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Granville Street reborn as the No. 1 party spot

February 22nd, 2010 · 30 Comments

One of the many interesting phenomena that have emerged during the Games (which is actually turning into a giant social experiment in our city) is the way the massive crowds are redefining public space in Vancouver.

They’re congregating in places no one quite expected and voting with their feet on what space they think is the most amenable.

So far, the winner in that competition is the new fixed-up Granville Street. Somehow it just feels much more like a pedestrian party space that even Robson. While there are lots of pedestrians on Robson, it still feels mostly like a street temporarily closed to traffic.

But Granville feels like the urban place. That’s partly because of the remake, with the cool vertical light poles that give the street a special feel. It’s partly because of the Lunar festival artwork that got set up near Georgia and Granville. And it’s partly because the street doesn’t feel like just a regular street, with its wide sidewalks and not-quite-a-road road.

So when I went walking down there yesterday, it had all the most interesting activity. The pin-sellers were there up and down the street. The buskers were setting up their music spots (the business association organized for 120 of them to be down there for the Games). Kids were stamping happily on the wooden stands for the lantern trees, part of the Lunar Festival art.

The homelessness activists, showing some creative savvy, had three people “sleeping” on the street with sleeping bags thrown over them and crudely lettered cardboard signs at their feet giving some of the details about homelessness, lack of a federal housing strategy, and more. (And people were snapping pictures and gathering around like crazy.)

This is the street where impromptu hockey games have been staged. It’s also the street that has a rise in it at Georgia, so that you can get a sense of the river of people on it by looking down the slope.

All of that is making everyone along the street — and beyond — rethink how it might be used.

Charles Gauthier is the director of the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association, a group that fought for well over a decade to try to get cars back on the street. Now, seeing how successful it is, they have not just stopped talking about cars. They’re even interested in getting the buses off from time to time.

“People are asking us, ‘How often can we close Granville down?'” he said. Not every day, but maybe Saturdays and Sundays, if the crowds continue to appear. No one wants a dead street. But if it can be like this, where people are using it as kind of their back yard, the businesses there would love to see more of that.

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  • Rico

    I am no longer a Vancouverite, but still visit. It seems to me that with the long period of construction on Granville followed by the Olypics drivers have adjusted their commuting patterns and Granville could be closed to car traffic with minimal disruption. I think it would be a mistake to close it to bus traffic (except for special events) as the distances are to long for many pedestrians without using transit. It would be nice to see more outdoor cafes /street food, store displays etc to continue to give the street energy.

  • Sharon

    this is how the Summer Spaces program should have been developed. Look at what instinctively happens and then facilitate rather than pick a spot and force it on everyone. The energy on Granville is amazing and weekend closures make a lot of sense.

    Now, we should start identifying spot #2

  • gmgw

    There was a time– maybe 40 years ago– when Granville was still a pleasant shopping promenade. I remember it well. That, of course, was long ago. The last nails in the coffin of the civilized Granville were the closing of, first, the Bon Ton, and more recently the Granville Book Company, after its landlord tripled the store’s rent. The GBC was the last bastion of genuine culture on the street (discounting the Orpheum, which has not oriented itself toward its Granville entrance for many years). The final insult to the street was last year’s wholesale removal of the trees that once lined it all the way to the bridge. They were clearcut as part of the makeover; a wantonly destructive and stupid act, as it would have been easy to retain them with a few tweaks to the redesign. When the City clearcut those trees, they transformed a merely unattractive street into a butt-ugly one. The trees were Granville’s one saving grace; they compensated for the rundown facades of the hotels and the glass-and-chrome garishness of the new meatracks and boozecans, which is only heightened by the new vertical light fixtures.

    Of course, with the trees gone, there’s now more room for the nightly herd of yahoos to stagger about in a drunken stupor, vomit, fight with each other, scream, yell, mill about like sheep, toss garbage about, piss in doorways, strut about and flaunt their hardbodies, bait the cops, and generally carry on; all of which makes the street more attractive to a certain mindset, I guess. I’ve been avoiding Granville as much as possible for some time now (I made the mistake of walking down the street from Georgia to the bridge on the day before the Olympics opened. It was already descending into nightmare). I shall continue to do so, quite likely permanently (with the notable exception, of course, of the Film Festival, as long as it continues to center around the Granville 7…).
    gmgw

  • Urbanismo

    http://www.alternet.org/story/145754/the_olympics_and_its_stars_pimp_for_junk_food

  • Paul Hillsdon

    @gmgw. I suspect it’s time you go back down to Granville for some new perspective. This is not the same street as even two years ago.

    As I wrote on Gord Price’s blog:

    I suspect the powers that be didn’t realize how ready Vancouver would be for a truly pedestrianized Granville – just as the City overestimated the Burrard bike lane in the 90’s.

    Tear out the bollards. It completely ruins the space. And keep the buses on Howe and Seymour – they work just fine there. Leave Granville as the celebration street. More public art, more street performers, more festivals, more people, more reason to be – that is the future of Granville.

  • gmgw

    @Paul Hillsdon:
    Is it the same street as it was ten days ago? That’s the most recent occasion on which I walked the length of Granville. Please, tell me of the positive changes that have been brought to the street since that time, and I’ll reconsider my “perspective”.
    gmgw

  • Suzie Smith

    I cannot stand the retail business obsession with parking, like that’s the draw. It’s soooo retro. Whatever happened to capitalism – drawing people with your business, service and product? Transit and pedestrian areas are the wave of the future.

  • Paul

    Public spaces cannot be everything to everyone.

    While one person’s idea of a good time may be flipping through the pages of the latest Atwood and nibbling on a “Canadian Cheese” while waiting for the Cremaster marathon to begin, another may just want to go out and party.

    The huge numbers on Granville are proof that there is demand for the latter and it is fair to expect a public space designed to accommodate and contain it.

    Try perhaps to assume that Granville Mall may no longer belong to what it once was and has evolved into something else for someone completely different. Don’t cry and whine about it.

  • landlord

    @gmgw : Even 40 yrs ago Granville left a lot to be desired. But enough nostalgie de la boue, come on over to West Broadway. We’ve got the Bon Ton, several decent bookstores, cafes and street trees. Not to mention plenty of boomers like you and me.

  • Voony

    We shouldn’t draw too hasty conclusion on the Granville street experience;

    There is a big confusion between a “Celebration” street and a “pedestrian” street.
    If you want understand the difference, Paris will provide you a good example:

    if you want a memorable pedestrian street experience , Go to “rue Montorgueil” or “rue des Mouffetards”…but to celebrate…off course “Champs Elysee” is the place to go !
    (check Google if you don’t know)

    here people seems to draw some misleading conclusion from a mere experience of “extraordinary” time on the sustainability of some pedestrian space
    (I know some people gonna cite Las ramblas in Barcelona, but Las Ramblas is not fully pedestrian, it is also open to car traffic in normal time…)

    Paul Hillsdon draws conclusion of a celebrating Granville when gmgw draws conclusion of a pedestrian Granville.

    Why the Robson#Granville space work well?

    may be urban furniture and urban art help but are they the catalyzers?

    The most noticeable change I have noticed is the urbanization of the corner Robson#Granville : The building form, envelop and scale provide a very urban feeling to the corner
    (you could say they are same scale at Georgia#Granville, but Georgia is wider than Robson, so harder to fill…and Georgia drawn naturally less pedestrian traffic than Robson)

    …The screens at 798 Granville is not without remembering the one of Dundas Square in Toronto (which has taken NYC Time square as model), and act as a focal point.
    the projection on the Sears building help also. Dundas Square concept has been an instant hit…Robson#Granville makes no exception.

    France is right: Robson is not working well as a pedestrian mall: why? scale proportion is not there: too large avenues (you can not meandering in the street wide without risk of losing sight your buddies) with too low building…Granville is only marginally better South of Robson…

    So what we see look more as a “place to hang around” at Robson#Granville (eventually because Robson Square doesn’t work as an urban space) and “celebration” time bring people to spill over on Granville and Robson…

    Put either of them permanently pedestrian only could not necessarily be a good idea because 1- the ratio street wide building height (south of Robson) could be not appropriate for a pleasant experience: the pedestrian could fill lost in a space clearly not conceived for its scale 2- It could be not enough pedestrian traffic year around to generate this “bustling street” feeling we like in the pedestrian mall (and by the way necessary for the business sustainability…so vicious circle…).

    The only successful pedestrians mall I know are street turned pedestrian primarily to improve traffic flow, not because pedestrian mall are “cool” …and make no mistake, Time Square success in New York is no exception to the rule…

    ( I know some people gonna cite third street in Santa Monica or… Whistler…Disneyland…touristic area obey to a different logic, but still they got the ratio street wide building height of successful European experience).

    Don’t get me wrong, I love pedestrian streets, but you need to have the appropriate context for it.

    That say, the Granville slope is well pointed: it is also a feature of the Paris ‘Champs Elysee” and one of the reason feeling of “celebration” can be so impressive here…

    At the end, have a kind of a mix with bus routes function of the time of the day or day of the week is by far the worst scenario…

  • Frank Murphy

    Some people gonna cite Las Ramblas sure but we happened upon the Merce Festival in September. Papers said next day there were 1.6 million people in the relatively small mediaval core of the old city.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7J_LQYOicI

    This mass claiming of public space has to be a good thing, eh?

    And Havana’s Prado is pretty cool too –

  • gmgw

    You cannot create a sustainable combination of pedestrian street and party zone. It’s either one or the other. Granville’s wall-to-wall bars and clubs completely dominate the street-level ambience and make walking along it at night a ghastly experience for non-drinkers or anyone over 35. During the day it has the shoddy, cheap, dirty look of an abandoned amusement park. Paul says that we (I) should try to accept that the street has “evolved” (I’d say devolved) into something other than it was. Do tell. All that’s needed to complete that devolution is extensive installation of stainless steel and ceramic surfaces, to facilitate the hosing off of the blood, puke, piss and spilled beer each night after closing time.

    Landlord’s citing of west Broadway is a lot closer to what a pedestrian-friendly street should be. What distinguishes west Broadway is the same thing that distinguishes south Main and the Drive; A diverse range of interesting, independent retailers (i.e. a minimum of franchises and chain stores), civilized places to eat lunch or dinner or maybe just have a glass of wine, a couple of small grocers, a coffeehouse or two (preferably with live acoustic music or jazz in the evenings); in short, a neighbourhood ambience, palpable even if you don’t live there. West Broadway has this for now. But you can bet that the developer/sharks are eager to do for West Broadway what they did for Fourth Avenue. Once one of the most interesting walking streets in the city, with a plethora of heritage storefronts and an eclectic mix of small retailers, bakeries, and crafts stores, Fourth’s ambience was largely destroyed by the Caper’s development, which brought the “Vancouverism” model of high-end condos upstairs with retail spaces downstairs and leases so expensive that only major retailers can afford them (RIP Duthie’s). What heritage remained on Fourth is pretty much gone, replaced by some of the ugliest concrete-fronted retail buildings in the city– which house cell-phone outlets and the like. Fourth has become a street you go to for specific shopping, not strolling. It will be little short of miraculous if West Broadway, Commercial Drives, and the so-called SoMa can hold back this foul tide much longer.

    There were attempts made a few years ago to “Robsonize” Granville and turn it into another high-end retail strip. The makeover of the street-level shops in the Commodore building in the wake of Granville Book Company’s departure are the showpieces for this failed process. “Failed”, because as I’ve already pointed out, Granville’s dominant, party-hearty ambience makes it impossible to build any other kind. John Fluevog, almost the only distinctive retailer on Granville these days, carries on as he has for decades, but the rest of Granville is a hideous hodgepodge of drinking establishments, a few surviving porno shops, the blessedly still-going-strong Templeton, Charlie’s Place (how does a large used-CD shop survive these days?) and assorted other odds and ends. Granville is obviously a street in transition. Unfortunately it’s a transition very much for the worse.

    Voony suggests the Third Street Mall in Santa Monica as a model. This two-block pedestrian-only strip works as an area for walking– sort of– but its retail component is terrible. Big fashion chains (Gap, American Apparel , et. al.) nestle next to big-name fast-food outlets and multiplex theatres. Downtown Disney outside the gates of Disneyland is more attractive, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. If Santa Monica is to be cited as a community, south Main Street, which runs down into Venice, works far better, with its wonderful mix of eating places ranging from uber-pricey Chinois on Main down to the best hole-in-the-wall breakfast place we found in LA (name escapes me at the mo– been a couple of years). Plus funky natural-food stores, a couple of excellent antiquarian bookstores, little shops selling tchotchkes of every description (show me a gift store in Vancouver where you can buy books on local history, practical-joke items, birthday cards, and good-quality day-of-the dead calaveras– and that was just one aisle), some trendy bars, wacky architectural touches (the Chiat/Day/Mojo binoculars, the giant dancing clown), and more besides. Another neighbourhood where local residents are happy to shop and stroll. And Venice’s Ocean Front Walk is only a few blocks away, if you want to experience one of the most distinctive pedestrian-only environments on the planet.

    Voony’s citation of the Champs Élysées as a “place of celebration” is appropriate if your idea of a good time is fighting your way through hordes of American tourists, many of them drunk in the evenings. The sidewalks are very wide and very crowded, and they straddle six lanes of incredibly noisy bumper-to-bumper traffic. I make a point of avoiding the Champs whenever I’m in Paris– it’s the most Americanized street in the city. If you want to party with Parisians, there’s plenty of places to do so in Saint-Germain, the Marais and Bastille. Voony mentions the lovely Rue Mouffetard as a pedestrian street. To that I would add the Rue Cler in the 7th, with its two-block pedestrian-only zone lined with some of the finest food retailers in Paris (take a look on Google Street View). And the nearby, narrow Rue-St. Dominique and its neighbouring streets are the epitome of a what a shopping & strolling street should be: Lots of small, lovely, independently-owned shops, antique stores, cafes, patisseries, boulangeries, traiteurs, from the mundane to the trés chic: you can buy a single chocolate croissant at Poilane or Russian caviar at Petrossian at 200€ to the hectogram. This is a *neighbourhood*, in the fullest sense– people of all ages and income levels live upstairs in those Haussmann-era buildings, and this is where they do their shopping. Indeed, it’s the kind of neighbourhood that, had it miraculously emerged in Vancouver, would have been smashed into atoms by the Bob Rennies long since.
    gmgw

  • mezzanine

    ^sigh… well, I suppose you’d be ok with full re-instatement of the transit mall and bus traffic on Granville.

    I myself like the current changes that you can see on Granville.

  • Voony

    Frank Murphy, “mass claiming of public space” is a good thing indeed, but it doesn’t need to translate to pedestrian street.
    Closer to us, Montrealer during “festival” season also do “mass claiming of public space”, but the streets are returned to normal usage after the festival, because, winter helping, normal pedestrian flow could not sustain street life year around. It was my point.

    gmgw, I was not suggesting Third Street Mall in Santa Monica as a model, but rather as an outlier example, resort style one which have more in Common with Whistler village than a true urban pedestrian street one…that say, we have to recognize some quality to it, first it is one of the handfull pedestrian mall not build ex-nihilo working on this continent, but to be sure it has more in common with Disneyland than the Parisians “rue des mouffetards”…how and by the way Third Street Mall have a Vancouverite brand: Cafe crepe, can not be totally bad 😉

    Also when I was mentioning “celebration”, it is not “party”. Sure parisian doesn’t “party” on the Champs Elysee, and gmgw shows fine taste whenever it is time to suggest good place to spend an evening in Paris, but a “celebration” is something else not happening on regular weekly occurence

    It happens at News years eve and for some other event (like world cup soccer), and then the Champs Elysee looks like it:
    http://photo.lejdd.fr/media/images/societe/reveillon-champs-elysees-2009/1590940-1-fre-FR/reveillon-Champs-Elysees-2009_pics_390.jpg

    when the crowd take possession of the 6 lanes of traffic lane, and one will notice the effect provided by the slope.

    gmgw also tastefuly mentioned numerous of pedestrian street in Paris, you will notice that the scale of them is small enough (and it is also the case of third street in Santa Monica extending only on 2 relatively small blocks).

    I also agree that it is hard to fathom a successful “combination of pedestrian street and party zone” (the concept of “party zone” is eventually beyond me, but well…)

    Mezzanine, personally I like the current change occurring on Granville, but I don’t think they are exclusive of transit usage (thought I think a transit mall can bring problems of its own, like I have eventually mentioned on the Stephen Rees blog).

  • Booge

    “I cannot stand the retail business obsession with parking, like that’s the draw. It’s soooo retro. Whatever happened to capitalism – drawing people with your business, service and product? Transit and pedestrian areas are the wave of the future.”

    It bears repeating, it’s that good!

  • Charles Gauthier

    I’m really enjoying this discussion on how we can all build on the successes that we’ve experienced with the pedestrian corridors along Granville and Robson streets during the Olympics.

    For this to continue well into the future along Granville Street, either on a permanent basis or on weekends only, there has to be an ongoing commitment from the City and TransLink to maintain the trolley infrastructure and bus operations on Howe and Seymour streets. The system appears to be running extremely smoothly and, contrary to expert opinions, users seem to be fine with walking the one block to SkyTrain and Canada Line stations. This current configuration has been in place for almost four years and transit ridership has only been increasing, not decreasing.

    Within the next six weeks TransLink crews will be starting the six-month process of installing the trolley wires on Granville Street.

    The City will also begin a dialogue on how we can ensure that the $22 + million capital investment on Granville Street is a success. Not unlike building a community centre and investing money on programs to attract users, it is important to do the same for Granville Street especially if we all want it to be a successful public space. How will we fund this in light of the current budgetary constraints at City Hall? We’ll need to be creative and open to different ways to doing this. All suggestions are welcomed.

  • Joe Just Joe

    Good to see you on here Charles, keep pushing for the dumpter free alleys, I hope to see it happen shortly.
    Any thoughts given to keeping the buses on Howe and Seymour but allowing cars allow Granville M-F during business hours say until 6pm. Have the street revert to pedestrian only in the evenings and all weekend? Seems like it could be done cheaply (no need to reroute buses) and still provide a wide client base for the businesses. I don’t know if there is really a need for Granville to be pedestrianized at say 10am on a Tuesday.

  • Michael Gordon

    I have been following this thread with some interest as I have been the area planner for Granville Street for some 15 years.

    Granville as a shopping street: There has been and will likely continue to be an increase in the quality and variety of shopping on Granville. There are at this time a number of reno’s and new buildings for retail and the bodes well for the street.

    Granville as an ‘entertainment street:’ With the planning of Yaletown as an neighbourhood housing eventually up to 25,000 people, most of the liquor primary licenses were transferred to Granville. No doubt this appeals primarily to a demographic of 20 and 40 years olds. About sixty per cent of residents on the blocks adjacent blocks are between 20 and 39 years of age. The dilemma posed by the emergence of Yaletown as a primarily residential area was where should Vancouver’s night life be located. Hopefully, areas other than Granville will also be a destination for nightlife to give this important aspect of our downtown variety.

    Granville as a street for dining: The street needs more good restaurants that are focused on serving food, accompanied by a bottle of wine or a beer or two. There will continue to be an increase in restaurants downtown and it is challenging to find the right floor plate size. Also, stratafied mixed use buildings are often not friendly to restaurants because the residents living above do not want a restaurant below them. Granville as a primarily commercial street shows great potential for restaurants. Larger CRU’s are on hand.

    Image of Granville Street: Many who think of Granville immediately think about it as a bar street. However, this function of the street is the focus of the street two or three nights a week and only after 8 pm until 3 am. Otherwise, shopping, eating and enjoying just going for a stroll is actually the primary activity on the street.

    Pedestrians and Cafes and Sidewalks: Walking is the primary way of getting around in this part of the downtown. Granville can be one of the more interesting strolls. At the same time, the wide sidewalks provide a great opportunity for cafe seating. The street south of Robson gets lots of sun because of the lower heights on the streets.

    Mid-afternoon: One of my favorite times to be on the street is mid-afternoon as the street runs SW to NE resulting in great sunshine at this time of time and into the late afternoon. I live a block off Granville and often head up there at that time of day.

    Pedestrianization: The suggestion that buses should be re-routed off Granville for at least Friday evening and the weekends is one I anticipate will considered over the next few months and I invite all to weigh in on this one. I do know that the Police find the street is a much safer street when the focus is on its entertainment role because providing the whole width of the street for pedestrians apparently results in less problems for them. Tight sidewalk areas crowded with people and line-ups is less safe.

    I had lunch with a commercial real estate broker to check in on retail in the downtown. When I asked what he thought about Granville, he said…which block. He’s right. Granville is many places in many states of evolution.

    Let’s hope that working together we get it right.

  • Richard

    Two of the big successes of the Olympics are the pedestrian streets on Granville and Robson. Now that hundreds of thousands of visitors have experienced these streets and millions have witnessed them through the media or friends, this has now become an integrate part of the Vancouver experience, an experience people will expect when they visit Vancouver.

    We need to be honest with the world by retaining these streets as great social spaces so people when they return to Vancouver, they are not disappointed by these streets not being what they were presented as during the Olympics.

    The first step should be the delaying of placing the trolley wires back on Granville to allow time to further consider what Granville Street should be. If the decision is made to make all or a portion of Granville a ped street and keep the buses on Howe and Seymour, the funds allocated for the trolley wiring on Granville could be used to improve the bus facilities on Howe and Seymour and for implementing the ped street on Granville or even placing trolley wires on other streets so a portion of Robson could be a pedestrian street as well.

  • Lance Berelowitz

    Frances Bula is spot on about the sense of Granville Street being more pedestrian friendly and comfortable than other downtown streets that have been temporarily closed to vehicle traffic during these Olympic Games. It is no accident. Indeed, a lot of talented, creative people put a lot of thought over a very long time into designing the revitalized street, and now we are seeing some of the payoff. Granville Street has been thoroughly recalibrated as a public space, with new and higher quality paving, wider sidewalks, new street furniture, custom lighting, new street trees (yes, these will take time to grow, and no, the former trees could not be easily retained and worked around), public art, and so on.

    At the same time, it is noteworthy just how many business and building owners along the length of the street have taken this opportunity to renovate and upgrade their buildings: new storefronts, sidewalk patios, restaurant facades, etc. This bodes well for the future mix of retail services and commercial vitality. Yes, the street is in transition, but in my view it is in a positive direction, and we will likely see increasing numbers of restaurants, wine bars, coffee shops, boutiques and the like. And fewer pawn shops and sex joints. All good.

    But downtown Granville Street is not really a “Neighbourhood” High Street like, say, West Broadway or Commercial Drive. It is really more of an urban destination street for the whole city, with a broader mix of uses and services. It is also the city’s preeminent nightlife entertainment district, for better or worse (and I for one seriously question the wisdom of concentrating so many of these entertainment businesses in one area). As such we should not expect it to exhibit those “Neighbourhood High Street” characteristics that we know and love in other parts of the city.

    So, if we want to see Granville Street continue in its new-found (or rediscovered?) role as one of the city’s major public open spaces post Olympic Games, what will be required? Here are a few suggestions:

    For starters, we obviously have to address the issue of traffic versus pedestrians. Right now it works as well as it does of course precisely because there is no traffic, cars or buses. Once those go back in, all bets are off. So post-Olympics, we will need to get the balance right. This probably means day- and time-restrictions on vehicles, including the buses. As others have noted and I myself have observed, routing the buses onto the Howe/Seymour one-way couplet has worked well, and in fact commuters have told me that the ride is faster than it used to be on Granville, because of the dedicated lanes and one-way traffic on those two streets. So keeping the buses on those streets is an option worth seriously considering. TransLink (which out up 50% of the public funds invested in the street’s redesign) and its subsidiary Coast Mountain Bus Company need to be at the table and encouraged (persuaded?) to explore this.

    The City needs to relax its licensing and permitting procedures to encourage and facilitate more and bigger sidewalk patios of all kinds, and be more flexible in interpreting its bylaws about commercial use of sidewalks. Perhaps Granville Street should be a “rule free” test zone, where a far more permissive and limited set of regulations pertain to street uses. More like Granville Island, for example, or Vieux Montreal.

    The provincial government and its liquor licensing monopoly need to join the rest of the word in the 21st century and finally get rid of the remnant Presbyterian laws that arbitrarily restrict and limit alcohol sales and consumption in this province. In particular, the archaic law that still requires all restaurants and cafes to erect a physical barrier between sidewalk tables and the rest of the sidewalk is absurd and needs to go. I can’t think of any other city I have visited in the world where this still goes on, and guess what? The sky has not fallen; drunks do not stagger about the street of Paris or Portland or Portofino; and the kids are not all raging alcoholics. We need to grow up.

    Seeing downtown Vancouver taken over by huge crowds during these Games has indeed been a great wake up call for us or, as Frances put it above, a giant social experiment. Will we learn the lessons it offers?

  • Vlad the Inhaler

    Well, GMGW, time to get out that can of pepper spray and use it those loud-mouthed, vomiting, pissing youth once again, eh?

    Your point is …???

    Maybe I get it. Hitleristic zoning control. That’s it.

    Perhaps you should move to Paris or Venice Ca. and let us go down the toilet with Vancouver in peace.

  • gmgw

    I’ll probably want to test it first, Vlad. Care to volunteer?
    gmgw

  • grumbelschmoll

    A vibrant pedestrian area would be great for Vancouver. I don’t see how an entertainment district would deliver that, too limited in its daily usefulness. Small-scale pedestrian areas can work if they meet everyday shopping needs and are located between mass transit stops and peoples’ homes, or so. A downtown pedestrian area could work if it combines destination shopping with a second tier of places where people want to eat, drink and get entertained, all preferably easily accessed by mass transit and strung along an existing pedestrian route. Robson would seem to have much more potential for that than Granville.

  • Voony

    Did you notice that human nature is such that we tend to see success under the prism of our own contribution and attribute failure to external element:

    I don’t doubt that City of Vancouver put lot work toward the redesign of Granville street, and of its positive contribution to the potential success of Granville street but it need to be put in perspective:

    In despite of all the effort put on Granville, and other effort to restrict pedestrian activities on Robson (city had fenced the middle of the street to restrain pedestrian activities): the later street has been filled beyond expectation and Translink had to reroute its buses, while that on the former,I didn’t see the crowd fill its allocated space (basically it becomes empty North of Dunsmuir, and South of Smithe is pretty spare)…

    So we shouldn’t give more credit that it deserve to some design detail, even if they are contributing to the success, they are probably not catalyzing (so otherwise the numerous of “mall” experimented in America could have been something else that countless failure)…I have the feeling that the big picture is missing here.

    I have mentioned addition of building significantly contributing to the urban feel of the street at Robson, but
    Grumbelschmoll is certainly on the spot: to make a pedestrian mall a success, you need people in the first place (it is also what I was meaning in my first comment on traffic flow)…and don’t know if readers have noticed, but there is a new transit line called Canada line carrying in the tune of 200,000 riders/day those day, a significant share of it exiting right on Granville, that + the one of Expo/Millenium line…they obviosuly have to go somewhere…

    It is true that buses on Howe/Seymour seems to go fast, and from what Lance Berelowitz says the transit user value speed more than the inconvenience of transfer or access. that is not a new finding, tremendous Canada line success is here to validate this, but eventually Translink were underestimating the value of “speed” given by transit rider. May be it will reconsider…

    But there is another thing people value: it is readability of transit route:
    Worth to repeat: it is simply not good to have a bus route changing according to time of the day or the week, you need to keep it as simple as possible…

    So bus routes should be either always on Howe/Seymour or always on Granville, not an combination

    That say, it left the business sustainability of a fully pedestrian Granville mall all year around:

    Mall owners know how to draw crowd along windows store, by strategically locating pedestrian impediment in the middle of Mall alley: usual motor traffic just do that…but may be there is other alternative…

    Also, Lance, in regard of the “archaic law that still requires all restaurants and cafes to erect a physical barrier between sidewalk tables and the rest of the sidewalk” : May I suggest of visiting Toronto, San Diego…even third street in Santa Monica: don’t know if they have the “archaic law”, but restaurant have usually the “physical barrier” … Ok it could be better without but not necessarily…

  • Richard

    @Voony
    Whenever I have been on Granville Mall since the Olympics started, there have been a lot of people in the street from Hastings south until Smithe. Past Smithe there have been enough people on the sidewalks to warrant closing the street to traffic. On Saturday, it was a pedestrian street south to Davie and it was quite packed.

    Robson has been packed as well. Really hard to say which has had more people. Not sure that it really matters.

    One thing that I did not not realize is how much better it is walking in the middle of Granville Street as opposed to on the sidewalks until I tried this week. Vancouver has worked hard to preserve the view corridors so people can see the mountains. Only issue is that along streets like Granville, the mountains are really only visible from the middle of the street. If there are buses, only the driver really has a good view and he/she can’t really enjoy it while avoiding pedestrians dashing across the street. If Granville remains a ped street, everyone can enjoy the spectacular view of the mountains and get their iconic pictures of the city. The middle of the street also gets more sun too.

    Here are some photos of Granville illustrating the above:
    http://gallery.me.com/rac#100092

  • MB

    There was a previous comment on utilizing curb bump outs on Seymour and Howe to increase the efficiency of bus boarding. I’ve seen this work quite well on Main Street and I believe this deserves further consideration when examining making Granville into a permanent pedestrian street.

    I would hope the bump outs are treated in a much less utilitarian fashion than Main Street. I can see the busiest bus stops 1/3 to 1/2 a block long with unique and generous rain shelters, stone paving, digital message displays linked to the GPS interspersed with lines of poetry, and pedestals for public art. The public realm really needs a humanizing touch.

    The issue of transferring is relative only to the number of bus riders who previously used Granville as a transferring point as opposed to the proportion of riders whose final destination or original point of embarkation is downtown. I suspect the latter outnumber the former by a wide margin, but have no stats to back up my assertion.

    Voony has it right: the advent of the Canada Line station on Granville — on top of the pre-existing Granville SkyTrain Station — changes the goal posts by bringing even more pedestrians to the street, and the vast urban experiment of managing crowds during the Olympics emphasizes that the potential for Granville is more complex than previously envisioned.

    I think a major study with full public participation on making Granville a pedestrian street is completely warranted.

  • MB

    There were some rather rabid comments above about West Fourth, as though the 60s and 70s experience there should have received Glass Bubble treatment under heritage designation.

    A particular reference was made about Duthies Books, like this one family-run store was the litmus test for how all things wrong happen to a supposedly perfect urban experiment. Personal nostalgia is often not helpful because times and circumstances change, often for the better, and it can cloud our judgement.

    Some of us have had relatives who ran single shop antiquarian bookstores decades ago, and we remember their dismay when Duthies started an expansion campaign that cut into their ability to survive. The tide turned when an even bigger kid arrived on the block and overtook Duthies just as their expansionist debt chickens came home to roost during a time of higher interest rates. It was a case of bad timing as much as anything else.

    Many of us have fond memories of the original Duthies at Robson x Hornby (with Bill invariably perched at the upper floor counter handing out intelligent advice to any listener), and miss it dearly, and also miss the last Duthies on Fourth. But its loss wasn’t a sign of some evil international corporate genius rolling across the artisanal Mom & Pop Shop streetscape like Godzilla with half a brain. It was a sign of questionable business judgement that even the best of us suffer from, and the most Left of us have to concede we rely on, albeit with a preference for a smaller scale. Could you even order a book on-line at Duthies?

    Moreover, many of us remember that West Fourth was not exactly a prime example of human urbanism brimming with family owned shops and affordable housing. Prior to the last Duthies, the site was a city block sized asphalted car lot previously owned by Chrysler, that bastion of hippy corporatism.

    Some of us welcomed the fact that a small local developer built Saltlicks on the car lot and took innovation to a new level with Vancouver’s first large-scale geothermal heating system, something a larger developer wouldnt’t have bothered with because of its high capital cost, which translates into an incremental increase in the unit costs.

    However, the result is much, much lower space and water heating costs over the life of the building. The break even point for recovering the costs of the geothermal system was probably reached a decade ago, so other than maintenance, this is likely one of the most efficient and inexpensive buildings to operate in the city. Just ask David Suzuki. If I was looking for a condo, the permanently low heating costs would be a huge selling point.

    Moreover, the architects (with input by city planners) created a building scaled quite nicely to the street with a moderately-sized but extremely effective courtyard. Would that Saltlicks (otherwise known as the Capers building) be used as a model for other notable arterials, like Main, Fraser and others.

    My point is that businesses like Duthies and Capers (which was locally-owned but is now part of the Whole Foods empire) and the Granville Book Company cannot be effectively used as permanent economic guages for an entire neighbourhood or street. They are only wavelets on the ever-moving sea surface of the marketplace, and part of an ever-changing cityscape. Change is part of living in a city.

    Granville Street has always been more intensely zoned and used and abused than Fourth. Lance hits the nail on the head by illuminating the huge block-by-block differences. To use a street as a device to make social commentary is not really fair or valid. If the Entertainment District is cavalierly dismissed as a Public Urinal District, then the day-night, week-weekend, block-by-block and architectural differences are ignored.

    Council made a mistake in my opinion by allowing such large and numerous liquor clubs to congregate on one or two blocks, but that doesn’t mean we should stop the conversation about converting Granville to a pedestrian street. It means we need to dilute the flow of vodka and margaritas with more diverse establishments, with great food eaten at very substantial and numerous sidewalk cafes, to increase the number of theatres, to supply more public washrooms (with attendants if necessary), to offer adults as much entertainment choice as adolescents.

    Further, one of the most significant historic influences on pedestrian life on Granville was to suck hordes of people underground into Pacific Centre. Perhaps it’s time to daylight this subterranean world to help draw people back to the surface. Perhaps another large glass rotunda is in order, but this time oriented to Granville, like a transparent front door.

    Should Granville become 100% pedestrian in future, then the new design will need to change to erase the paraphenalia of vehicles (curbs and gutters, marked lanes). I suggest large sections could be glassed over with beautiful canopies, and that permanent stages be set up for weekly / daily outdoor concerts by professional musicians How about a Busker’s Row? Public art and patterned stone paving would add interest and texture, but elements like these should be seen at more intense and larger scales than we’ve got now.

    The fact remains, our public realm has been treated badly, and efforts to humanize our streets have been tepid at best. This be a chance to show how much better it can be.

  • mezzanine

    ^^ great perspective, MB.

  • Dave 2

    I miss the days of “Theatre Row”, even as recently as the ’80s the street would be alive with crowds on the weekend and on “$2.50 Tuesdays”. Hard to believe there is only one theatre left.

  • False Creep

    I love Granville without trees. It suddenly looked like a very different place, with buildings and signs I’d never noticed before. Very urban and inorganic. I know Vancouver loves its trees, but wouldn’t it be cool to have one street that’s different? Of course, the new trees will grow, and return calming feel of nature that Vancouverites can’t go a block without.