Everything that makes a city worth belonging to begins as something smaller than itself. A conversation that runs late. A bottle of wine opened after dinner. A handful of people who refuse to accept that the city they live in is the only city it can be.
One of Calgary's great civic stories began that way, at a kitchen table, in 1969. Three women, Martha Cohen, Vera Swanson and Sandra LeBlanc, gathered the leaders of the city's orchestra and theatre companies, none of which had a proper home, and began to dream out loud. The Calgary Herald would come to call them the three tigers. They had no land, no money, and no building. What they had was harder to come by: the nerve to love a version of their city that did not yet exist.
It is worth remembering what that city was. Fewer than 400,000 people. A prairie town in the middle of becoming something else, not yet sure what. To imagine a home for symphonies and new plays in that place took more than ambition. It took faith in people who had not arrived yet.
In the middle of a recession, the province told them it would build only if they could raise $15 million from their neighbours. Someone asked Vera Swanson what they would do if they failed. "I don't think about that," she said, "because I believe we will raise the money."
There is a whole philosophy of city-building in that sentence. It isn't optimism, exactly. Optimism waits to see how things turn out. This was something sturdier: a decision to act as though the future had already said yes.
If Vera supplied the conviction, Martha Cohen supplied the momentum. She chaired the effort through planning, financing and construction, and led the campaign that rallied Calgarians to raise those first $15 million in the middle of a downturn. Sandra and Vera were indispensable. But it was Martha who turned a conversation among friends into a cause an entire community could join. She was nearing fifty when the dream began, and in her sixties when the doors opened.
That faith took fifteen years to become real. Fifteen years of boardrooms and phone calls and polite refusals. Fifteen years in which giving up would have been perfectly reasonable. When the doors finally opened in 1985, wrapped in red ribbon, the founders were not celebrating a building. They were celebrating a promise kept to strangers.
They called it the Calgary Centre for Performing Arts. Over the decades it would carry other names, EPCOR Centre and then Arts Commons, and today it is Werklund Centre. The names changed. The promise didn't. What began as a home for three companies with nowhere else to go became the largest arts centre in Western Canada: a full city block in the heart of downtown, now home to five resident companies, a launching pad for local artists, and a classroom for tens of thousands of young people every year. Most Calgarians have walked through its doors at some point in their lives. Far fewer know it started over dinner.
Three names carry this story, and they deserve to. But no kitchen table is set by three people alone. Around theirs sat artists, volunteers, donors and dreamers—a list of names too long to write. The nerve was theirs, too.
Here is the thing about that kind of nerve. It doesn't stay at the kitchen table. Sooner or later it has to walk into a room where decisions are made, and ask someone there to catch it.
Someone always has. And who caught it is one of the most surprising parts of this story:
The first was a Progressive Conservative premier who led Alberta through its boom years. He issued the founders their dare, then stood on stage on opening night and handed the credit straight back to three volunteers. The ground itself came from a city hall led by a populist mayor, a man who would go on to become one of the most famously frugal premiers this province has known. Hardly the obvious patron of the arts. He championed a theatre district anyway.
A generation later, the nerve passed to a progressive mayor who would go on to lead the provincial NDP. His council dared to reimagine the place for a city that had long since outgrown it. Then it passed to the council of the first woman ever elected mayor of Calgary, which carried the vision out the front doors and into Olympic Plaza. And then to a United Conservative provincial government, which committed $103 million to that same vision. Alongside them all, private citizens kept doing what the founders had done, including the Werklund family's gift, the largest to the performing arts in our country's history, and the name the centre carries today.
Pause on that list. Progressive Conservatives and United Conservatives. A future NDP leader. A populist remembered for cutting and a progressive remembered for building. People who have campaigned against one another, voted against one another, and will likely do so again. On almost any other question, they would not share a table.
On this one, they did. Not because the arts belong to any one side, but because each of them, when their turn came, understood they were sitting at a table bigger than any one of them, and one that would outlast them. Each inherited something they did not start. Each handed on something they would not finish.
That is public life at its most generous.
We are living inside one of those handoffs now.
Today, this vision is expanding Werklund Centre into the country’s largest performing arts campus. A new building is rising beside the original one, on track to open in 2028. Olympic Plaza, where the world gathered in 1988 to watch medals placed around athletes' necks, is being remade as a cultural and civic living room for the decades ahead. The organization the “three tigers” opened for a city of some 600,000 now serves a city of almost two million. A kitchen-table dream from 1969 has become the largest cultural infrastructure project in Canadian history.
It is tempting to see that as an ending. It isn't. It's a baton, mid-air.
The hardest part of any legacy is not building it. It's keeping faith with it. That work is rarely dramatic. It happens quietly, at tables where the people we have elected weigh the needs of today against the promise of tomorrow, in seasons when every dollar is asked to do the work of two. It happens when the case for the future has to compete with the very real pressures of the present. That is exactly when the founders' question matters most: who are we building for?
I should say plainly that I lead Werklund Centre, the institution that inherited this story, so read me with that in mind. But the question isn't mine, and it isn't only about one campus. It belongs to every long-horizon idea in this city, every park and library and transit line and gathering place, that needs more than a single term in office to come true.
The honest answer has always included people who are not in the room. Children not yet old enough to buy a ticket. Newcomers who haven't yet found their way to Calgary. Citizens of 2060 who will never know our names, but will live inside our decisions. They cannot speak for themselves. Someone has to imagine them, and then act as though they were already here. That is the whole art of a city.
The three tigers understood that. So did a premier and a populist, a progressive and a United Conservative government, and thousands of Calgarians whose names will never be on a wall. They agreed on very little. They agreed that this city deserved to be bigger than its present.
Calgary has never lacked that nerve. I have every reason to believe it still doesn't.
The kitchen table taught us how to dream for the people we love. The council table asks us to do the same for people we will never meet.
Both tables are still set. There is room at each of them for all of us.