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Can you identify Bayview on a map of Calgary?

I couldn't until recently. I have worked as a journalist in Calgary for more than two decades, and from time to time I still see neighbourhood names that don't ring a bell for me. I maybe heard the name before, and might get the quadrant right, but I couldn't tell you where exactly a certain neighbourhood is or what it's like.

This was the case when RioCan's high-rise towers at Glenmore Landing came up at city council last year. They were proposed for the neighbourhood of Bayview, which I knew absolutely nothing about.

This would soon change.

In January, on New Year's Day, Sam Hester emailed me suggesting that she do a Curious Calgary comic about the Glenmore Landing Shopping Centre, which her late architect father, Peter Burgener, had designed (and named!) in the 1980s. I liked this idea. I'd had Glenmore Landing on my list of possible Sprawlcast topics for almost a year, and this would be a good excuse to finally tackle it. The Sprawlcast and comic would complement each other.

When Sam filed her comic a few weeks later, it mentioned that in the 1970s, there had been proposals for multifamily housing on the Glenmore Landing site. This was news to me—I'd never heard of this before. But I was intrigued.

As I dug into the history of the area, I became obsessed with Bayview and its origins as a swanky subdivision built close to the Glenmore Reservoir's southern shores in the late 1960s, before citizens and politicians mobilized to preserve the shoreline from further residential development.

The residents of Bayview got in on lakeside living early, before city hall clamped down on it. The "Bayview blunder" is relevant—and fascinating—because some of the loudest opposition to subsequent proposed multifamily housing near the reservoir, including RioCan's Glenmore Landing towers, has come from Calgarians who live closest to the water in Bayview.

The Glenmore Landing story is one of my favourite kinds of stories to do. There are piles of public documents to draw from (spanning over a half century) and audio from numerous council meetings (spanning a decade, in this case). Local newspaper archives are a goldmine. And zooming out, with all of this material, one can see how a story unfolds over time.

For example, in the story we see that, in 2016, city hall was making grand proclamations about the future ridership of the contentious southwest BRT that goes by Glenmore Landing—and that the actual ridership today is nowhere close to those predictions. It was to be 12,500 daily riders by 2024; in reality, it's about 3,600. Which begs the question (one among many): What happened?

As I researched, I figured that a big part of my story would be recent drama at the local community association over the RioCan towers. But there was a problem. Now that council had voted down RioCan's plans in December, community association board members were not doing interviews, citing an ongoing court action (which was already ongoing before council's decision and community association reps were talking to anyone who would listen, but I digress).

This frustrated me. My preferred style of storytelling is to gather different perspectives and weave them together in a way that helps listeners/readers think through an issue and make up their own minds. Having interviews with one side of a story is not interesting. It feels like doing half the job. I could use public hearing audio to present the community association's perspectives, and did, but knew I needed more than that.

So I dug deeper into the archives. And what was hazy at first became crystal clear: History is repeating itself. What just happened at Glenmore Landing is not new. It happened in the 1960s. It happened in the 1970s. And it's happening again today.

Now it was time to publish. The days before we publish a deep dive like this are always chaotic. I rework my script countless times, revising and tightening with each pass. I get and incorporate feedback from my wife (the real editor of The Sprawl), who, after reading numerous drafts, cannot stand to look at it again. Then I go to CJSW to record my narration and often end up revising my script further while I'm there.

In this case, I sat in the production booth and stared at a wall of black text. It didn't look right. Usually my script is broken up by highlighted bits of colour which represent clips from interviews, city council meetings and so on. But in this case I was drawing so heavily from archives that in the first part of my script, these colourful bits were missing. What to do?

I left the booth and asked CJSW's podcast coordinator, Kaamil Kareemi, if he was busy, and if not, would he mind doing a bit of voice acting and reading out some historical quotes? Kaamil suggested something even better: Let's get a bunch of people around the station to do it! He gathered up four others and within 20 minutes, we had those lines recorded. The missing bits of colour were restored to my script.

Once my narration for a Sprawlcast is recorded, the whole package goes to my audio editor, Mike Tod, to get all stitched together. But we're still far from done. There is still the readable version of the story, a magazine-style article complete with cover art, photos and visual archival goodies. Calgary photojournalist Gavin John took photos of Glenmore Landing for this story, including aerial shots that help readers better understand the lands in question.

For this story, my designer, Chris Pecora, also annotated aerial photos so that readers can see the locations in the story in relation to each other, and at different points in time.

I work with Chris on art at the same time that I try and nail down a punchy headline. Sometimes the headline comes quickly. Usually it does not. My working headline for this one was "The Great Land Battle of the Glenmore Reservoir," a line directly from a 1970s newspaper article. The problem was that the story is about Glenmore Landing, and Glenmore Landing needed to be in the headline. Hmmm.

"The Battle of Glenmore Landing" is concise, mimicking a 2022 Sprawlcast ("The Battle of Banff Trail"), but this story is about a 60-year struggle. Wouldn't a battle that long be... a war? But "The War of Glenmore Landing" sounds stupid and overly dramatic. It doesn't work.

"The Battle of Glenmore Landing" would have to do!

After I get the audio back from Mike, I take it on a test drive. I mean literally. I listen in the car or while walking the dog. As I do, I make notes of further small edits—bits to trim out, and sometimes, short clips to add. I try not to add too much at this point, but sometimes it occurs to me that a bit of tape that seemed inconsequential in my early research would now add a lot. I can't resist tinkering right up to the moment of publication.

After all that, it is a relief to get the damn thing out the door! But even after publication it's not done. I like to do a "short version" at the top of the article that is a bullet list with the salient points from the story, cramming in as much good information as possible. That way people can either a) read the summary; b) read the full story; or c) listen to the Sprawlcast. Or all of the above.

It's rewarding to see all of this work pay off. After four days, The Battle of Glenmore Landing had been downloaded more than 10,000 times and viewed on the website almost as many. It's a piece that will be as informative six months or a year from now as it is today. It can sit on the shelf alongside evergreen Sprawlcast episodes like The Hollowing of the Calgary Herald (available as an actual book!), The Real Costs of Calgary's New Arena Deal and The Tycoons Reshaping Calgary-Area Transit.

But while downloads and pageviews are satisfying to see, they don't make it possible for us to do more deep-dive stories like this. For that we need ongoing financial support from readers and listeners who believe in what we're doing. So if you value The Sprawl's independent Calgary journalism, please support it so we can do more stories like these! You can sign up here.

So. Can you identify Bayview on a map of Calgary?

Maybe you couldn't previously, but you'll be able to after diving into this story. What I love about a project like this is that everybody learns something. It doesn't matter if you've never heard of Bayview or you've lived there your whole life. You will have learned something about your city that you didn't know before.

Jeremy Klaszus is founder and editor of The Sprawl.