Inglewood

Calgary's first main street, still doing the same job.

Ninth Avenue was Atlantic Avenue, and it was the first main street the city had. The settlement east of the Elbow dates to 1875 and the building of Fort Calgary at the confluence, and it went by East Calgary and Brewery Flats before the name Inglewood was settled on in 1911, borrowed from Colonel James Walker's homestead nearby. Walker ran a sawmill there from 1882 to 1903 and set aside the land that became the Bird Sanctuary. The Calgary Brewing and Malting Company opened in 1892, three months after prohibition was repealed in the North-West Territories, and its first beer reached the street in 1893, a year before Calgary was a city. Around four hundred buildings here went up before 1914, which is why the storefronts along 9 Avenue read the way they do.

We wrote the full story on The Desk. Living in Inglewood.