The Olympic Bricks!

A win for the City of Calgary in 2025

I was all ready to post some comics from my old sketchbook series “The Drawing Book,” which is what I usually do here. But instead, I couldn’t resist writing about something that happened yesterday… because it was just so cool.

Back in 1988, Calgary hosted the Winter Olympics. It was a big deal for the city in many ways. Back then, I was a high school student, and I vividly remember the feeling that everyone in the city was part of the experience. We all participated in some way, whether attending an event, trading Olympic pins at a festival tent, watching the opening ceremonies and recognizing people we knew, or crowding into Olympic Plaza in Calgary’s downtown, to watch a medal ceremony.

The open space across from the City Hall, known as Olympic Plaza, was created especially for the Olympic ceremonies. Parts of the Plaza were paved with bricks. Prior to the Olympics, when the Plaza was being built, Calgarians were given the opportunity to pay $19.88 to have a name or other inscription carved into a brick. Olympic Plaza ended up with about 33,000 personalized bricks.

My parents ordered bricks for a few family members. Long after the Olympics were over, we’d still make a stop to look at our bricks at Olympic Plaza, when showing visitors around the city. Somehow, the bricks felt special. They were a tangible reminder of a personal connection to a time and a place. I wish I knew who had the idea for the personalized bricks: it was a good one.

In early 2024, I did some graphic recording at an engagement event down at Olympic Plaza, at which passers-by were asked to share their favourite memories of the place. There were some good answers.

While I was there, I left my graphic recording station for just a minute to walk a few steps away and take a photo of my family’s bricks. This was the picture I took.

Why did I take the picture? Because, in 2025, Olympic Plaza is scheduled for demolition. After all these years, it’s time to use this space for the Arts Commons Transformation project (which sounds pretty cool).

So what about the bricks? Well, that was going to be the end of them. Kind of sad, but there was nothing to be done. I discovered, though, that there’s a pretty cool website where you can search for your brick. That seemed to me like a good enough way to preserve the legacy of Olympic Plaza.

But no! There was an overwhelming response to the news that the bricks would be thrown out. Calgarians wanted their bricks! Yes, these crumbling, forty-year-old, unwashed chunks of masonry… they were important.

How important? Well, my brother, who’s lived in Australia for twenty years and doesn’t feel too sentimental about the years he spent growing up in Calgary, wrote to me to ask if I could save his brick. That’s just one example. But it seems the sentiment was shared by many.

I wish I knew more about how this came together. There are some good articles published by LiveWire’s Aryn Toombs about this (here’s one), but to make a long story short, the City responded to the public outcry by creating a program that would allow people to request, and pick up, their bricks. I just love the fact that this happened. This was definitely a one-time project, something that would have to work just once, and which would never been needed again. But the City did it!

On January 3rd and 4th, Calgarians headed down to the Stampede grounds to collect their bricks. I’m trying to imagine the creativity that was needed on the part of the City staff, to put all these logistics together. It must have been a lot of work!

I loved all these custom-made signs. Like this one:

Bricks were sorted alphabetically. Wow! I’m just imagining what an undertaking this would have been. (Although it feels like the hardest job would have been the actual brick extraction… cutting through all that mortar, during some cold winter days, in attempt to salvage thousands of individual bricks.)

City staffers were there at each table to confirm that the picker-uppers were really who they said they were, and to sort through lists of brick inscriptions and cross off the ones that were being collected.

And more City staff members were there to look through the stacks of bricks and hand them over.

A super helpful City staff member told us that there had been about 8000 bricks requested, and that about 5000 had been successfully extracted.

My family had ten bricks! That meant trips to multiple tables, checking that each one was there, and each time waiting in suspense as the list was checked. We were in luck: eight of our ten bricks had made it! One of them, we were informed, had been damaged and didn’t survive the extraction. (The staff member who told this to us, provided the information with so much consideration and kindness. I’m sure that, for some folks, the news would have been a real disappointment. We were ok, but still appreciated her communication!)

The last of our ten bricks wasn’t there, but wasn’t on the “damaged” list either. Apparently, it might still have been in transit. They took our name and told us they’d let us know… and deliver it to us (!)… if it showed up.

Anyway, I thought this story might be worth sharing, since it really felt like a win for the City. At a time when there is lots of criticism of municipal governments, the folks who organized this project put together a process that responded to the wishes of many Calgarians, and, at least in my case, really delivered. It was fun to walk around that giant warehouse and see all the other citizens who were there for the same reason, along with all the staffers who were helping make the dream possible.

For now, the bricks are sitting on my front porch. I wonder what will happen to them next?

Thanks for reading! I promise comics next week!