McNab Park memorial gateway and plaque, ca. 1960.
HOMEtown Reflections
Photo Credit: Local History Room - Saskatoon Public Library - QC-215-2
mcnab park Born in the shadow of the atom bomb, McNab Park was once a symbol of the rising tensions between East and West known as the Cold War. Today, this quirkiest of Saskatoon neighbourhoods is the site of a shiny new business park. But for more than half a century, it was a place to call home. Tucked between Circle Drive and the airport, the McNab Park area was first surveyed more than a hundred years ago, during
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the city’s first big real estate boom just before the First World War. Like dozens of other fringe-area subdivisions from those days, Devonshire Heights and Drummond Place were never more than a speculator ’s daydream. Nothing would be built there until 1952, when the Saskatoon airport underwent a major expansion as an air force training base. Indeed, the story of McNab Park is inextricably
linked to the history of aviation in Saskatoon. Spirits Soar Few things symbolize the exuberance and optimism of the 1920s better than the airplane. The “Roaring ‘20s” they called them, and the thing that roared loudest were the engines of aircraft taking to the skies. Newspapers were full of the exploits of daring aerialists as they set and broke records almost daily. Aviation had
By: Jeff O’Brien
come to Saskatoon in 1919, when Stan McLelland started a flying service out at the west end of 22nd Street. By 1930, Saskatoon had the second largest flying club in Canada and our own aerial celebrity, Nellie Carson, who set an aviation record that year by flying to 16,000 feet without an oxygen mask. Saskatoon had its own airport by then, west of Avenue A just past 51st Street. It was a humble affair, with a couple of hangars and a small
