Historic downtown bank building for sale

The CIBC building on the corner of Jasper Avenue and 101 Street that was built in 1929 has been put up for sale.

A nearly century-old landmark bank building in downtown Edmonton is for sale.

Commercial real-estate broker Colliers has listed the former Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) building on downtown’s main east-west thoroughfare. No asking price is disclosed.

The five-storey building on the northwest corner of Jasper Avenue and 101 Street closed in January, with CIBC moving its downtown branch to Ice District. It is not listed as a protected building, although it is on the city’s inventory of historic resources.

The 60,000-square-foot structure opened in 1929 as the Canadian Bank of Commerce and was extensively renovated 70 years later. The brick-and-masonry-faced structure faced demolition in the late 1980s, when the developers of the adjoining office and retail complex planned to build a second tower on the site, which had been the location of a bank since 1903. Those plans did not go ahead.

CIBC bought the complex, originally called CityCentre, in the early 1990s and renamed it Commerce Place.

The bank’s departure from its longtime home left Jasper Avenue without a branch presence of a major bank for the first time since before Edmonton became a city in 1904. Scotiabank left its nearby namesake office tower complex home in 2022, the Royal Bank of Canada vacated theirs across the street from CIBC in 2020, while TD Canada Trust moved out of its branch further down the road at 117 Street in 2018.