The Bay, Eaton’s, Woodward’s…” 

But it didn’t last. As time went on, fewer people were shopping downtown, instead going to the suburban malls that were springing up. The Bay moved to Edmonton City Centre Mall in 1993, and two years later closed the Jasper Avenue store completely. The City of Edmonton had stepped in to protect the building in 1989, designating it a Municipal Historic Resource. 

The University of Alberta bought the building in 2005, something David Johnston calls an “amazing step” at that time: 

“They did a fantastic job with renovating it and preserving some of the historic components and there is a beautiful atrium space in there now. It’s really a wonderful space.” 

But Johnston says in the years since the university bought the building, a lot of questions still remained. 

“They struggled to keep street level tenants over the years. A TV station was in there for a while, and a radio station, the library was there temporarily… But it was getting quieter in the building, and I was starting to wonder where things were at. But obviously they had great plans for the space and they were working away behind the scenes and made this wonderful announcement, consolidating people into the building.”

In Johnston’s line of work, fighting to preserve Edmonton’s heritage, it’s often a struggle. 

“The worst thing that we can see for a designated building is it getting vacated and just sitting empty, forlorn. Especially a big building like this that has such massive frontage on key streets in the downtown, seeing them sit empty is disappointing and upsetting. From a heritage preservation point of view, we’re always trying, and it’s an uphill battle a lot of the time, to get people to appreciate the built heritage we have in this city…. This is one of those classic cases that, even if you don’t know the building, if that building burned down overnight and was a smoking hole in the ground tomorrow, you know people would be devastated to see it disappear.”

The 500 University of Alberta staff moving into Enterprise Square work in human resources, academic support, finance and communications. And Johnston is excited about the new energy this influx brings to a venerable building.

“Getting active uses in these buildings allows people to experience them… it’s an important aspect,” he says. “It’s not just the old timers experiencing the building, it’s getting younger, university-aged students in and out of this building and kind of saying, hey, what a cool space, this is a really interesting building…”