Living at N3, Calgary

The Atlas

There is no parkade. That is the first thing anyone says about this building and it is the correct thing to say, because it decides the rest. What went underground instead is bicycles, a whole level of them, with a repair bench and a wash. So the walk out the door is the commute. The library is four blocks west and the train is a few minutes north. Somebody drew a building for a person without a car and then went ahead and built it.

Grounds

N3 stands at 450 8 Avenue SE in East Village, one address along from the St. Louis Hotel. The ground here is the old east end of downtown, flat and gridded, with a good deal of it rebuilt in the past fifteen years, and with the Bow along the north edge and the CP tracks along the south. Eighth Avenue runs east and west through the middle of it. At street level the building opens through transparent retail frontage and a public mews running to the St. Louis next door, which is one of the oldest hotels in the city and whose upper floors now hold the head office of Calgary Municipal Land Corporation.

East Village is the piece of Calgary that changed hardest and fastest in the last two decades, and the two anchors of that change are both in walking reach. Studio Bell opened on Canada Day 2016 as the home of the National Music Centre, wrapped around the old King Edward Hotel. The Central Library opened four blocks west in November 2018, drawn by Snøhetta with Calgary's DIALOG and built over a working CTrain line that curves from grade into tunnel underneath the reading rooms.

Homes

GEC Architecture drew it at 15 storeys holding 167 suites, and it finished in 2017 for Knightsbridge Homes with Metropia. The missing parkade is the design decision the rest of the building answers to. Calgary city council relaxed the requirement that would ordinarily have put roughly a hundred stalls under a building holding this many suites, and the architects paired that relaxation with heat recovery ventilation and compact suite plans, describing the result as transit-oriented rather than car-served. A resident here is walking or boarding a train. In this location that costs a household very little. It is still a hard constraint, so test it against your own week before viewing.

Everyday

The Central Library is four blocks west. It is this neighbourhood's living room, which is the sort of claim that usually needs an argument and does not here. Studio Bell is a block east of the library, with the King Eddy beside it running live music and a kitchen. RiverWalk carries four kilometres of pathway along the Bow between The Confluence and the Peace Bridge, and St. Patrick's Island sits across the water off the north edge of the neighbourhood, which puts an island park inside a short walk of the front door. The 7 Avenue CTrain platforms are a few minutes north on foot. What the building leaves out is what the neighbourhood has to supply, so read the district page alongside this one.

Amenities

The bicycle storage level carries cleaning and repair facilities, which is the building's answer to the parkade it does not have. The rooftop terrace is outfitted with two gas barbecues, a sink, pergolas, seating and a fireplace. The fitness area beside it runs across two levels with windows onto the Bow River, Studio Bell, the Saddledome and downtown Calgary, so the view does the work a television would otherwise be doing. Suites are assigned storage lockers. There is a rooftop lounge in the shared space as well. Reading the list as a whole, the amenity budget went upward, to the roof and the view, and downward, to the bikes, with nothing spent in between.

Edges

The Bow closes the north with RiverWalk along it. The CP tracks and 9 Avenue draw the south. Fourth Street SE and the library blocks open the west, and The Confluence and the Elbow finish the east. Every edge here is water, rail, a civic building or a piece of parkland, so the neighbourhood has hard boundaries and short distances inside them. Across the river to the north, Bridgeland climbs its hill. East along 9 Avenue, Inglewood keeps the older main street. South across the tracks, Victoria Park runs the towers and the fairgrounds. We wrote about the community in Living in East Village, and the wider map sits on the full neighbourhoods index.

The N3 Edit

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

Central Library
800 3 Street SE. Snøhetta with DIALOG, opened November 2018, built over a working CTrain line that curves into tunnel under the reading rooms.

Studio Bell and the King Eddy
850 4 Street SE. The National Music Centre since Canada Day 2016, wrapped around the old King Edward Hotel, with live music and a kitchen next door.

St. Patrick's Island
Across the water off the north edge. A bridge and a beach across the water, and the reason summer here does not need a car either.

Simmons Building
618 Confluence Way SE. A 1912 mattress factory holding three tenants, a bakery, a coffee roastery and a restaurant with a wood grill. The shortest walk to a full afternoon.

We keep the listings on the building page, updated as the market moves. Start with N3 condos for sale.