The Pulse: Feb. 8, 2023

A chance meeting at an alumni event that Ellen Schoeck almost skipped led to a series of books about the University of Alberta, the latest of which has just been published.

Taking Care: Alumni Stories About Life in the Original Residences and Lister Hall, 1911-2020 is the fourth of five books that Schoeck has written, all of which owe their existence to a chance meeting in 2001.

"On that Friday night, I was buried in work, preparing for two council meetings on Monday. I looked at my calendar and saw the alumni event and I thought I just can't go – too much work," she told Taproot. "Then I thought, 'My name badge will be sitting on the welcome desk: a no-show.' The alumni event was in the Horowitz Theatre, right across the street from my building. So I thought, 'OK, I will go for five minutes and then get right back to the office.'"

The Horowitz Theatre was packed, and she almost left. But when the sea of people parted before her, she noticed an elderly man who was "bristling with energy," she recalled. "I thought, 'Hmm, this will be the one person I'll meet.'"

That man's name was Hugh Morrison, who graduated in 1930 and was a Rhodes Scholar. "Hugh started to tell me about life on campus in the 1920s," she said. "Story after story! I was enthralled – but I also felt cheated that for all the years I had been on campus getting my BA and MA, I hadn't known anything about the life lived in the buildings I passed by every day. I was hooked."

Meeting Morrison made Schoeck "look at campus not just as a physical place, but as a place where people lived their daily lives." Taking Care shares what happened at the student residences, from Athabasca Hall, built in 1911, to Lister Hall, which has been housing students since 1964.

The book also takes a look at the Ring Houses, which were taken down in 2022 and are to be incorporated into a new development in McCauley by Primavera Development Group.

Schoeck regrets their loss. "The Ring Houses were home to the first president and to early professors at a time when housing was not available in the city of Strathcona. I have long regarded these homes as containing the U's DNA," she said.

"The faculty who lived here engaged in informal talks about who should be hired: Were we ready to offer the PhD in chemistry? Were we ready to have a (physical education) faculty? Which building should be built next? And more. They shaped the U of A for 50 years in this informal setting. These buildings should have been cared for over time and preserved as an essential part of our past and as an essential part of our future."

• The Edmonton Police Service is requesting a series of bylaw changes related to pepper spray and bear spray, which are types of non-restricted oleoresin capsicum (OC) spray. The changes include making it illegal to tamper with safety mechanisms or labels, introducing a "nuisance-type offence" for negligent use in public spaces, and creating consistent rules for businesses to record who buys the spray. Police data from 2015-2021 shows 10,000 recorded incidents of OC spray used in Edmonton in the past six years, with 75% occurring within 100 meters of a bus stop or transit centre. Administration is working with police to draft bylaw changes, which will then go to council for approval.
• City council's community and public services committee received a report from Alberta Health Services showing Edmontonians experiencing homelessness are at a greater risk of a variety of physical and mental health conditions, but that stable housing contributed to a decrease in emergency room visits and hospital stay duration. According to Dr. Chris Sikora, the lead medical officer of health for the Edmonton zone, the AHS study saw a nearly 50% drop in ER visits and a 68% drop in addictions and mental health-related EMS events among a selection of people who had permanent supportive housing. Tricia Smith, executive director of Radius Community Health & Healing, agreed that patients' health destabilizes when they lose housing and also noted a shortage of detox beds.
• The city's auditor found that the Enterprise Performance Management Policy adopted in 2018, which is intended to improve transparency and keep administration accountable to council and the public, isn't being followed by most departments or enforced by the service innovation and performance (SIP) branch. In a report going to council's audit committee on Feb. 13, the auditor said city departments are only using the provided software to track about half their performance measures. Meanwhile, a separate audit looked at a sample of 15 council reports and found some contained jargon, "confusing, vague and ambiguous content," and, in several cases, false or unverifiable information.
• The city is inviting Edmontonians to celebrate International Winter Bike to Work Day on Feb. 10. City teams will hand out hot drinks and snacks near the High Level Bridge in the Garneau neighbourhood from 7:30am to 9am. Bike Edmonton has also launched a challenge to win a pair of studded tires for winter cycling.
• Jobber, an Edmonton company that makes software for home service businesses like heating and plumbing companies, secured $100 million USD in a Series D funding round led by New York equity firm General Atlantic. Since closing Series C funding a few years ago, the company has tripled its revenue and doubled its customer base to more than 200,000 home service providers in 60 countries.
• EPCOR, Edmonton's municipally owned utility company, has applied to provide water service to an Arizona suburb called Rio Verde Foothills, which has been without water since the city of Scottsdale earlier this year began preventing private water delivery to customers outside city limits because of a water shortage in the Colorado River basin. The company said it could take years to secure water supplies and build the needed infrastructure, however. Its subsidiary EPCOR USA has expanded into several drought-impacted markets in Arizona and New Mexico.
• Premier Danielle Smith did not commit to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's proposal to spend an additional $46.2 billion on health care over the next 10 years, which would bring the federal government's total contribution to $196.1 billion if a deal is signed in the spring. Echoing the remarks of other premiers, Smith's office said in a statement that the amount is "significantly lower" than anticipated. The premiers said they would take time to assess the proposal.

On this day in 1926, Edmonton's transit system was dealing with the aftermath of three separate collisions between cars and streetcars.

The crash-heavy weekend didn't result in any serious injuries, although a newspaper reported that the cars "suffered severely in several cases," as did the light pole that was "taken away" in a different crash. While this might have been a particularly bad weekend, unfortunate meetings between road and rail vehicles have not been uncommon in Edmonton's history.

The city's first streetcar system was put into place in 1908, during a time of rapid growth in the city. It proved popular. Within a decade, it was seeing millions of trips taken each year, impressive for a city with a population just north of 50,000. At the same time, increased prosperity made personal automobiles more feasible. They all had to share the road — with the occasional mishap.

The streetcar system was decommissioned in 1951, and Edmonton's public transportation system would run without rails for a quarter-century. Construction on the city's new LRT system began in 1974, in time to have the line open for the 1978 Commonwealth Games.

Light rail transit was more separated from car traffic than streetcars were. It was built on exclusive right-of-way (often on old railway routes) and carried multiple cars, which meant both a higher capacity and faster speeds. The original line grew through the 1980s and 1990s, eventually stretching from Clareview to Century Park. It became known as the Capital Line when the Metro Line came aboard in 2015, running from Churchill to NAIT.

Edmonton is now in the testing phase for its newest LRT line, the longest single expansion since the system was built in the 1970s. The first phase of the Valley Line includes 12 stops from downtown to Mill Woods. Unlike the original LRT, the new low-floor LRT system is meant to encourage a more "hop on, hop off" approach, in accordance with transit-oriented development guidelines. That makes the train somewhat more like the streetcars of old, though it still mostly runs on its own right-of-way.

The line has yet to open, but history has begun to repeat itself. In January, a car making an illegal right turn collided with a train on a test run, prompting city officials to ask drivers to please not do that.

This is based on a clipping found on Vintage Edmonton, a daily look at Edmonton's history from armchair archivist @revRecluse — follow @VintageEdmonton for daily ephemera via Twitter.