I'm a Liverpudlian

[mbarrick]

I've been reading "Historical Atlas of Vancouver and the Lower Fraser Valley" by Derek Hayes and have had a few old mysteries about certain streets cleared up. Ever wonder why the block between Alberni and Georgia streets is so narrow and why Alberni abruptly ends at Burrard? Or why, excluding Georgia, Davie, Pacific and Nelson, none of the streets west of Burrard match up with the streets east of Burrard? And why does Burrard, the busiest north-south street through downtown, just end at 16th? Or why there is a bizarre dog-leg in Oak Street at 16th? Or why on Granville there are shops north of 16th abruptly giving way to giant lots with mansions on the south side of 16th? What's up with that great big square of nothing in Richmond between Alderbridge, Westminster Highway. Garden City and Shell Road?

Well the mismatching of streets downtown on either side of Burrard is because, prior to incorporating together in 1886, there were two separate town sites on the downtown peninsula. East of Burrard was "Granville" and west of Burrard to Stanley Park was "Liverpool". Granville was laid out with the long side of the block parallel to Burrard, whereas Liverpool had the short side parallel to Burrard. Pacific, Davie, Nelson and Robson more or less line up by accident. Granville was a CPR townsite and Georgia was already established as main street so the planners of Liverpool carried it through despite that it interrupts their grid, thus the narrowness of the block between Alberni and Georgia, the after-the-fact dog-legs at Smithe-Haro and Dunsmuir-Melville, the weird left-over street-to-nowhere that is Eveliegh, and all the other "what were they thinking?" weirdness that happens at Burrard.

And why does Burrard itself just suddenly end at 16th? Because, in 1886, that's where Vancouver ended. The original city limit was at 16th and all the space beyond was unincorporated nothing. When the Interurban electric railway was built between New Westminster and Vancouver the people that had land in the intervening unincorporated space got together to incorporate everything from Point Grey to North Road as a new municipality. There was a disagreement over the name. The farmers in the eastern part wanted it named "Burnaby" after Colonel Moody's secretary Robert Burnaby, who was the first to survey and map Burnaby Lake. Real estate speculators who wanted to make money selling lots near the Interurban line wanted to call the new municipality "South Vancouver" since they thought that was a more marketable name. They split the territory at what became Boundary Road. To the east was Burnaby, to the west was South Vancouver. South Vancouver incorporated in 1891. Burnaby in 1892. Like the Liverpool/Granville join, the grid for South Vancouver was laid out separately from the grid in Vancouver, thus the mis-match of Oak at 16th.

Because land was cheaper in South Vancouver than in Vancouver lots in the east were marketed to blue-collar sorts. The municipal government of South Vancouver refused to go into debt and roads and other services weren't getting built fast enough to suit the richer land-owners in the western part, so they split off (at Cambie Street, then called Bridge Street) in 1908 and formed the municipality of Point Grey. The abrupt change in zones on Granville at 16th is because at the time houses like Hycroft Mansion were being built, they weren't in Vancouver. Point Grey and South Vancouver were separate municipalities up until 1929, and it is no accident that the new (and current) Vancouver city hall, built shortly after amalgamation, is at 12th and Cambie, more or less where the three municipalities met.

So what's the connection to all this and that weird patch of nothing in the middle of Richmond? It goes back to the Interurban - and this is funny in a painfully stupid kind of way. The original line of the Interurban, built in 1891, connected New Westminster and Vancouver, spurring the creation of Burnaby and South Vancouver. In 1902 a second line was opened to Steveston. That's what the railway tracks beside Arbutus Street in Vancouver and along Shell Road in Richmond are. In the 1920's someone had the brilliant idea of putting an airport along the Interurban line in Richmond and that blot of nothing is it. When planes got bigger and longer runways were needed the airport was moved to Sea Island, but think about it for a second. In 1986, in order not to look like dufuses with the rest of the planet looking millions were spent to build the original line of SkyTrain between Vancouver and New Westminster. Guess what path it follows? The path of the electric railway that was there in 1891. And right now, again simply to not look like dufuses with the rest of the planet looking because of the 2010 Winter Olympics, hundreds of millions more are being spent to build rail transit to Richmond that we had in 1902 and a connection to the airport that we effectively had before there was an airport. It seems that in the area of transit all we've managed to accomplish in the last twenty-one years is flail around trying to rebuild what was in place over a century ago.

Comments

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

i'll have to pick up that book...and it is a shame that the car and oil companies effectively destroyed the interurbans...if they had been left alone it would have been an easy upgrade to light rail or something similar...and they covered the entire city...

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

No kidding. At least we didn't go so far down that path as L.A.

[sovietnimrod.livejournal.com]

I dunno... in some ways that might have been better. If they had of pushed for a downtown highway going through Strathcona in the early 1970s, I doubt we'd have much of the congestion we have now. I don't know of any other major North American city with depends on arterial roads like Oak, Granville, First Avenue, Stanley Park Causeway, etc. for servicing the downtown core. Sure it makes the city look nice but at what cost from auto pollution from gridlock?

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, by the time the freeways were being proposed in the 1960's it was already abundantly clear that L.A. had made a big mistake with the freeways resulting massive urban decay as the middle class completely abandoned the downtown core in favour of the suburbs. All the cities that had followed through on atomic-age visions of autopia were starting to show signs of the same rot.

Our gridlock and the dearth of parking downtown is planned. It keeps people living downtown, and with people living downtown, downtown remains livable. We're unlike an other major North American city by design, because we were slow enough on the uptake to see that they'd all made a mistake.

Now the irony is downtown has become *too* livable. Council has had to put a moritorium on approving any more residential developments downtown because it's causing the the cost of commerical space to go up. Rents in office towers have gotten too high and now *businesses* are fleeing the downtown core. People living downtown are increacing being forced into reverse-commutes. This I know about all too personally.

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

yeh look at what happened to detroit...that's by far the worst case scenario...

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

personally i'm glad they didn't do that...seattle is a nightmare on the i5, so many ramps and guideways...most cities that have high volume roadways going through the middle of town are plain ugly...it's not worth it...

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

i picked up the book today and am reading it myself...one of the striking pictures early in the book is the one of the burrard inlet which shows downtown and stanley park as an island...too bad it wasn't kept that way...

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

That same image is in the Mayor and Councillors' bathroom at Port Moody city hall.

I think it is artistic licence, though. None of the survey maps show that passage, nor is there any history of the Carroll/Columbia Street area being filled. The first fill in False Creek came from the dirt moved to make the Grandview Cut, which wasn't until 1910-13.

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

well in the books i've read on the inlet it has mentioned there was some sort of connection between false creek and burrard inlet...it was larger than a small creek, but not nearly as big as the one pictured there...

[turtle-time.livejournal.com]

It's always disconcerting to re-realize how much of Vancouver's geography I've forgotten. Reading the first section of your post, I was trying to picture it in my mind and I had a really difficult time. It's amazing what thirteen years away (and two kids and age) will do to one's mind.

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Fortunately there's the Internet. Google maps to the rescue!

[magiknat.livejournal.com]

It's funny how things work out like that. The funniest thing about Sydney is that it was built in a haphazard, slap-it-together-quick kind of fashion, so there's no grid at all. No streets are numbered- they all have names. Usually, the reason that a road will take an abrupt turn or have a strange deviaion in it is that there was a bigass tree or boulder that no one could be bothered to move... so they just went around it. Of course, it looks hilarious now because the tree has since died and there's a strange twist in the road for no apparent reason.

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Any city that was started before the late 18th century is like that. Downtown New York has very little rhyme or reason to it. Wall Street, for example, is just the space left from where they took down the old city wall. Taxi drivers in London go to school to learn how to navigate the mess of random streets in the old part of town.

Sydney is odd because it is unusual for a post-Enlightenment city not to have a Cartesian grid layout. There is probably some interesting history as to why that didn't happen. Vancouver, on the other hand, is funny because everything was planned - except how the plans would fit together.

[magiknat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the interesting reason is that they couldn't get the damn trees out of the way and they were in such a damn hurry and the only stuff to build with was sandstone because the damn trees explode periodically! Aweseome!

[sovietnimrod.livejournal.com]

That is an awesome book. It also explains the haphazard street alignment in the enclave known as District Lot 301 in Mount Pleasant.

From what I haved gathered in my research and readings, the Liverpool name for downtown was never used except in the very initial planning stages before anything was built.

What I always wonder is: if Port Moody had been the final terminus of the CPR, what would our downtown core (which would have been located in Port Moody) looked like. Probably developed a lot like San Francisco judging from the more hilly terrain, and likely Port Moody and New Westminster would have joined up as expansion would have naturally occured between those two cities. Until New Westminster's fire in 1898, the Royal City was still the hub of the Lower Mainland.

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

It's unlikely that the CPR ever really thought of Port Moody as the end of the line. In the original concept of the railway the terminus was going to be Victoria with the line heading over the North Shore and up Squamish, through the mountains and across to Vancouver Island, but there is no viable pass between Squamish and the straight so the idea was scrapped (although the E&N had already been built on the Island with the intention of being the last leg of the transcontinental line). The federal government named Port Moody as the terminus as a purely political move ("We've hit salt water therefore we've got a railway from coast to coast. Promise met. KTHNXBYE.") Even with the naming of Port Moody as the official terminus by the government the option for the CPR to carry on west at their discretion was built right into the wording.

At the time the Burrard Inlet was not considered a good harbour. The currents through first narrows were very difficult for sailing ships to manage. And even with the introduction of steam-ships, Port Moody remains a pretty crappy port. Even the pleasure-boat launch at Rocky Point (http://www.cityofportmoody.com/Parks+and+Recreation/Parks/Rocky+Point+Park/default.htm) has to be dredged. The nearest deep water is where Reed Point Marina is along the Barnet Highway or where the IOCO refinery site is on the North shore - and there is no level ground in either spot for a rail-yard. Port Moody never really had a chance.

[seymour-glass.livejournal.com]

it is interesting in one of the early maps how it has the railway heading more south of point grey to the coast...though there would have been no place for a viable port such as burrard inlet there...that would have been a strange twist of fate...also interesting is the proposed port on boundary bay in some of the maps...it's right where i lived for a couple of years when i was a kid...thing is the tide there goes way out at low tide...

A little more about nothing....

[van-champion.livejournal.com]

At some point after 1920, the federal government decided to turn the big square of nothing in central Richmond into a giant radio antenna farm. I'm not clear on all the details, but I believe it was for monitoring sea and air traffic. It held this function up until a few years ago. There has been much talk of Olympic developments, but such has been delayed, because both the Musqueam and the Agricultural Land Reserve have laid claim to it. Ah, layers of government....

Richmond's development is a rather interesting counterpoint, because it has been so rapid. With the exceptions of Steveston Village, Eburne (On Sea Island across from Marpole, now dismantled and replaced by the Arthur Laing Bridge) and what still is occasionally called Brighouse, there was practically nothing right up until the mid-1960s. The first apartment towers were from the end of that decade, and are still standing today (by our main public library). At the time, everyone was afraid that a plane would crash into them. And look at us now. We haven't exactly digested the demographic surges very well, but when one considers how most of the city is less than 40 years old, even though we were incorporated in 1879....

[neverletmedown.livejournal.com]

I love this kind of trivia. Some of the stuff (like why the blocks are lengthier going north-south east of Burrard, and lengthier east-west west of Burrard) I knew ahead of time. Yet I never knew why Eveleigh Street existed... it's just the most illogical street in Vancouver.

I knew of the original city limits of Vancouver, but never clued into it being the reason why Burrard ended there.

Another favourite trivial thing of mine is that the name of the streets along Broadway by Granville (ie: Fir Street, Hemlock Street, Oak Street, Maple Street, Cypress Street, Heather Street, etc) were origially supposed to be in alphabetical order, but somebody mixed up the files.

Interesting about the airport/railway connection, but I was under the impression that the railroad lines along Arbutus continued south into Richmond via Railway Avenue (which is basically directly south of Arbutus and has the same pathway where the railway once existed). I didn't know they also went along Shell Road, but it would explain why it's currently used as a cargo rail line.

I was actually going to say, if you're really enjoyng this, you should definitely try to get your hands on a copy of "Vancouver and its Region" by Graeme Wynn and Timothy Oke. It's a course prerequisite for Geography 210 (an intro urban geography course appropriately taking the name of the book... the author, Wynn, usually teaches the course). But it continues on with stories of such, going into the depths of why Vancouver and its suburbs exist the way they do. I personally think it's a fascinating read.

[neverletmedown.livejournal.com]

Oh, and for my History of British Columbia seminar course I'm currently taking, my group had to do a presentation on the suburban development of Greater Vancouver. Part of the reason why neighbourhoods like Kerrisdale and Commercial Drive appeared was because they built tram lines out into 'nowhere'... so many families would head to the furthest line (ie: Kerrisdale, Steveston) so that they could build a large house with a farm/garden. The article we had to read for that class basically discussed how Vancouver was very different from any other Canadian city in the early 20th century because there were no other cities where the residential neighbourhoods within the city limits were single family houses with gardens.

Okay, I'm babbling! That's what happens when you inspire a geography major with your Livejournal! ;D

[(Anonymous)]

Three cheers for the glorious municipal councils! It seems a shame they stick to things like transit, planning and bylaws. Imagine the folly had they jumped on the dot.com bandwagon!

~b

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

ROFL