With its towering steel and glass skyscrapers, its endless modern suburbs, and its collective focus on the future, Calgary propagates its own greatest myth: that it is a city without history. But native archaeological sites, a reconstructed Mounted Police fort, and hundreds of historic homes, warehouses and commercial buildings that have escaped the wrecker's ball record the development of a nineteenth century cattletown into a twenty-first century metropolis.

Alternating boom-and-bust cycles created their own legacies, providing architectural examples of the pre-First World War real estate boom, a late 1920s economic recovery and the petroleum wealth that flowed after the Leduc oil discovery of 1947. Illustrated with over 300 contemporary and archival photos.