Cool ... ClassCon in a piece on the Jubilee Auditorium renovations in my old stomping grounds of Calgary. From the incipit Globe and Mail:
... better yet, I can't ever remember seeing this motto -- or any marble -- at the Jubilee. And this is the place where we had our high school graduation, where I saw Split Enz and Peter Tosh (and had purchased the entire front row for the Pretenders, then the drummer put his hand through a window or something so it was cancelled). Heck, if I knew it was there, I would have taken a photo of it during our stay there this summer. Oh well ... (the other 'anomaly' about the Jubilee auditorium is the statue of Robert the Bruce outside it ... I can't remember the story behind it).
A heap of discarded brass light fittings lay near the front doors of the Jubilee Auditorium, a few metres from the quotation from Suetonius that has greeted every visitor during the past 48 years: "He found the city built of brick -- left it built of marble."
That motto, installed in raised brass letters on travertine, was right in tune with the cult of progress raging in Alberta in the mid-fifties. Nobody seems to have noticed the oddity of affixing the phrase (initially written about Caesar Augustus) to a building that was mostly finished in brick and precast concrete.
... better yet, I can't ever remember seeing this motto -- or any marble -- at the Jubilee. And this is the place where we had our high school graduation, where I saw Split Enz and Peter Tosh (and had purchased the entire front row for the Pretenders, then the drummer put his hand through a window or something so it was cancelled). Heck, if I knew it was there, I would have taken a photo of it during our stay there this summer. Oh well ... (the other 'anomaly' about the Jubilee auditorium is the statue of Robert the Bruce outside it ... I can't remember the story behind it).