Blacklock's Reporter

Why do some landmarks escape the wrecking ball, and others not? Gone forever is the Ottawa home of Robert Borden, WWI prime minister depicted on the $100 banknote. In 1962 it was pondered as a possible National Historic Site. In 1971 it was demolished by Cadillac Fairview Developments to make way for a grey complex with an unfortunate name, the Watergate Apartments.

It was “Glensmere,” a Queen Ann Revival mansion at 201 Wurtemburg Street on the Rideau River; for 31 years a place of repose and happiness for Borden and his wife Laura. Built in 1894 on park-like grounds, it was designed by the same British-born architect who designed the ornate interior of the Library of Parliament, Frederick J. Alexander. Glensmere was a generous combination of wood and stone, projecting gables and a wraparound verandah.

As prime minister Borden ended his workday by walking three kilometres from Parliament Hill home to Wurtemburg Street. Here this modest man spent contemplative moments gardening, bird-watching and practicing his golf swing. Here Borden entertained VIPs and plotted Canada’s war through two tumultuous terms.

“No Canadian prime minister faced quite the same preponderance of grave problems as proved his lot in wartime,” wrote a newspaperman in 1937. “At heart he was a man of simple tastes, unpretentious and democratic despite the wealth of high honours properly bestowed upon him.”

Maclean’s readers in 1927 voted Borden among the “greatest living Canadians.”  When he died in 1937 grieving war veterans stood with heads bowed outside the Glensmere home and all along the road to Borden’s grave at Beechwood Cemetery. “Life is vain,” Borden wrote. “Life is short.”

Borden bought Glensmere in 1906. The house then was as unaffected as the man. It was so drafty a radiator froze and burst his first winter in the place. Borden complained the street was pot-holed, the grounds were a “jungle” of weeds and the city had left a derelict graveyard across the street overgrown with bushes where “undesirable characters” liked to hang out.

He spent the rest of his life improving the home and property.  When the city reclaimed the neighbouring graveyard as a park Borden had it named in honour of John A. Macdonald.

In 1942 Borden’s nephew sold Glensmere to the Chinese Nationalist Government. It remained a legation until 1970, when it was lost to the wreckers.

In a cruel joke on Borden’s memory, a splendid house next door to his prized Glensmere not only stands but is now protected. Yet there is no plaque to commemorate Canada’s wartime prime minister lived on Wurtemburg Street. All that remains is an old iron fence with Gloucester limestone pillars, a silent sentinel to what once stood here.

By Andrew Elliott

When retired park warden Frank Farley of Camrose, Alta. died in 1949, neighbours installed a stained glass window at his local United Church depicting St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of the creature kingdom. “He loved this church,” said the pastor. And the townspeople loved him.

Farley, now long forgotten, was among that generation of sodbusters who settled the Prairies and are caricatured today as white supremacists, colonialists and profiteers. Frank Farley And The Birds Of Alberta is closer to the truth, an affectionate biography of a homesteader who achieved national renown in his day as a self-taught ornithologist who loved the land and its people.

Born in St. Thomas, Ontario, Farley left his job as a bank clerk to settle in Alberta in 1892. Provincehood was 13 years away, and the plains were wide open country where buffalo herds could still be found. Not until 1909 would Parliament vote a budget appropriation to save a herd of 750 bison in a Prairie sanctuary.

“Farley was fascinated with birds from a young age,” biographers note. “He published his first article in an ornithological journal when he was 16.”

The young settler’s frontier experience coincided with the dawn of the first great North American conservation movement prompted in part by calamities like the death of the last Passenger Pigeon in 1914. The species “had once been the most abundant on the continent with a population between 3,000,000 and 5,000,000,” so plentiful the birds blacked out the sun in migration. They were hunted to extinction.

“From the early 1900s bird populations were in decline in both Canada and the United States,” authors write. “The reduced numbers of ducks and geese attracted significant attention, given their importance to both sport and subsistence hunters. Habitat change was the primary cause of their decline, particularly with settlers draining wetlands.”

“Some of the large birds will become nearly extinct if we are not careful,” Farley wrote a friend in 1919. He devoted the rest of his life to the study and care of migratory birds.

As warden of Miquelon Lake Provincial Park, Farley marveled that one year “there were 10,000 ducks of all kinds resting along the shores of the south lake and it was commented upon by hundreds of visitors that it was a wonderful sight.” As president of the Alberta Fish and Game Association he led a campaign to introduce conservation themes in public school curricula.

To his death Farley was compiling an encyclopedic listing of all Prairie species he’d seen in 57 years and “all other accounts of Alberta birds I could find.” It was unfinished at his passing.

The epilogue to this love story? Ornithologists named a subspecies of the Boreal Chickadee in Farley’s honour.

“His Camrose house still stands on 49th Street, the Camrose and District Museum that he founded remains open and the City of Camrose now employs a Wildlife and Greenspace Stewardship coordinator whose duties include assisting residents who want to care for Purple Martin nesting boxes,” note authors.

By Holly Doan

Frank Farley And The Birds Of Alberta, by Glen Hvenegaard, Jeremy Mouat and Heather Marshall; University of Alberta Press; 289 pages; ISBN 9781-7721-28239; $32.99

Canadian doctors

asked to volunteer in West Africa,

help fight Ebola.

Some answer the call.

Others may prepare

for the greater challenge

of going to Disney,

fight measles.

By Shai Ben-Shalom

Any tourist can describe Burmese jungles or the snows of Kilimanjaro. It takes talent to write a travel book about shopping malls. “I am writing a book on boredom, on repetition, on déjà vu, on replication, on the dysphasia of constructed landscapes, on the tackiness of the world and how it is shrinking,” writes Swiss author Rinny Gremaud.

All The World’s A Mall pops and snaps. It is outstanding. “It never ceases to amaze me how fatalistic people are about the ugly environments they live in,” she writes. Yes, the food courts in Edmonton and Casablanca look much alike. Yet Gremaud’s book is no tiresome rant against commercialism. She captures the contrasts of life on Earth through the lens of shopping centres.

It’s easy to sneer at malls as “sinister places, cultural and aesthetic deserts where the dead souls of a population that has converted to the religion of consumerism mill around,” writes Gremaud. They are much more.

Our correspondent visits Alberta, “almost rectangular,” she tells European readers. “If it were a country it would be somewhere between Qatar and Norway in terms of petrodollars per inhabitant.”

At the airport Gremaud encounters labourers bound for Fort McMurray, an industrial city “in the middle of the boreal forest,” she explains. Here “you can earn a six-figure salary without having finished high school,” adding: “Alcohol and sex are reputed to be rampant.”

In Edmonton in January, Gremaud correctly notes the predominant feature of local life is the climate. It was minus 23 degrees Celsius with night winds that could freeze batteries, but in the windowless West Edmonton Mall “the sun never sets,” she writes: “The lighting has turned white. The effect is daytime busy-ness in this long two-storey tunnel with its glass dome. The night and the freezing cold outside are mere abstractions, long-gone memories of an animal condition.”

Outside is hypothermia. Inside, “there is a strange background noise, fizzing fountains, footsteps slapping or squealing as the acoustics change with the height of the ceiling.”

Gremaud spent two days inside West Edmonton Mall in January. The profundity of the experience dawns later. “The indoor corridors that were lined with shop windows let me indulge in a kind of mental streetwalking,” she writes. “I could think about everything and nothing, why commerce exists, the value of things, the nature of exoticism.”

All The World’s A Mall tours the shopping centres of Kuala Lumpur, a city “yellow with pollution, red with congested traffic.” In Casablanca, Morocco Mall corridors run like “intestines of a whale lit up with neon tubes” and security guards enforce a dress code to keep out local slum dwellers. “Casablanca feels hostile,” writes Gremaud.

Beijing’s Golden Resources New Yansha Mall attempts to mimic West Edmonton Mall but fails, she notes. It is cockroach infested, has an “illogical arrangement of the elevators and escalators” and retail tenants selling a “diverse and wacky assortment of stuff” like harmonicas and chicken feet. “I haven’t bought a thing,” writes Gremaud. “At a certain cynical point there are no souvenirs for anyone.”

The Dubai Mall by contrast is spotless. Doorways are 15 metres high. There is a pond filled with tiger sharks. A cellphone store sells diamond iPhone cases for $1,300. Outside are sidewalks where nobody walks and greenspaces irrigated with drinking water that “are a nonsense that nobody notices,” says All The World’s A Mall. “Who in this era of touchscreen pleasures will look out the tinted windows at the landscape flowing by while ensconced in the back of a chauffeur-driven car?”

All The World’s A Mall is fresh and funny and sad. It is the best thing since free parking.

By Holly Doan

All The World’s A Mall by Rinny Gremaud; University of Alberta Press; 152 pages; ISBN 9781-77212-7126; $24.99