14 The Mill Creek Park Movement and Citizen Activism in Edmonton, 1964–75

Today, the downstream reach of Mill Creek is urban parkland, achieved through the work of citizens who mobilized to halt a freeway and conserve a neighbourhood. From Indigenous camps and river lots to a German working-class district on an early railway, and then to current pressures for high-density redevelopment, the Mill Creek Ravine area has, over the years, exemplified a multi-layered social and cultural landscape with its own politics of land use and activism.

The origins of urban Edmonton lie in twin cities north and south of the North Saskatchewan River. The pressures of city life were a significant challenge as early as 1907. Movement from rural to urban life at the turn of the century was difficult in many cities and was exacerbated by rapid growth in the Canadian West. Town planners advised Edmonton council in 1907 to set aside deep ravines that were valued as community public resources and parks. Planner Frederick Todd was recruited to offer his insights as a Canadian landscape architect from Montréal. Trained in the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted—renowned creator of New York’s Central Park and Montréal’s Mount Royal Park—and familiar with the Garden Cities and the City Beautiful movements, Todd recommended protection of Edmonton’s river valley lands and emphasized the importance of nature in urban life and health.⁶ Public parks were seen as the green lungs of the city. As he put it, “a crowded population, if they are to live in health and happiness, must have space for the enjoyment of that peaceful beauty of nature—which because it is the opposite of all that is sordid and artificial in our city lives—is so wonderfully refreshing to the tired souls of city dwellers.”⁷

Before Mill Creek took shape as a park, its ravine spiralled through various land-use cycles. First Nations’ occupation, colonial settlement, industry, and recreation all shaped the historical landscape. The ravine was home to wildlife: elk, deer, moose, rabbits, coyotes, woodpeckers, bats, frogs, and a multitude of roaming species. Fish swam in the lower reaches of the creek, and, later, Chinese pheasants were introduced. The ravine was also home to many early industries, including the Edmonton, Yukon and Pacific Railway (EY&P), which crossed the North Saskatchewan River, and meat packers like Gainers Meats. Proximity to water, graded elevations, and a train line contributed to such land use and developments. By the early 1900s, meat packers, brick makers, coal mines, lumberyards, and dairies dotted the ravine landscape, as did miners’ shacks and dumping grounds.⁸ A residential street grid extended to the top of the bank. The ravine was neglected as a recreational space by all but free-range children. Between 1940 and the 1970s, Mill Creek Ravine was a dumping ground for polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) products, old transformers, and reeking garbage. A city dump existed where today people and dogs play in a well-used meadow, but, at that time, children were forbidden to play there.⁹ Indigenous, industrial, agricultural, residential, and itinerant uses of the ravine overlapped and coexisted for many decades.

Local neighbourhoods experienced hardships during the Great Depression and World War II. Jobs were scarce and paid little, and many families depended on government relief, charity, food handouts, and the generosity of neighbours and strangers. People built makeshift shacks to dwell in ravines. Mill Creek Ravine near Connor’s Road became the community of Ross’s Acreage.¹⁰ Twenty-five families and bachelors lived there, which was seen as a problem in 1934, when the city declared the ravine to be parkland; by 1950, all had been evicted except for one elderly resident. After World War II, the Mill Creek area was known as a district of German postwar immigrants. Many local Lutheran and Moravian churches and businesses reflected these cultural associations, as did the prevalence of backyard beekeeping, apple trees, and gardens.¹¹ Two German immigrant brothers dug the excavation for Mill Creek Outdoor Swimming Pool using shovels and wheelbarrows in the 1950s. Despite the men’s labour there and in the nearby meat-packing plants, considerable anti-German prejudice persisted. Land prices here were also among the lowest in the city. The neighbourhood east of the creek, by contrast, was an Alberta francophone district and Catholic. By the 1960s, established communities had grown on the footprint of an earlier city.

The City of Edmonton was eager to build freeways in the 1960s, especially ones enabling access to downtown. The METS proposal called for expropriation of the “German Area” to build a four-lane automobile freeway that would run for three-and-a-half miles through Mill Creek Ravine, with the aim of connecting new suburbs in Millwoods to the downtown. In 1964, three thousand citizens objected to this controversial proposal.¹² Still, the city began to prepare for a freeway by re-engineering Mill Creek. In 1966, the creek’s upstream reach was buried fifteen metres deep in a four-and-a-half-metre-high bypass sewer, near 75th Street and Whitemud Freeway, going north to Argyle Road. The lower reach was buried at 93rd Avenue and flowed underground in a pipe until it met an outflow with a fifty-foot drop into the North Saskatchewan River.¹³ Upstream movement of fish and spawning was obstructed. The creek was enjoyed between Argyle and 93rd Avenue as a water runoff system. Because flooding of the creek was common, city engineers built a water control system near 80th Avenue in 1970.

The demographic composition of the Mill Creek area—diverse workers, professionals, women at home with children, and seniors—was a defining neighbourhood characteristic. Residents found housing in Mill Creek affordable to rent or buy. Older housing stock in Old Strathcona resembled the homes and streets in older parts of Canada and the United States. Four-square two-storey homes, bungalows, and old miners’ shacks sat on long, narrow, 33-foot frontage lots, and some lots left open for vegetable gardens. German-Canadian worker families, often Lutheran Church members, and Moravians had established apple trees, bees, and gardens as well as a social culture that valued nature and healthy fresh air. What Mill Creek offered was much like country living complete with rough edgelands and industry in the middle of the city. As an affordable working-class district with heritage elements, it attracted a mix of old and new residents.¹⁴

The University of Alberta (U of A) expanded in the late 1960s. Because the Mill Creek district was inexpensive and not far from campus, many new academics and families moved in. The community benefited, as educated and activist citizens were part of this influx. Ideas of civil rights, urban reform, land ethics, and civic politics moved with the young newcomers—especially those coming from larger cities like Toronto, San Francisco, and New York—who were also shaped by baby-boom demographics, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War.

Carolyn (née Binks) Nutter and Richard (“Butch”) Nutter moved from California to Edmonton in the 1960s for graduate studies at U of A. Carolyn was a Queen’s University BA graduate born in Kingston, Ontario, who had studied at Stanford for a year and worked while her husband Butch, from Shelby, Montana, was in the US Army near San Francisco. They purchased a small house on the Mill Creek Ravine from a German widow in the summer of 1968 and later added a basement. Living an idyllic life, they went to graduate school and cared for four children. Soon, they started new jobs in social work and were active citizens. Much was at risk when they learned that a four-lane freeway would obliterate the neighbourhood and destroy their home.¹⁵ Along with others, they pushed back.

Opposition from nearby neighbours, homeowners, and community leagues was immediate. The head of the City of Edmonton parks and recreation department was also opposed to incursions. Other ravine and valley communities—Riverdale, Cloverdale, and Centretown—were also jeopardized by the METS proposal. The neighbourhoods on the Southside, inspired by the success of Riverdale in halting large transportation projects, also became politicized. The Nutters had lived in California and watched new freeways, like the San Francisco Embarcadero Freeway, wreck communities. American activists also knew that freeways were not a solution to urban traffic congestion. Even in Edmonton, an early freeway proposed for Mill Creek, in 1957, had been opposed—a petition written by the Reverend D.J. Elson of nearby Holy Trinity Anglican Church was signed by seven hundred citizens. “As our population grows, we are going to need more, not less, parkland. I am pleading for those who are silent. I am pleading for our children,” argued Elson.¹⁶

To drum up opposition to the Mill Creek freeway plan in the 1960s, the Nutters composed a brief petition against the Mill Creek Ravine Freeway.¹⁷ In the petition’s preface, they described the importance of the ravine for recreation and conservation: “By virtue of Mill Creek Ravine’s unique elongated shape it has served, not only the year-round recreational needs in a large area otherwise without such facilities, but has also provided a natural wildlife sanctuary.”¹⁸ The activists went door-to-door and were able to collect signatures from seventy-two of the seventy-five households. Comments from the three households that chose not to sign the petition recorded and shared in a neighbourhood newsletter: “I work for a contractor who does business with the city. If I sign this petition the city may stop doing business with my boss”; “The freeway is needed. I’ll move to a different part of town”; “The ravine is so messy and dirty. The freeway will clean it up.”¹⁹

Butch Nutter presented the signed petition to city council in September 1968. He also spoke of the California example as a case against intra-city freeways. Councillors were surprised by the overwhelming opposition to a Mill Creek freeway; they also knew a civic election was coming. Many city dwellers had never known a farm or campground; urban recreational experiences in the wooded ravines and river valley provided residents access to nature in the city’s own backyard. Citizens began to pressure the city to connect the system of ravines in the river valley, to develop walking and biking paths along both banks of the North Saskatchewan River. The community activists also presented alternative solutions to a freeway, including a proposal called “UNI” that called for one-way streets.²⁰

The Nutters, Joe Weinberger, and other activists persisted in organizing opposition to the Mill Creek freeway. The final community meeting, in 1972, was held in the gym at Rutherford School, on the east side of the Mill Creek Ravine. The janitor set chairs on the stage for the city councillors and asked organizers how many to set on the floor for residents. Butch and Joe expected forty to attend. Almost three hundred packed the hall. After the meeting, Alderman Cec Purvis asked Joe and Butch to help organize his campaign to replace MLA J. Donovan Ross as the Social Credit candidate for Strathcona Centre. They agreed that if the Mill Creek Ravine Freeway was stopped, they could probably do some work relevant to the Social Credit nomination meeting. Purvis lost the nomination, but the election of Peter Lougheed’s Progressive Conservatives soon followed.²¹ On 26 May 1972, the Mill Creek freeway came before Edmonton City Council; six voted against the freeway, and Purvis cast the crucial seventh vote to reject it. He was later elected Edmonton’s mayor, in 1977.

The district east of the CPR tracks on Edmonton’s Southside developed without planned parks but had the wooded Mill Creek Ravine. As the population of the area increased, residents argued that they had contributed tax revenue to the city, over a longer period of time than other areas, without an adequate return in terms of recreational areas. In 1972, city councillors agreed that a rejuvenation of the area was warranted. At this point, Mill Creek Ravine was a dumping ground for the city’s winter road sand, used cars, old clothes, and effluence from the Gainers Meat plant and city incinerator. The creek was almost an open sewer, as city storm sewers emptied directly into it.²² The city had neglected to enforce bylaws and environmental protection here near the low-cost district. The ravine had some picnic areas and the public’s favourite Mill Creek Outdoor Swimming Pool. Recreational activities such as skidooing and motorbiking were enjoyed but also damaged the area.

In 1974, the city hired Butler Krebes & Associates, a local landscape architecture firm, which released a $2 million site-development master plan the following year.²³ It proposed the construction of two artificial ice arenas and a new recreational facility complex with volleyball and tennis courts, plus an information centre, and the enclosure of Mill Creek Outdoor Swimming Pool for year-round use. The plan also included large ponds, a new playground, and a working replica of the old Birds Mill at 87th Avenue. The proposed mega-park threatened to remove more than four hundred homes and dislocate residents. The “urban renewal” it also promised would require the removal of an existing community, and, in effect, was an expropriation proposal comparable in scale to the clearance of Africville in Halifax during the 1960s.²⁴ As it was, forty houses ended up being transferred out of the Mill Creek Ravine.

Later, the city told the community that no park would be built in the area at all, because the ravine was the park. The community accepted this resolution but was uneasy. Mill Creek Ravine communities voiced many objections to the proposed master plan; for example, they stated that residents had not been adequately consulted before Butler Krebes designed its plan. By April 1975, residents had organized a group called “Build A Park,” led by neighbours Gurston Dacks, Butch Nutter, and Roger Deegan. The new group was supported by a large coalition of community members who supported a variety of neighbourhood initiatives: Save Tomorrow, Oppose Pollution (STOP), Opportunities for Youth, community leagues, schools, and others, along with a local park committee of Mill Creek residents. It was also sponsored by the city’s parks and recreation department, suggesting a nascent collaboration. The objectives of Build A Park were articulated as a community-based cooperative effort that elevated ecosystem protection to value natural areas and incorporated elements of a people’s park for environmental education and adventure:

1. To help develop ravines as natural areas valuable for environmental education. The ecosystem should be disturbed as little as possible and in fact should be considerably protected.
2. To help parents in the community develop “adventure play grounds” with the cooperation of Edmonton Parks and Recreation.
3. To demonstrate by doing it, that citizens can help short cut the bureaucratic process, build a people’s adventure park in cooperation with the city, and do it quicker and less expensively than the city doing it alone; and have fun, to boot.
4. To help form a strong group of community action volunteers who will carry on the Mill Creek Build A Park.²⁵

Build A Park’s committee members thought that Butler Krebes had underestimated costs. They also criticized the master plan, pointing out that the city would need to obtain 421 lots and almost as many houses for demolition, plus a meat-packing plant, and reroute local motorized traffic. The plan would also affect the local ecology by removing many trees, adding cement-pad parking lots, and increasing pollutants in the creek.²⁶

Build A Park responded to the Butler Krebes plan with an urban environmental counterstrategy. Deegan, a local music composer trained at UCLA, was on Build A Park’s board of directors. He recommended that the city’s planning model address ten specific criteria in a pro-nature and pro-neighbourhood scheme:

1. That the park be a pedestrian park for the over 30,000 citizens who live within walking distance of the park.
2. That mobility issues of the very old, young and handicapped be addressed.
3. That it be a water based park.
4. That the boundaries of the park will not extend to remove present residences.
5. That education be emphasized through signs and displays.
6. That a historic theme be emphasized.
7. That it will include the Gainers building to become the southside parks and recreation department’s headquarters, a community centre and or education centre.
8. That pedestrian and bike connections are made to the River Valley.
9. That it be a community school park.
10. That they do not develop beyond the necessary to reach the above 9 aims.²⁷

Still, the city invoked its own park plan, and tree removal began without notice to the community. One September morning, writer Barbara Dacks, a resident and parent who lived on 87th Avenue, phoned Carolyn Nutter and other neighbourhood women. She said that a large truck had stopped at the end of her block and a bulldozer was being driven off the truck. “What can we do?” was her question. Nutter responded, “We can stop the bulldozer. Get your kids. We’ll bring ours. And we will stop the bulldozer.” They hurried over and ran in front of the bulldozer and asked the workers, “What do you intend to do?” They said, “We were sent to ‘smooth’ out a ‘dangerous’ cutbank on the west side of the ravine.” The women said “No way!” The city employees asked them to move and to let them work. Dacks refused. Finally, the workers asked what they should do and she told them to go back to the shop. The driver got in the truck and drove away. About thirty minutes later, the truck returned and its driver told the bulldozer operator, “Okay, load ’er up. We’re finished here for today.” They drove the Caterpillar D8 bulldozer onto the flatbed and left.²⁸

Arguments between city and community went on for years. In the late 1970s, nearby communities came together again to push the city to retain Mill Creek Ravine Park for its natural characteristics. Gurston Dacks brought forty-five residents together for a meeting convened at Ritchie Community Hall. A Princeton University–trained political scientist, Dacks was hired as a U of A professor in 1971. He suggested that residents ensure that only pathways, walking trails, bike paths, bridges, and picnic sites be constructed as recreation amenities in Mill Creek Ravine. The counterproposal was strategic and helped to refocus on a modest plan. The city welcomed it, given budgetary realities, and designed a ravine park with benches, picnic tables, paths, and eighteen footbridges crossing the creek at intervals—three of these were original EY&P trestle bridges retained for heritage value, and fifteen were newly built Glulam bridges. Still, some nearby residents were dismayed by the wide paved bike paths and the number of bridges.²⁹ Many questioned why the city had even sought community consultation and involvement. Local newspaper journalist and bicycle-guide writer Gail Helgason wrote that “the 18 monstrosities which criss-cross little Mill Creek might be more appropriate over the Nile.”³⁰

The residents questioned why the city repeatedly proposed grand schemes for the ravine. Designs to build parks and recreation facilities in Mill Creek mirrored the top-down freeway engineering of METS. This plan ran against the public’s expressed desire for a park with nature appreciation, play, and outdoor education as an essential focus. To them, the creek and woods were the invaluable amenity. Over the years, the public engaged in tactics such as petitions, a peaceful blockade, and mobilization of local stakeholder groups, which culminated in a civic political process that proved worthwhile. Community stakeholder groups generated a counterproposal for a park and backed it up by writing a nature education curriculum for schools, a curriculum implemented by some teachers but never officially adopted). Neighbours invested in the commons as their own public asset.

Drawing on environmental and urban reform movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and other local and far-reaching influences, the Mill Creek movement adopted a distinctive mix of tactics and ideas centred on the environmental and social benefits of Mill Creek as a ravine ecosystem and a people’s park for enjoyment as a public amenity. In choosing a nature park as their form of resistance to the auto-centric city planning outgrowth of postwar urban capitalism, local citizens grounded a counterhegemonic critique in everyday practice and advocacy, introducing elements of grassroots activism and democratic civil debate to city administration and city hall. The freeway and mega-park plans were pushed back, and, as a result, the demolition of hundreds of homes and a mass dislocation of residents were avoided and the forested ravine lands were conserved as a naturalized urban park.

Multi-layered stories entwine in Mill Creek as a cultural landscape with a social and ecological history. Changing and overlapping social groups have occupied the area, where people and other species have lived together. Today it forms an ecological backbone for biodiversity, habitat, water drainage, and air as well as for social needs: dwelling, recreation, health, and spiritual rest. During the pandemic, the need for urban parks was all the more evident and, in the years to come, as cities seek to address issues of climate change, natural areas within city limits like Mill Creek will only grow in importance to a city’s population.

Neighbours and a grassroots coalition of interests and creative thinkers turned the tide of freeway development and public park making. They dared to take on city hall, and they won. This action was a philosophical expression of environmental values and faith in democratic civic process, contemporaneous with influences that were both local and transnational. The spirit and strategies of grassroots urbanists were much in evidence, as neighbours became activists together in efforts to save their homes and the local woods. A closer look at the Mill Creek Park movement sheds light on Edmonton’s culture of civic activism in the 1970s and the people who helped to shape it.

As current plans for Edmonton-area parks push extravagant engineering schemes that intensify recreational and even industrial uses of the river valley, it is worth remembering the Mill Creek movement of the 1970s and how it played out to reassert the foremost value of ecosystems both in everyday practices and in civic politics. Today, the story remains relevant: current neighbourhood resistance to development of the public commons owes much to efforts first put forward to stop a freeway and build a community-driven park instead of an expropriated recreational landscape of urban displacement.

Prospects have turned to “daylighting” Mill Creek’s outflow with intent to surface a buried drainage and restore its river mouth and fish habitat, but infill politics continue to challenge mature neighbourhoods at the same time as local neighbours continue to confront them. Today, the City of Edmonton manages “nature” in Mill Creek while the River Valley Alliance engineers the river valley with paved trails and pedestrian bridges, and EpCor constructs a new power plant on the valley floor.³¹ Key questions first raised over forty years ago remain: Who has the right to the city as an ongoing negotiation and creation of space and social life?³² How are the values of conserving complex natural and cultural landscapes weighted, compared with the aims of urban redevelopment? Local people and residents can assert their active rights to imagine and shape the city, even in the face of state planners and capital.

The fight against the freeway and the battle of the bulldozer in Edmonton were emblematic of the environmental movement across Canada and elsewhere in the era. Mill Creek represents one of many civic efforts to stand up and speak out for the neighbourhood and the local woods. Its significance today speaks to a wellspring of conservation values and the power of the public to push back against the market and the state’s rationalistic urban design order. This movement insists on a bottom-up civics and modernity, one that values and embraces the environment and the neighbourhood as a shared commons and home.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the citizens who took part in the Mill Creek Park movement, many of whom still live in the neighbourhood, and those currently working to ensure mature neighbourhoods and public parks as heritage legacies for the future.