As one of the oldest neighbourhoods in Edmonton, Riverdale tells a story full of drama, interesting characters, and a fair share of controversy — starting with the Cree people the community’s creation displaced. The 1860s search for gold brought European settlers west, and over the next 30 years they developed Fort Edmonton’s first industrial suburb in one of the North Saskatchewan river’s easterly bends.
D. R. Fraser’s lumber mill and J. B. Little’s brickyard provided jobs (Little’s literal home still stands as Little Brick Cafe), and the 1905 subdivision set the neighbourhood’s earliest shape. Collapsing coal mines, floods and uncaring governments didn’t make life easy for residents of the growing community, but with some homes now housing the sixth generation of Riverdalians, it’s clear that when people move here, they never want to leave.
Kristina Eustace of Kresswell Interiors and her husband, Ryan, of Revive Contracting, moved to Riverdale in 2020, and they never want to leave. In fact, they can’t stop falling in love with other homes in the area.
“Being in our industry, we are always looking for projects, either for flips or future moves for us personally,” Kristina says. “We love this neighbourhood so, so much, and when we saw this property, we knew it had lots of potential, but that it was going to come down if somebody else got their hands on it.”
Somebody else got their hands on it long before the Eustaces did, and that somebody was Con Boland. The late photographer was another one of the neighbourhood’s colourful and controversial characters. After he moved into this Riverdale home during the early 1980s, he didn’t want to leave, either.
Boland did want to add to the home, but not in any kind of linear way that contractor Ryan would approve of. “It was very much a DIY, build-as-you-go thing, with no real plan in place,” he says. “It was like disorganized chaos, and it became that for us too, because the more we opened things up, the more we had to fix.”
The first thing they opened up was the original home’s taped-up back door, which now leads from the kitchen to the main living room Boland added on. The original chimney stood opposite that doorway, connected to the massive boiler in the basement.
They boarded up the chimney, removed the boiler and had to close up the ceiling. That’s because as soon as they walked in they saw through parts of it to the second floor — which leads us to the curious case of the mysterious stairways.
If you Google “Con Boland Riverdale house,” you won’t find this one. Instead, you’ll find stories on his other Riverdale house that — much to his then-neighbours’ grief — never reached completion, largely because he kept adding levels. Turns out, adding levels was a lifelong theme.
“So, there’s this set of stairs,” Ryan says, pointing to the stair-way leading from the living room to the second floor. “Then another set of stairs go to the loft, and I remember going up the first time and seeing another set of stairs above me, like a loft in a loft, that was all floor-to-ceiling carpeted, with this kind of upper platform… that was also fully carpeted.”
Flipping through an album documenting the home’s changes over the decades, we spot a photo of Boland and friends taking an upper-level carpeting break back in the ‘80s. Ryan smirks and says he “has some words for them.”
The photos came from Boland’s widow, Rose, who lives across the street. She gave them to the home’s current residents, Jay Sparrow — co-owner of Sea Change Brewing and rockstar of many albums — and his fiancée Michelle Chen, a pharmacist-turned-Vinyasa yoga instructor and baker extraordinaire. A realtor friend put the home on Sparrow’s radar well before renovations were complete.
“All these new builds, it’s like I know exactly where everything’s going to be, and all the choices the designers made creatively,” Sparrow says. “But this one is laid out so weirdly. Like when you go upstairs, there’s this corridor, and then there’s another whole amazing room with skylights, and it just keeps getting more interesting. I liked that I didn’t know how the story was going to end.”
The end is far from written, but it turns out the couple’s story with this house — and Boland — started well before Sparrow first stepped into it. Years prior, Chen attended one of Boland’s “white dinner parties,” at which guests dressed all in white, and says “When [Sparrow] told me about the house, he was like, ‘By the way, do you know who Con Boland is?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, I do!’”
Today, the house — which first went up in 1908 — is fully theirs. The front kitchen is stocked with industrial appliances for Chen’s baking classes, and she teaches yoga in the now carpet-free loft. Beyond the beautiful yard sits the new garage with Sparrow’s recording studio up top. And the living room, where Boland once photographed people like Wayne Gretzky and Jean Chrétien, is the heart of the home.
“I don’t think people really understand how precious Riverdale history is to the people who live here, so it was really important to us that this didn’t get torn down,” Kristina says of the house she and Ryan were only too happy to finish for their new friends. “It’s such an Edmonton story, and we’re so excited that they get to write the next chapter.”
This article appears in the June 2024 issue of Edify
