Scarboro/Sunalta West

Posted by Ricky Jin on Wednesday, August 19, 2026 at 11:59:25 PM By Ricky Jin / August 19, 2026 Comment

The Atlas

Scarboro/Sunalta West is the half of Scarboro that ended up on the wrong side of Crowchild Trail. The road cut the old community in two and the City gave the western piece a name with a slash in it. One hundred and sixty-four houses now sit out here on wide lots, on streets whose names all open on S, and two different community associations count them as their own.

Grounds

The community is a wedge between Crowchild Trail and 24 Street SW, with Bow Trail closing the north and 17 Avenue the south. It is roughly four hundred metres across at its widest and it falls away toward the Bow River valley at the northern end. Crowchild runs in a cut along the eastern side, down the gully that used to be a working sandstone quarry, and the traffic is the price of the address. At the north end the land drops into Oliver Quarry Park, which is the community's only park and the only ground inside the boundary that is neither a house nor a road. The Shaganappi Hill Pathway comes down through it and joins the Bow River pathway below. The Blue Line runs through the community, with platforms at Shaganappi Point to the west and Sunalta to the east, so the train is a walk in either direction and neither platform is inside the boundary.

Scarboro was laid out for the Canadian Pacific Railway between 1909 and 1911 by John Charles Olmsted of the Olmsted Brothers, the successor firm to the practice of Frederick Law Olmsted, who co-designed Central Park. The plan followed the contours of the hill with curving streets and dropped small triangular parklets at the intersections, and it is one of two Olmsted firm designs in Canada built out in full and kept that way. Every named street in it opens on the letter S. This ground, west of where Crowchild would eventually go, inherited the alphabet and none of the houses, because nothing here was built until after the Second World War. The earliest construction date on the City's roll is 1945 and 125 of the 164 residential parcels went up in the 1950s. Two associations now claim the ground. Scarboro's boundaries run west to Crowchild and take it in, and Shaganappi's own history states that its association grew to include Upper Scarboro. Neither of them is wrong, and we file the page under the name the City uses.

Brick house, white columned veranda, painted deck and a wood screen door.

Homes

One hundred and sixty-four residential parcels is a small housing market by any measure, and the lots under them are wide. Median lot size runs near 7,653 square feet. Nine houses date from the 1940s, 125 from the 1950s, five from the 1960s, and 18 have been finished since 2010, so this is postwar stock with a steady modern replacement running through it rather than a redevelopment wave. All but eleven parcels sit in the low-density district, and those eleven carry a grade-oriented housing designation, which is the City's signal that a little more density is contemplated on them. A buyer gets a large lot with a modest house on it, inside the ring road by a long way, in a community too small to support a shop of its own. The heritage inventory is somewhere else, which we mention because the S on the street sign suggests otherwise. There is not one evaluated historic resource inside this boundary. The community across the traffic carries eighteen.

Everyday

One commercial building stands inside the boundary and it services Mercedes-Benz. Every other shop and kitchen is outside, and outside is close. Seventeenth Avenue runs the southern edge with the kitchens and shopfronts of Richmond and Killarney on the far sidewalk. Bow Trail runs the northern edge and takes you downtown in minutes. Oliver Quarry Park carries the community's whole outdoor life, with a City off-leash area inside it and the pathway dropping to the river. The park is named for the quarry that worked the gully, and that quarry's sandstone went into parts of Calgary's City Hall and into Sunalta School, which is the sort of fact that changes how a person looks at a hole in the ground, and it changed how we look at this one. Residents rebuilt the park in 2013 alongside the City and Parks Foundation Calgary, and the following year it took a Calgary Heritage Authority Lion Award for landscape. For a community of a hundred and sixty-four houses, that is a considerable amount of civic infrastructure to have made, and we count it in the address.

Edges

Crowchild Trail east, 24 Street west, Bow Trail north, 17 Avenue south. The eastern edge is the one that made this community, because the ground on the far side of it is Scarboro proper and used to be the same address. East across the traffic, Sunalta runs down toward the tracks with a platform of its own. South across 17 Avenue, Richmond picks the grid back up. The wider map sits on the full neighbourhoods index.