A Street Urchin in Downtown Edmonton, around 1930, by Ralph Ethier

The streets of downtown Edmonton are the playground for a little boy and his siblings during the Great Depression.

Downtown Edmonton in the 1930s at the bottom of the Great Depression was unlike anything we know today. I was born there in 1932, the youngest of 8 children in a fairly close-knit family. I had a twin brother and sister four years older than I and they were my playmates. We lived at 104th Street and 104th Avenue; very few children lived downtown-our neighbours were industries and warehouses. We roamed the city core without any concern, there were few dangers and although our parents may have worried about us, we had no fears. Houses were never locked. Nobody thought about break-ins, pedophiles or muggings.


Besides looking after a family of ten, my mother made a full hot meal every day for the people who worked in my father's shop. She also cared for an invalid boarder, an old man who lived upstairs. She did all her own baking. My father had built a brick oven in the basement of our house, where she cooked huge amounts of bread. Sometimes on Saturdays, she cooked "galette fondue." She cut chunks off the main dough after the first rising, flattened them to 5 or 6 inches in diameter, made a cut through the middle of each piece, and fried them in butter to eat hot. What a treat!


Coal was delivered to the house, by horse and wagon, for the furnace and the kitchen stove. The man would shovel the coal by hand down a chute into a basement coal room. Of course, the basement was a cloud of black dust while he was unloading. It was our job to keep the coal pail full, for our mother.


The iceman-hardly anybody had a refrigerator-had giant tongs to grab a huge block of ice and carry it over his shoulder, leaning forward under the weight. He'd chip off small pieces of ice from inside the wagon and give us each one to suck on. We thought that was a treat too!


When the iceman or milkman came, he might let us drive the horse; we thought we were doing a marvelous job, but in reality those horses knew exactly where to go and when to stop. We'd be allowed to do this for a block or two before being sent home.


The Blacksmith Shop

In the early 1930s, my father started a blacksmithing business in a small garage behind our house, and within a few years had expanded by building a large shop 3 doors north. By that time, he had a staff of 5 or 6 working for him. It was a multi-faceted business; he was a craftsman and innovator. He built a trip-hammer, which was run off a main jackshaft pulley and was used for pounding out ploughshares. He built a steel-operating table for the General Hospital, and had a contract with Marshall Wells to supply many items that he made. However, shoeing horses, sharpening ploughshares for farmers, and re-rimming wooden tires formed the core of his business.


He made his own horseshoes. He'd take a shoe out of the forge, lift the horse's foot and fit it on to check if it was the right shape. I remember the smoke and burning smell. In the winter, he would put cleats on the horseshoes for ice conditions. Horses and wagons did almost all deliveries. (McCosham's had a few trucks with solid rubber wheels, chain driven-quite a racket when they came down the street. But that was exceptional.) He did work for many of the dray companies, large and small. The smallest may have been a Chinese green grocer with a covered wagon who peddled his fruit and vegetables throughout the area, and brought his horse for shoes and his wagon for repairs. Money never changed hands-my mother got fruit and vegetables in exchange.


He re-banded wheels, that is, put a steel band on wooden wheels. He built a large fire outside the shop, made the rim and placed it in this fire of wood and blacksmith coal. It was the kids' job to have pails of water ready. When he and his helper removed the rim from the fire and placed it on the wheel, we were told to throw water onto the rim to shrink it tight to the wheel. We were paid, I think, a nickel each. On Saturdays, the acetylene tank had to be cleaned of sludge, formed from the carbide-water reaction. We had to take the bunghole out of the bottom and hose out the tank, being careful not to get any water into the top carbide chamber.


Sometimes he had to go somewhere on business. As soon as he left, my brother and I would go into the blacksmith shop and fire up the forge, put metal into the forge and emulate what my father did by pounding the hot metal. Invariably, of course, we were caught. We often wondered how he knew that we had been using his forge and anvil! But of course when he drove up he could see the smoke. I learned that blacksmiths were fussy about their anvil-it was like having someone use your toothbrush.


Roaming Downtown

The downtown was quite magical for a youngster. For example, Marcus Coal, down the street from us, had a weigh scale and weighed commercial vehicles. There was also a masonry and brick establishment called Gormans, and a coal distributor, McKenzie Coal.


When Eaton's store was being built on 101st Street and 102nd Avenue, we'd walk over and watch the excavating. When the store was finally finished and in operation, we'd go over and ride the escalators, a modern marvel to our eyes and great fun.


We went to the Tegler building, which may have been the tallest in Edmonton then, to ride the elevators. The operators (all men) sat on a little stool in the corner of the cage to work the controls. They'd give us a few rides and then ship us out.



In the summer, we'd sometimes take the streetcar over to the south side going across the top of the High Level Bridge. Then we'd transfer to a streetcar that could be driven from either end and go out to Whitemud Creek. There being no turn-around facility for the car, the conductor had to move his driving gear from the front to the rear and vice versa.


Sometimes our pennies from helping out in the shop would take us to a movie theatre on Saturday mornings. We walked to the Gem Theatre on Jasper Avenue between 96th and 97th Street. We chose the Gem because the movies there were only 5 cents, while the one across the street, the Dreamland, charged 10 cents. On very special occasions, my older brother or sister would take us to the Strand Theatre and treat us after the movie to an ice cream or a piece of pie in the American Dairy Lunch, in the basement of the building. We thought the American Dairy Lunch was very high class! It had black and white tile floors and a soda fountain with stools, as well as booths.


The butcher shop was across the street from the post office about 99th or 100th Street, just off Jasper. The floor was covered with sawdust. Balls of string hung from brackets above the counters with the end trailing down. The butchers wrapped the meat in brown paper waxed on one side, then pulled the string to tie the package. They had a mysterious method of looping and breaking the string without having to cut it.


Some Saturday mornings, my mother gave us the largest pillowcase in the house, and 10 cents and sent us to a puffed wheat factory north of the tracks, (was it called Prairie Puffed Wheat?), with instructions to be sure the man gave us a full measure of puffed wheat. He went into the storage area and opened a trap door. My brother and I had to hold the pillowcase open for him to scoop into. I can smell it yet. We always thought how important and impressive we looked carrying a huge bag, but of course it weighed next to nothing.


Another marvel for small eyes was the "Old English Fish and Chip Shop" on Jasper Avenue. We could never afford to eat out, but we went in, to smell the smells. They had a basket system from the kitchen at the back to the cashier at the front. This was the forerunner of "take-out." The cashier put the order paper in a basket and sent it on a clothesline pulley system to the kitchen. In due time, the fish and chips would travel back to the cashier. The Birks store had a pneumatic tube system. The clerk put the customer's money into a cylinder with a little door that snapped shut. The cylinder then traveled down a long tube to the office, where the change was put into the cylinder and it traveled back to the clerk.


Sometimes we went over to the Edmonton Journal, situated near the top of Bellamy Hill, to watch the printing presses. At street level, you could look down at the machinery. Paper would fly through at a mile a minute; we thought that was amazing.


Behind our house, a spur line serviced warehouses and commercial buildings. There was another spur between 103rd and104th. I remember an accident when they were shunting cars behind our house. A switchman or brakeman was leaning out signaling the engineer at the front of the train, but apparently leaned too far. He struck a pole near the track and was thrown under the rail cars and run over. Mother kept us in the house that day.


For a time, my oldest brother worked across the street at Royal Fruit. In the late summer when the watermelons arrived in the city, they came packed in straw within the boxcar. When they were unloading, the workers formed a human chain and threw the watermelons from person to person until they were put down gently in the building. Little kids would stand around watching this production. Of course, workers occasionally "accidentally" dropped one. It cracked open and was given to the watchers. We gorged ourselves on those special treats.


Next door to Royal Fruit was an Orange Crush bottling place. The bottles that were improperly filled were handed out the back door to waiting kids. We drank the pop on the spot and gave the bottles back. Other places we frequented were the old Army and Navy store, the W.W. Arcade, and Ashdown Hardware. We wandered through looking and touching, if we could get away with it.


In those days, the main line of the CNR went right through town, parallel with 104th Avenue. There were underpasses at the tracks on 101st and 97th Street, but at 109th Street they had many sidings, so the city built a "rat hole", a long two-lane tunnel under the tracks. After he got a car, we would implore our father to honk the horn so we could roll our windows down and listen to the echoes. Sometimes he did it, sometimes not. When traveling from east to west on 104 th , approaching the rise over the rat hole, we would beg him to speed up, so we could feel as if we were airborne over the rise, followed by the sinking of the stomach.


I started school at Sacred Heart School at 98th Street and 110th Avenue. We walked through the underpass on 101st Street and cut across open space to the school. The teachers were nuns and French was the language of instruction. Sometimes on the way home from school, we made a detour to McCormick's biscuit factory, and were given bags of broken cookies. We thought that was grand. Calgary bottling was also on our way home, and sometimes we stopped there to see if any bottles of pop were available.


On the way to school, was a building called The Lighthouse, which catered to the jobless and homeless. Once my brother, sister and I went into the building on our way home. They were having a prayer meeting or study session, so we sat at the back. Afterwards they handed out hot chocolate to all the transients, and we took our turn. When we got home, late of course, my mother asked where we had been. We had to confess. She was not at all pleased about this; we never went there again.


When the Royal American Shows came to town on a Sunday afternoon, the carnival train was put on a siding near 106th Street and 104th Avenue. We would go down to watch them unload the carnival wagons off the flatcars. Trucks or horses then hauled them out to the Exhibition Grounds in North Edmonton. But when the unloading began, elephants would haul the first wagons, parading down 104th Avenue to 101st Street, through the underpass east, on 111th Avenue. Kids followed on foot to watch them put up the rides and the tents. But we never had any money to go on the rides when the show opened. Many of the concessions had sawdust on the floors. Late Saturday night, when the show was over and the concessions gone, we sifted through the sawdust looking for loose change that might have been dropped. Once in a while, we were lucky and found a few coins.


When I went back to Edmonton in 2000, I spent a few hours walking in the area where I grew up and found virtually no recognizable landmarks. It's all gone.