As a relative newcomer (10years,) reading current perspectives on the City’s history, it seems like Art Phillips and Walter Hardwick would be worthy of consideration. It seems their role was pivotal in making Vancouver what it is today.

I’d have to go with John Deighton. A city created on a vice, and still thriving on vices. As much as people don’t want us to be Vegas, we have more in common with them then we’d like to admit. A toast to Jack.

Looked at from the point of view of the history of the development of the city, there can be but one person—a corporate entity—the CPR and their real estate divisions.

With a 500-acre grant in the downtown peninsula (False Creek to Burrard Street; Burrard Inlet to English Bay); and 5,000-acre grant immediately south of False Creek, the story of CPRs dominance over Vancouver business, real estate development, I don’t believe has really been told.

In fact, we may never know.

One example: Why is the Downtown East Side called “East Side”? What exactly is it East of? Java? No. The better answer is: the CPR land grant downtown.

Ever wonder why it is that only every third street in Hamilton’s downtown plat for the CPR connects through across Burrard street to line up with streets in the West End? There is a famous story that the CPR negotiated with the land owners and obtain every third lot as a concession. Coincidence, or driving a hard bargain?

It is hard to follow the trail of the location for the downtown proper without thinking of the CPR. Downtown was first located on Hastings between Main and Carrall, perhaps as far as Woodward’s Department Store at Abbott. It then moved into CPR lands on Hastings at the foot of Granville (near the CPR terminus at Cordova). Finally, it moved up the hill to Granville & Georgia (the site of the first and second CPR hotels). It is difficult to follow this migration without getting the sense that CPR lands benefited with every displacement.

The first Granville Street bridge, linking to the 5,000-acre CPR land grant to the south, was erected with 50-50 share between City Hall and the CPR.

The tale continues to our present day. Sir John A MacDonald’s deal of the century may have made Canada. But it also created one, very powerful corporation.

They get my nod.

Andrew Roddan 1882-1948.
Changed our view of the DTES and the poor in general.
And May Gutteridge 1917-2002.

But then you can spread the circles out.

Shaping our city is the CPR and the BCElectric and their tram networks.

I would choose not just Mike, but the whole of TEAM (Hardwick, Phillips, Pendakur, etc) because they were the first to show that a diverse set of people, with differing political idealogies, could come together with a real vision of how the city could be—and and then work together to prevent the destruction of it.

Tip of the hat to these wonderful people, who kept us from repeating the freeway mistakes of the rest of N. America.

We see that attitude reflected today in the expanded casino fight, with people from all walks of life from every corner from our city, getting out to fight the fight. Now, do we have enough foresight and guts from the current crop of politicians to resist expanded gambling?

Let’s put together a 15 year plan for this place that looks at the economic plan and neighbourhood plans and think of what we want Vancouver to be for the people who will follow us.

No more short-term “fixes”, please.

Agreed 4 Horses 10. But, if 1 person has to stand out it must be Walter Hardwick. There were many visionaries who were part of the social dynamic which occurred in Vancouver in the late 60’s – early 70s, but Walter was the single most important individual. He had the vision but also an in depth understanding of the why, not just the what and where which have formed today’s Vancouiver.

Phillips, Harcourt, Marzari, Pendakur, Cowie, Oberlander and many others where there too, but Walter kept us all going in the same direction.

The CPR and the Bartholomew Plan were obvious form makers, but are not unique. Many cities across western Canada have had similar templates. But, there was only 1 Walter Hardwick which has allowed Vancouver to achieve what it has to date.

Ray Spaxman gets my vote. If lastingness is the measure, then his almost 40 years as the most prominent and respect planner in our midst speaks to his legacy. As Vancouver’s Director of Planning from 1973 to 1989 he oversaw the great leap forward into world prominence that the city now enjoys as a leader of urban planning and design, basicalaly by changing the culture within which development and development approvals took place. Area planning, heritage, peer review, South False Creek, Fairview Slopes, Concord Pacific, downzoning the West End, and the first steps toward a livable Downtown South were all started on his watch. Further, succeeding generations of planners, architects and community activists have learned from the local area planning model that he initiated back in the day. Indeed, he still carries on today with community-based advocacy, arguing persuasively for a new community plan for the owntown Eastside that seeks balance between the competing attitudes and interests that are in play there. Having worked under councils and mayors as widely disparate in approach as Team (Art Phillips), Cope (Mike Harcourt) and NPA (Gordon Campbell) also says something about his political savvy. He is truly the father of contemporary urban planning, urban design and developmentfor Vancouver.

Mike Harcourt and Walter Hardwick: but for them the tenor of the city would have been destroyed.

PS Frances are a you a big Christy Clark fan?

Frank Ducote is right. Everything we credit Larry Beasley with, was learned at the knee of Ray Spaxman.

I wouldn’t vote Allan Fotheringham as the most influential Vancouverite of all time, but his columns in the Vancouver Sun in the early ’70s poking fun at our narcissism, conservatism and narrow mindedness were instrumental in getting us to think critically about who we were and what we wanted to become.

my fave was “Narcissus by the Pacific”

…and of course, Chuck Davis—who chronicled it all…

Among the folks who have made transformative contributions to the Arts: Bill Millerd

My pick is Margaret Mitchell, early neighbourhood activist and MP for Vancouver East from 1979 to 1993.
She showed us how to can stand up for social justice and be gentle while doing so.
All the business, politics and land development is useless without civic justice.

Friend of mine (I wont blow his cover) told me this story…

John Deighton (JJJ #4 a.k.a. “Gassy Jack”) opened up a saloon at the end of Alexander Street then a straight easy walking distance from the Hastings Mill Gate.

Picture that folks. An entrepreneurial venture based on two solid facts:

(1) The distance a person will walk without much notice or care; and

(2) The license of selling alcohol to men in the pioneering frontier.

Gold, Baby!! Pure gold! Does that not capture the better number, if not the better part, of ventures in our region for the past century and a quarter?

The problem with nominations of those still with us, or just recently departed, is that we lack the critical distance of time. We really are not in a good position to asses the fortunes of post-WWII planning… much as we’d like to pick our stars and our sentimental favourites.

Some have postulated that the city rebuilds itself every 50 yeas. By that mark, we can only look back to 1960. So, the Freeway Fight, the rise and fall of the automobile culture, and the frenzy of modernism, is all stuff that has yet to enter the rear view mirror.

Pile on that the fact that the record of urban thinking in the past 50 years is somewhere between “dismal” and “pathetic”.

Without investing too much value in one side or the other, 125 years into the history of making this place we are facing an almost insurmountable chasm: will the forces of modernism wreak havoc willy nilly throughout the neighbourhoods? Or will we find the wherewithal to say, “Enough!”.

Who among us is fool enough to wager on the more sober approach?

The CPR plat for downtown deserves a look.

1. Grid Plan

Most commentary centres on the “cranked grid”. Hamilton aligned his streets with “Liverpool” (the West End) and hinged or pivoted against the Gastown Townsite plat. That gave us the distinctive “cranked grid” with closed street end vistas at both ends on Hastings, Cordova and Water. Really good stuff, but off the CPR plan.

Hamilton oriented his long blocks so that his avenues would run to the mountains. The street end vistas of Burrard, Howe, Hornby, Granville, Seymour, Homer, and Cambie are spectacular, glorious—above any adjective we may find. They give the downtown what the rest of the city has: the mountains as reference for way-finding. No view cones needed here to preserve public vistas, the platting takes care of that.

It’s less certain that the grid engaged the land sloping to the sea—as a kind of inverted saucer—as successfully. There is something mean about the feel of the downtown streets that is not present in the better proportioned blocks of the West End.

Georgia Street is the exception. Extending majestically to Stanley Park, and now to an ever more refurbished False Creek, the plan is at its best on the corner of Georgia and Granville.

The plan is chain measure. Streets are 66-feet or one chain wide (unless otherwise designated as Michael states); lot frontages are 33-feet or half a chain; and the 122.5-foot lot depth on either side of a 20-foot lane adds up to 265 feet, or 4 chain. Block lengths vary in chain increments of 4, 5, 6 and even 7 chain or 462 feet.

2. Victory Square

The second plan feature is locating Victory Square at the head of the approach on Hastings on the unit blocks, along the south-boundary of the Gastown plat.

While this is a singular gesture that we recognize to this day, the site chosen for Victory square is in every other way barely usable. The slopes are so steep that until such time as design for the square precinct is re-engineered to take ground contour into account, all efforts to make it urban place are doomed to fail. That in spite of hosting some of the best architecture in our first wave of urbanism.

3. The Hastings Blocks

The downtown grant for the CPR measures half a mile. That is a result of the land granting history in the area. It also happens to coincide with an important limit for human sense perception. Standing at Harbour Centre, the Marine Building is 1700-feet away, and Victory Square 900 feet. The Marine Building looks about as far away as one would care to walk, while Victory Square beacons us with its proximity.

However, it is the blocks either side that are a remarkable and a unique feature in our city. Hamilton platted the section of Hastings Street that crosses the CPR plan with 7 pairs of perfectly square blocks, rear lanes paralleling the street. The blocks measure 265 feet square, lining up perfectly with the end dimension of the long blocks that comprise the rest of the plan.

I can find only one purpose for this: walkability. The street pattern here has a permeability to pedestrian paths that it fails to achieve just about anywhere else in our city.

4. An imperfect conclusion

Sadly, the architecture that located on the CPR blocks along Hastings was the first to show that it is possible to invest a lot of time, money and effort and still get the urbanism wrong. The tall canyon walls, and the Greek Temple banks never quite got it together. The demands for private development rights far outstripped any considerations for the quality of the resulting public realm.

Soon conditions were reached that would make it pay for “downtown” to seek higher ground.

For this reason, and the fact that the human scale of the square blocks on Hastings has been lost to more recent redevelopments south of Granville, this part of the Hamilton plan is today at the dawn of an age of sustainable urbanism our “Easter Island”.

I would list some people who I think contributed the most to make Vancouver the most livable city:

1. Mike Harcourt
2. Philip Owen
3. Larry Beasley
4. Dave Rudberg

Most of you like me must have noticed that more than 90% staff is Caucasian , Dave hired the first non Caucasian engineer . However, now the things are again back at square one , almost no representation of any of the miniport group.

Cheers

Ayaz

How about Major JS Matthews, the first archivist? Much of what we know about the city’s history comes at least in part from him, which made the work of Chuck Davis and many others possible. As the title of his biography says, he was “The Man Who Saved Vancouver.” He was also one of those colourful characters that livens up Vancouver’s history. He routinely fought City Hall and won and the archives building is named after him.

As for Mike Harcourt, please, not for blocking the freeway. Many people were part of that struggle, and someone like Mary Chan would be more deserving of credit for that accomplishment. Although she’s not a white guy.

If the criterion is major contribution to shaping the city and the focus is Vancouver city proper, it’s Li Ka-Shing hands down.

Mike Harcourt. Shirley Chan. Bruce Eriksen. Libby Davies. Bob Williams.

Pick one or more.

“Riot Shmiot, I Deny It!”

(Godzilla Salmi’s by-line on the cover of Terminal City, after being accused of inciting the Stanley Cup riot in 1994.)

Michael, that was actually Major Mathews paraphrasing Hamilton,
in Vancouver Historical Journal v3, 1960.

Not to downplay the roles of Spaxman, et al, but I suspect Matthews would scoff at any of the later planners in comparison to Hamilton. Here’s what he says (p56):

“”Godfather to Vancouver” at its birth. Marked its place, named its streets. CPR Land commissioner, senior alderman, first City Council; moved the first resolution, that the “Government Reserve” be acquired for Stanely Park; Chairman of the Relief Committee after The Fire. Erected the first City Hall we ever possessed; a tent, pitched in five minutes.”

Hard to argue with that, no?

Hamilton never liked the plat of Vancouver, as others noted above, as the downtown is actually 3 different plats he had to stitch together (Granville townsite – CPR – 3 Greenhorns).

He also intended the streets in the Kits grant to be tree names in alphabetical order going west, but some government/CPR lackey messed it up, so the result was the alphabetical hodgepodge of tree names we have now.

“Hamilton never liked the plat of Vancouver, as others noted above, as the downtown is actually 3 different plats he had to stitch together (Granville townsite – CPR – 3 Greenhorns).”

GJG 40

O.K. Ghost, I can take on your #40 that came on while I was working on post #41.

My concern with Hamilton is what power he held within the company to make his own decisions. Who was he, and how much clout did he have? And what were the principles informing CPR platting in what we have to assume was their heroic march to the west coast?

While the town planning feats pale in the face of the survey and engineering challenges, in the final analysis the town planning decisions are more important to us today.

Hamilton’s role within the company—information which I lack—stands to tell us a whole lot about the Vancouver plan. Hamilton’s own background and development may fill in some of the gaps in the questions about what methodology he was following.

The downtown plat is not without its points of interest, as we have noted earlier. However, it does not rise to the level of a exceptional piece of design. Or does it?

@Sheila #38: Libby Davies??? Shaped the chair cushions of Vancouver (and Ottawa), I’ll give you that. Otherwise she and her cadre of pampered povertarians did much (and continue) to create and sustain the open-air asylum they patronizingly call their “community”, when they actually mean “clients” (yet another condescending, politically-correct euphemism).

Their demand? Perpetuate and expand the miserable ghetto that 30 years of their failed policies has produced. Ms. Davies’ $155,000 annual salary as NDP House Leader (not counting committees) and her gold-plated, inflation-indexed parliamentary pension will have to be a sufficient reward for a lifetime of “standing up” (in reality, sitting down) for others.

Frances

Your blog is titled STATE OF VANCOUVER

Lest we get too parochial . . . not the state of the Vancouver planning department, (you have twigged already), and carried away by a lack of imagination or spammers from the department.

“I’ve been asked to be on a radio program to talk about a person I think has made a major contribution to shaping the city.”

Have you done your show already?

May I suggest a wider vision.

Governing factor . . . “the person” . . . singular, dead or alive!

H. R. McMillan: Lumber

John Prentice and “Poldi” Bentley: lumber

Canon Herbert O’Driscoll, former Dean of Christ Church Cathedral: social services

May Gutteridge: Saint James social services society. (Already mentioned).

Malcolm Lowery: author Passage to Gabriola and Under the Volcano etc.

Earl Birney: literature, poetry (David, The Damnation of Vancouver)

Jack Shadbolt: painter.

Abe Rogatnick: historian.

Doris Shadbolt: curator.

Nancy Green: Olympic medalist.

Grant McConachie CP Airline: flyer.

Don and Phyllis Munday: mountaineers.

Captain George Vancouver RN: navigator.

Irving Stowe: peace activist.

All of the above have done much for the city in their own way.

@ Roger 47.

2011 just happens to be an election year. Vision is using the excuse of a 125 celebration to spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ money to fund their re-election. They’ve even got a City taxpayer paid employee with the title of “One Day Event Coordinator”! What do you think that person will be doing from now until 19 November.

Bill@#48 . . . Bill @#49

Yup . . . we fall for ’em every time . . . and if we are so stupid . . . we must live with what we get!