Carstairs, Alberta
Posted by: 
T0SHEA
N 51° 34.036 W 114° 05.876
11U E 701124 N 5716901
One unfamiliar with this town might never suspect the heritage of the building that is now the Carstairs Town Hall.
Waymark Code: WMMJ6J
Location: Alberta, Canada
Date Posted: 09/26/2014
Views: 1
Built on Ninth Avenue in the late 1970s, this building was originally the CO-OP Food Store. A few years ago both the CO-OP and the town decided that they could use larger premises, so the CO-OP built a shiny new store on Main Street (nominally Tenth Avenue) and the town moved out of their old town hall, built in the late 1950s/early 1960s and into the old CO-OP store. It required a bit of cosmetic work to make it no longer look like a food store, but was, I'm sure, much cheaper than erecting a new building. Handily, food stores generally come with plenty of off street parking, as did this one.
I don't know how many town halls the town has had, but the number has to be at least three, as it was founded in 1903. Now with a population of over 3,000, its proximity to Calgary has made it a bedroom community of that city, which has a present population of over a million.
Carstairs is expected to grow exponentially in the next decade to a population of 13,000 or so. That's quite a growth spurt.
