Saddle Ridge

The Atlas

Your train stops at Saddletowne Station, the last stop on the Blue Line's northeast leg, and you step off at the northwest corner of Saddletowne Circle. Up on 88 Avenue, a bakery in Savanna Bazaar marked four years in one storefront on September 1 2026, and The Chai Bar boils its kadak chai, tea leaves and spices together, before the milk goes in.

Grounds

Saddle Ridge covers about 5.6 square kilometres in the city's northeast. The community association's history, written by Hugh Bennett, its first president, starts in 1912, eight miles northeast of downtown, when speculators in the great land boom cut much of the area into five- and ten-acre parcels and even city lots. By 1929 farmers had pulled the surveyors' stakes, a menace to the wild-hay cutting, and burned them in their kitchen stoves, and through the lean years that followed many of the lots went back to the Municipal District of Rockyview for unpaid taxes.

Acreage buyers arrived in the early 1950s, and by the late 1960s up to a hundred homes stood in a district that ran south to 48 Avenue. The residents chose the name by vote, for a ridge about 100 feet high inside those borders and, on average, at least one saddle in each household, and the association incorporated in 1968. The City annexed about seven tenths of today's community in 1961 and the eastern part in 1989, and its area structure plan calls the ground essentially flat, falling about 18 metres from northeast to southwest over a sour gas field with no active wells or pipelines left. We read the area structure plan before a listing, because the plan says what the land around a house was drawn for.

Homes

The plan asks for at least 30 per cent of the homes in each neighbourhood to be something other than single-detached, and it assumed the old acreage subdivision north of 80 Avenue would in time be redeveloped as a residential area. The City's 2026 assessment roll still carries eighteen residential parcels built in the 1960s and 1970s, the acreage years, and dates more than nine in ten of today's parcels to the build-out since 2000.

Genesis laid out Saddlestone on a fused grid, a street pattern meant to slow traffic inside the community, and Genstar's Savanna took the northern edge, with Homes by Avi among its builders in CREB's 2021 report. Genstar's page points Savanna owners to the architectural guidelines and to the restrictive covenants that can apply by phase, fencing being its example. We read those covenants before an offer, because a fence line gets decided long before the first post goes in.

Everyday

Calgary Transit opened the 2.9-kilometre run to Martindale and Saddletowne stations on August 27 2012. The City's plan put a retail town centre and an LRT station inside a loop road joining Falconridge Boulevard and 80 Avenue, and Saddletowne Circle is that loop today. The City is designing a one-kilometre extension north to a new station at 88 Avenue and 60 Street, funded by the Province and the City, and its project page gives no opening date. Just south of the loop, across the line in Martindale, the Genesis Centre holds the Saddletowne YMCA and the Saddletowne Library, which opened there on January 3 2012.

North on 88 Avenue, Savanna Bazaar went up as 92,000 square feet of independently owned shops, and CBC reported in 2018 that its businesses would own their retail units. Inside the boundary, Saddle Ridge School and Hugh A. Bennett School are Calgary Board of Education elementaries, the second carrying the name of the association's first president, and Peter Lougheed School teaches elementary and junior high grades for the Board. Light of Christ Catholic School, on Saddlehorn Drive, belongs to the Calgary Catholic School District. Designations change year to year, so confirm current catchments with the Calgary Board of Education and the Calgary Catholic School District.

Edges

Airport Trail and 96 Avenue close the north, Cityscape across Airport Trail and Cornerstone across 96 Avenue. Stoney Trail runs the east, with Homestead across its southern stretch. The south follows 80 Avenue, Martindale across its western stretch and Taradale across its eastern one, and at Saddletowne the line drops south of 80 Avenue to take in the whole of the circle. Metis Trail closes the west, the Saddle Ridge Industrial district across it. The wider map sits on the full neighbourhoods index.

The Saddle Ridge Edit

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

Hugh Bennett Park
Saddleridge Drive and Saddlecreek Way NE. A City park of about seven hectares with Saddle Ridge Lake, as the City maps it, inside.

Savanna Bazaar
5850 88 Avenue NE. A centre of independently owned shops, where the businesses own their units.

The Chai Bar
Unit 4120 in the bazaar, where two cousins opened the first Chai Bar in 2022. Kadak chai from seven in the morning, every day.

Made by AKB Bakeshop & Café
Unit 3180 in the bazaar. A scratch bakery with thirty-plus pastries. It marked four years in one storefront on September 1 2026.

We keep the listings on the neighbourhood page, updated as the market moves. Start with Saddle Ridge homes for sale.