The Quarters brings new life to the eastern part of downtown

Well, officially it is a 40-hectare area that extends from 97th Street to 92nd Street, and from 103A Avenue to the top of the North Saskatchewan River Valley. For a long time, it was a bit of a sore spot, with lots of old, vacant, decaying buildings and vacant lots. But now it is the site of spanking new developments like The Hat at Five Corners, a 25-floor apartment tower on 95th Street, and the Quarter Note Hotel, a dazzling mirrored glass building on Jasper Avenue. And a lot more are in the works. The Quarters currently has about 2,400 residents, but the City expects it to ultimately have many more, between 18 and 20 thousand. 

The Quarters gets its name from the four areas that make it up: the Civic Quarter, Heritage Quarter, McCauley Quarter and Five Corners Quarter. Those quarters are centred around the Armature, a pedestrian-focused corridor that runs along 96th Street from Jasper Avenue to 103A Avenue.  

The Quarters has deep historical roots and a diverse population, including Chinese-Canadian residents and businesses. 

Edmonton’s original Chinatown emerged about 150 years ago in the area around Jasper Avenue and 97 Street. 

Sandy Pon is a longtime Edmonton realtor who is also a longtime advocate for the Chinatown community. She says the first Chinese immigrant men largely worked in jobs connected to all the coal mining happening then in Edmonton and also in places like laundries and restaurants. Later, their wives and families joined them.

“Most of the immigrant workers were concentrated in the cheaper side of town, which is this side of 97th Street,” says Pon. “And back then, people would have little boarding houses, rooming houses. Four generations ago– those were the founders of the Chinatown community. It’s phenomenal what they went through.”

Chinatown went through constant changes. The construction of Canada Place and surrounding new development in the 1970s onwards triggered the movement of Chinatown’s cultural and residential institutions to 102 Avenue, between 95th and 97th Streets. 

And Pon says there were other changes too.

“Chinatown the last twenty years has been fading in North America, and other countries too. Because of the economic growth of a municipality. A lot of Chinatown areas tend to become the most expensive places later on. [They are] always right next to downtown or they are close to a waterfront… When the downtown expands, the next area to cut out is […] the poorest, cheapest area. Expropriate, buy it, whatever you need… Gradually you will see a lot of issues or problems where people will just say it’s time to leave.”

Chinatown’s cultural and residential institutions being now centred on 102nd Avenue naturally created tensions with the Valley Line LRT being built on the avenue—notably with the removal of the Harbin Gate in 2017. Three decades earlier, this gate was given to the city by Edmonton’s twin city of Harbin and it came to have a huge importance to the Chinatown community. Now the gate sits in storage awaiting a new home.

The younger generations have tended to have less of an affinity for Chinatown because of assimilation. But Pon sees signs that that may be turning around.

“I see in the last ten years, with the younger generation, if you provide them with education and show them there is significance about their heritage and to be proud, now you take ownership.  Now we see more people are being vocal. Now [the younger generations] are more curious about where they come from and who they are. You cannot be successful today because you did it yourself. You are always on the shoulders of giants.”

“And these giants are your grandparents, your parents, who put in a lot of hard work, who went through a lot of racism, systemic discrimination, injustice, all sorts of things.”