Paula Simons

Ride the rails for prizes

When the new LRT stations at Southgate and Century Park opened, my daughter and I decided to ride the rails to see them, just for fun. Beside us sat a man and his young son, doing the same thing. They lived on the north side of the river. It had been years, the dad said, since he'd visited Southgate -- his parents brought him to see Santa Claus. When we got past the mall, he grinned. Never, he said, had he seen this part of Edmonton. I thought it an odd exchange -- until Scott McKeen wrote a column about Edmonton's north-south divide. The online comments it provoked astonished me: south-siders confessing -- bragging -- that they'd never been north of the river.