Point McKay

Posted by Ricky Jin on Wednesday, August 19, 2026 at 11:56:04 PM By Ricky Jin / August 19, 2026 Comment

The Atlas

Point McKay finished building in 1987 and never started again. Every one of its 848 homes carries a construction date in the seventies or the eighties, with a single exception, and the exception is the 1905 sandstone house the whole community takes its name from. Your street is called Point McKay something. Your morning is the river. Nothing here is under construction, and nothing has been for a very long time.

Grounds

The community holds a shelf between Bowness Road and the Bow River, on the north bank, west of the hospital hill. It is small and it points one direction, which we mean as the whole description. The streets bend toward the water, the pathway runs the full length of the river frontage, and the front door of the whole place is a riverbank rather than an avenue. Across the water, Edworthy Park climbs the south escarpment, and a footbridge at the west end joins the two, so a household here walks into a hundred and sixty-nine hectares of park without crossing a road. Behind the houses, Bowness Road carries the traffic through and takes it away again. The Foothills campus sits up the hill east with the university beyond it, close on a Tuesday morning and invisible from a kitchen window.

Alfred McKay came west from Ontario in 1880 on the Canadian Pacific survey team, returned to stay in 1886, and lived as a squatter in a log cabin on land leased to the Cochrane Ranch Company. He received clear title in 1891. He quarried the sandstone for his house himself and hauled it across the frozen Bow to the building site, then raised the house in sections over several years, which is why one interior wall inside it runs roughly sixteen inches thick. He gave fifty acres of his homestead to the city, ground that is now part of Shouldice Park, and we still tell the story with the sandstone first. His sons held the house and the land until 1953. It stood empty and was vandalised before anyone restored it, and it is the recreation building today for the housing development that grew around it. The community itself belonged to the town of Montgomery until Calgary annexed the town in 1963.

Homes

Townhouse clusters and two towers, and very little else. The assessment roll carries 848 residential parcels, 497 of them built in the 1970s and 350 in the 1980s, and the last construction date anywhere on the roll is 1987. Median lot size runs near 3,465 square feet, which is townhouse scale rather than bungalow scale, and 725 of the parcels are governed by direct control instead of a standard land use district. That combination describes ground designed once, as one thing, and delivered finished. A buyer here is not weighing an original against an infill, because no infill exists, which makes this one of the simplest decisions we walk anyone through. The decision is a townhouse in a cluster with a garage and a small yard, or a unit in one of the Riverside towers with the water out the window. Both come with a pathway thirty seconds from the door and no through traffic at all, since the street pattern is a set of loops that lead only back to each other.

A modern building clad in vertical wood with a tall window at the corner, grass running up to the wall.

Everyday

A sweep of the community turns up benches, a shelter, some parking and the tennis courts, which is a fair summary of the commercial situation. What stands instead is a spa on Point McKay Crescent, City tennis courts on Point Drive, a footbridge, and the river. Groceries and the errand run point east into Parkdale or west into Montgomery, and the hill between here and the hospital is walkable in either direction. On the bank at the western edge there is a small building faced in local riverstone, put up in 1966, which draws Bow River water through four sump pumps sunk eighteen metres down and sends it north through tunnels to the hospital and to the University of Calgary's heating and cooling plant at better than sixty thousand litres a minute. It carries a bronze plaque naming what it does. Almost nobody stops to read it. We did. Winter turns the pathway into the entire social life of the place, and the footbridge stays open through it.

Edges

Bowness Road closes the north and the Bow River closes the south, and the community simply runs out at either end. There is no fourth road, which is unusual for an inner-city address and is much of the reason this place reads as detached from the city it sits inside. West along the bank, Montgomery holds the ground Alfred McKay once homesteaded and the park he gave away. East up the hill, Parkdale takes over toward the hospital. The wider map sits on the full neighbourhoods index.