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A Calgary, Alta. landmark is expanding and improving while keeping itself on a personal scale.

Humpy Hollow Park, named by school children in 1976, is located in Calgary’s growing Beltline neighbourhood and was underutilized before the Beltline Neighbourhoods Association proposed redevelopment of the space in 2018 which was approved by Calgary City Council in December 2019.

Construction began in October 2022 and the redeveloped park was opened to the public in this month. It features a covered performing stage, an enclosed dog park, a plaza and built-in multi-level seating along with improved pedestrian access.

The project was a community-led initiative, DIALOG partner and landscape architect Bryce Miranda said, and as such they were able to work towards specific objectives, including a viable performance space and more hardscape features.

“There’s a significant amount of hardscape versus softscape, and they (the community) wanted to have those performances and play off of the heritage aspect of the McHugh house. That’s why you’ll see that there’s a fairly large amount of hardscape, but we still wanted to capture some of those softer moments. That’s why we have that larger kind of planter wall that’s surrounded by seating and engage people in that that space,” Miranda said.

A seating wall in the park does “double-duty,” he said, by defining a boundary but still allowing for gatherings.

“Even if you don’t have people on it, it softens the space up. The wood is a warming colour. Eventually, over time, it’ll grey and it’ll have more of a soft approach to the site,” he said.

Movable furniture is also part of the space and Miranda said it was added to make the area more inviting.

“If you have movable furniture, it feels like there’s a trust relationship that also gets built up. It’s like the city is trusting the people in the neighbourhood that they’re not going to walk away with it,” he said. “We’re not being explicit about it, but it does bring that sense of ownership of the space, and people, if they’re going into that space, will generally look after these types of amenity items.”

Humpy Hollow Park is home to the McHugh House, a historic building built in 1896 and donated to the City of Calgary in 2014 which still stands at the east edge of the park site. Miranda noted NEXT Architecture is working on restoration of the heritage building while DIALOG focused on the park ‘s interface with the building.

“Our role is to interface the park with the heritage building, to create that community space right on the corner to transform it, so it’s not just a building that’s sitting within a kind of derelict, orphaned space. We’ve embraced it with a modern, contemporary landscape that complements the heritage architecture,” he said.

Other features reflect the personal scale of the space, Miranda added, including ensuring the stage matches the scale of the McHugh building.

“The house is going to be surrounded by taller buildings and to keep to that personal kind of scale of space was something that we wanted to strive for. By doing things like catenary lighting can really do that easily, because it brings the height of the area down to a personal level,” he said.

McHugh House renovations are not complete and the building remains closed, an update on the City of Calgary’s website noted, with completion of those renovations by 2025.