Program History
The Alberta Main Street Program was created through a three-way partnership of the Alberta Historical Resources Foundation, Alberta Community Development (then Alberta Culture and Multiculturalism) and the Heritage Canada Foundation. The program’s mandate and history are distinct from that of the Main Street Alberta program, an earlier downtown beautification initiative of the Devonian Foundation that was active from 1973 to 1980.
The Alberta Main Street Program is inspired by, and based upon, the approach of the U.S. National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Main Street Program. This program began in the mid-1970s with a series of successful pilot projects that emphasized heritage preservation as part of a broad, coordinated strategy of design enhancement, organization-building, marketing and economic development. This comprehensive approach, of which physical improvements were but a part, was adopted by Heritage Canada with the 1978 launch of its own Main Street Canada Program through a series of pilot projects across Canada. One of these pilot projects was Alberta’s own Fort Macleod.
Recognizing the value of Heritage Canada’s work and the Main Street approach, the Alberta Historical Resources Foundation launched its own program in 1987. Through the new program, the Foundation collaborated with Heritage Canada in a series of communities that included downtown Medicine Hat and Calgary’s Inglewood commercial district. Heritage Canada withdrew from the partnership in 1994 to focus on other initiatives, but Alberta’s Main Street program has continued to thrive and support municipal heritage preservation with funding and administration provided the Alberta Historical Resources Foundation and Alberta Community Development’s Heritage Resource Management Branch respectively. The program is currently only one of two province-wide main street programs in Canada (the other being Québec’s Rues Principales program).
Through nearly two decades of close collaboration with project communities and partners across the province, the Alberta Main Street Program has adapted and refined preservation and revitalization strategies for Alberta municipalities and contributes to a framework in which communities can participate in Alberta's Municipal Heritage Partnership Program and Canada’s Historic Places Initiative.
Historic Fort Macleod’s Empress Theatre, one of the town’s early Main Street restoration projects
The Alberta Main Street Program is rooted in more than three decades of downtown revitalization experience.