Electric to 11 Avenue: How Calgary’s nightlife has changed
Emma Voelpel, Staff Writer
Calgary is widely known as a big city with a small-town feel. With a population that’s increased by nearly 20 per cent since 2020, both the number of residents and land mass were the largest in Alberta last year.
As its population has grown, the city’s culture has shifted dramatically—as has its nightlife, which has bounced from one street to another. But while one might estimate that more people lead to a bustling nightlife, a night out in Calgary seems to have gone from over-the-top and wild to demure and modest.
Today, 11 Avenue is a quiet, peaceful road lined with cafés, restaurants, galleries, and nail salons. However, in the 80s and 90s, the atmosphere of the street was completely different.
Electric Avenue—as it was so affectionately called—was the epicentre of Calgary’s party scene. One block consisted of 22 bars that people packed each day.
The strip first gained recognition in 1986, when the Calgary Flames beat their rival, the Edmonton Oilers, in the playoffs. Places like Bandito’s, Coconut Joe’s, and the Manhattan Club saw massive amounts of people flocking to the block for not just a good time, but a long time.
A look back at Electric Avenue
Owner of 17 Avenue’s Trolley 5 Brewpub, Ernie Tsu, remembers when it was normal for bars to be open and filled with people until 2 a.m. every night of the week.
“The nightlife back then was definitely night and day to the nightlife now,” he says.
Decades ago, Tsu worked at many locations on the infamous Electric Avenue. He credits the strip’s success to Calgary’s mayor at the time.
“Back when Ralph Klein was around, he wanted to almost turn Calgary into a little mini Vegas,” says Tsu.
With the popularity of Electric Avenue came the typical hiccups familiar to those in the hospitality industry. Brawls, over-consumption of liquor, and the police being a constant presence on the street.
By the time the mid-90s rolled around, fights were a regular occurrence, and crime was up by 90 per cent. The Calgary Police Service described the avenue as a “place to go for a good time where the rules of the city no longer applied.”
In 1994, Calgary’s city council began to reshape 11 Avenue’s purpose, leading to major zoning changes that prevented any new clubs from opening after one would close. Their goal was to turn it into an artsy street filled with galleries, furniture stores, and independent shops.
The street that had once exploded onto the scene would slowly fizzle out into oblivion. In 1999, Coconut Joe’s was the last bar to shut down, and with it went the high energy of Electric Avenue.
Exit Sandman, enter the 2000s
Though Electric Avenue was gone for good, there were still issues in the nightlife that lingered after it.
In the early 2000s, when the Cowboys Dance Hall first opened, there was still an incessant culture of binge drinking that not just the city, but also the province, was attempting to forgo.
Many places would have deals such as 10-cent highballs, 50-cent shots, and other egregious deals that some would argue would encourage patrons to drink heavily and constantly. Even cities such as Winnipeg and Edmonton reported that their nightlife would get out of control from these deals.
It wasn’t until 2008 that Alberta implemented laws that capped alcohol prices and set minimum prices bars and restaurants can charge for certain drinks. Currently, an ounce of liquor in Alberta has a minimum price of $2.75—making a 10-cent shot a thing of the past.
Between drink deals and downtown destruction, the concept of a street like this is almost uncanny in the present day, where many laws stand in the way of letting clubbing in Calgary be what it once was.
What a night out in Calgary looks like now
Today, weeknight drinking is rare, and the establishments tend to be more polished, featuring cocktail bars and sit-down pubs.
Nightclubs are still present but not as prevalent. Places such as the renovated Cowboys Dance Hall, Commonwealth, and Ranchman’s have that vibrancy first established in the 1980s. What’s different is how they’ve been dispersed throughout Calgary.
Even the streets that are argued to have replaced Electric Avenue, such as 17 Avenue or Stephen Avenue, don’t bring in the same crowd. New practices like cover charges and the lack of actual dance floors make going out feel more casual than a big event.
Tsu argues that the pandemic has had a major impact on how the younger generation hits the town, with businesses having to comply with social distancing laws and government-mandated curfews in the early 2020s.
“What has changed is [that] the nightlife is just pinned down to Thursday, Friday, Saturdays,” says Tsu.
Bars and restaurants don’t stay open until 2 a.m. on a daily basis as they did back in the day. Most places shut at 12 a.m. during the week, and even then, not many people make it till closing time.
Though there are still crowds, cheap drink deals, and live music, the shift in culture has altered people’s evening plans.
