Bel-Aire

The Atlas

Bel-Aire is 159 houses on a bank above the water, and the count is the first thing you feel. You meet the same dozen people walking. A golf course closes the north, the reservoir closes the west, and nothing passes through on its way to somewhere else. Your street ends where the land does, which is a sentence very few Calgary addresses can use.

Grounds

The community sits on the east bank at the point where the Glenmore Reservoir drains into the Elbow River, which puts the original Glenmore Dam directly below it. The land falls west toward the water and levels off going east, so the western houses look across the reservoir and the eastern ones look across Elbow Drive. The Calgary Golf and Country Club forms the entire northern boundary, meaning the community's north edge is fairway rather than road. Glenmore Trail runs beyond Mayfair to the south. Meadowlark Park and the Chinook lands sit east. The whole of it measures 0.363 square kilometres, which is small enough to cross on foot in under fifteen minutes and small enough that the street pattern never needed a collector road. Elbow Drive carries the buses and the through traffic on the eastern side. The community's own roads carry neither.

The dam came first by a generation. Mayor Andrew Davison turned the first sod on July 26 1930, concrete was poured that October, and the structure went into service on January 19 1933 at a cost of $3.8 million. It gave Calgary a reservoir with a water mirror of 3.84 square kilometres and a drinking-water supply the city still draws on. The land above it was annexed in 1954. Bel-Aire was established in 1960, so the houses arrived twenty-seven years after the water did. That order explains the community, and it is the first thing we say about the place. The reservoir was already the view, the dam was already the landmark, and the subdivision was laid out to face both of them.

Homes

Detached houses on large lots, and by the 2006 count every building in the community was a single-family detached home with none of the housing rented. The City files Bel-Aire under its 1960s and 1970s structure tag, which matches what the streets show, low horizontal houses drawn for the sites they sit on rather than repeated down a block. There is no apartment stock here and no townhouse row, so the entry point into the community is a house or nothing, and the 159 dwellings mean that turnover is a small number of addresses in any given year. Four hundred and twenty-four people live across those addresses, spread over a third of a square kilometre, which is the reason an evening walk returns the same faces in the same order. Rebuilding has worked through steadily, and the ones that succeed keep the original relationship to the slope, which is the thing the lots were bought for and the thing we look at first on any rebuild here. What a buyer takes on is a community with no commercial frontage at all. Every errand leaves the neighbourhood, and every walk that is not a driveway is a pathway walk. That trade comes with the address.

Everyday

The reservoir does the daily work. Its perimeter pathway runs sixteen kilometres and connects Heritage Park Historical Village, North Glenmore Park, Weaselhead Flats, the Glenmore Sailing Club, the Calgary Canoe Club, the Calgary Rowing Club and Earl Grey Golf Club, so a walk from a Bel-Aire driveway reaches all of them without a car. The boat season runs from May 1 to October 31 and swimming is prohibited, which keeps the water a working reservoir rather than a beach. The Mayfair Bel-Aire Community Association keeps no hall of its own and puts everything outdoors instead, running tennis courts and playfields shared with Mayfair next door and flooding a rink once the weather turns. The Calgary Girls Charter School runs a Bel-Aire campus for grades 4 and 5. Designations change year to year, so confirm current catchments with the Calgary Board of Education and the Calgary Catholic School District, and we check them again every time this page is opened. Groceries and the rest of the errand list point east, past Meadowlark Park to Chinook Centre, 1.4 million square feet of it, open since August 1960 and the destination for anything the pathway cannot supply.

Edges

Fairway north, water west, Mayfair south, and Elbow Drive with the Chinook lands beyond it to the east. Three of those four are edges nobody can build on, which is the structural reason a community of 159 houses has stayed a community of 159 houses, and the reason we expect the count to hold. North up Elbow Drive past the golf club, Elboya runs the same postwar confidence at ten times the size. Straight across the water, Lakeview holds the far bank and the same pathway. The wider map sits on the full neighbourhoods index.

The Bel-Aire Edit

Where to start. Hours move, so check before you go.

The Glenmore Reservoir pathway
Sixteen kilometres around the water, and it starts below the community.

The Mayfair Bel-Aire courts and rink
Tennis in summer, flooded ice in winter, run by the association and shared with Mayfair.

We keep the listings on the neighbourhood page, updated as the market moves. Start with Bel-Aire homes for sale.