In Quotes: East Village construction update

It seems like everyday, something new is taking place in Calgary's fast emerging East Village.

Today, media were taken on a behind-the-scenes tour of construction in both the Simmons Building and on St. Patrick's Island.

Here's some of what went down:

Kate Thompson, architect, director of development CMLC

"[Calgary Municipal Land Corporation] CMLC is the landlord of this building and we have the responsibility of maintaining the historic integrity of the building, but also making it viable for tenants to thrive in the space ... we have three new citizens coming into the space, we have Phil & Sebastian's, we have Charcut and we also have Sidewalk Citizen Bakery."

"This is a robust building. It has huge fir columns that used to support the Simmons Mattress Factory that was in here previously. We have mill-floor construction, for those who don't know what that is, it's basically two-by-fours on the vertical."

Neil MacKimmie, senior development manager, CMLC

"[On St. Patrick's Island] we did a year of public engagement, a year of planning and approvals. We're about 14 months into construction now with the flood somewhere in between there and we've probably got another year to go."

"We did do a reassessment after the flood went through, we wanted to make sure that all of the assumptions we had made when we were planning and designing the island were going to hold true. The park was designed to withstand a one-in-1oo year flood as everything has to be designed to when you're in and around a river but you can see evidence of the flood."