In 1885, the Canadian Pacific Railway quietly approached the federal government seeking to take over part of a military reserve at the head of Coal Harbour.
The CPR wanted to build its railway terminus at English Bay, near where the Sylvia Hotel is today. It asked for about half the reserve for “streets, docks, warehouses and buildings.”
The feds passed, and the CPR wound up building its terminus in Gastown instead.
But the CPR’s associates in Vancouver still had big plans for the military reserve. Real estate salesman A.W. Ross made a request to Lauchlan Hamilton, a CPR surveyor who was also a city alderman, to petition the federal government to turn the “Reserve on First Narrows” into a public park.
It became the first resolution of Vancouver council, on May 12, 1886. A year later, the federal government agreed to lease the reserve to the city, and on Sept. 27, 1888, Stanley Park opened to the masses. It was named after Canada’s governor-general at the time, Lord Stanley of Preston.
This year is the park’s 125th anniversary, which the city is celebrating with a two-day festival Aug. 24-25.
It seems a bit odd that the first act of a city of about 1,000 people would be to create a 1,000-acre (400-odd hectare) park, but giant urban parks were all the rage in North America at the time. Stanley Park was supposed to be a Vancouver version of Central Park in New York or Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
Except it wasn’t. Central Park and Golden Gate Park are big and beautiful, but their “natural” spaces were designed by landscape architects like Frederick Law Olmstead. When it opened, Stanley Park was basically a big forest with some playing fields at Brockton Point — a genuine “nature” park.
At least that was the hype. The reality is a little more complicated.
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One of the biggest misconceptions about Stanley Park is that it was virgin forest until Europeans arrived in the Vancouver area.
In fact, First Nations people had been living there for hundreds of years.
“There’s 14 archeological sites in Stanley Park registered with the province’s archeological branch,” says York University professor Sean Kheraj, author of Inventing Stanley Park, An Environmental History (UBC Press).
“The sites are spread throughout the entirety of the (Stanley Park) peninsula. Every time the park board built something new, they discovered new archeological evidence. When they built the aquarium, they discovered new archeological evidence. When they constructed the swimming pool at Second Beach, they discovered new archeological evidence. When they built the road, they found stuff.
“The oldest radio-carbon dated artifact found in the archeological middens is 3,200 years before present.”
The most prominent First Nations site was Whoi Whoi, by today’s Lumbermen’s Arch. When they built a road around the park in 1888, the roadbed was largely constructed out of material from the Whoi Whoi midden (an archeological term for a refuse heap).
“The road was lauded for its beautiful white appearance, and that was all the shells out of the midden,” says historian John Atkin, who recently put together a Stanley Park timeline for the Vancouver park board.
“They just dug it out — there was no sense of recognizing the value of it, the artifacts, the skeletons they found, anything.”
There were people living in Stanley Park when it became a park. Most were evicted by the park board in 1931, but the last resident, Tim Cummings, lived at Brockton Point until he died in 1958. Then the park board knocked down his house, erasing the last vestige of the pre-park residents.
Cummings’ story is related in UBC historian Jean Barman’s 1995 book, Stanley Park’s Secret, about the “forgotten families of Whoi Whoi, Kanaka Ranch and Brockton Point.”
August Jack Khatsahlano — Kitsilano is named after his grandfather — said there were 11 native families living in Whoi Whoi in the early 1880s, as well as several families of mixed heritage (Portuguese, Scottish, aboriginal) on the Coal Harbour side of Brockton Point.
August Jack’s family left Stanley Park after the park road was built through their home.
“When they make Stanley Park road, we were eating (breakfast) in our house,” he told Vancouver’s legendary archivist, Major Matthews.
“Someone make noise outside; chop our house. We was inside the house when the surveyors came along, and they chop the corner of our house while we was eating inside.”
The European history of Stanley Park began in 1791-92, when a trio of explorers sailed into Burrard Inlet: Spain’s José Maria Narváez and Dionisio Alcalá Galiano, and England’s Capt. George Vancouver.
Vancouver and Galiano both thought Stanley Park was an island. Lost Lagoon was originally part of Coal Harbour, and at high tide, would virtually join with a tidal marsh behind Second Beach. At low tide, the lagoon would vanish, which led Pauline Johnson to write the poem, The Lost Lagoon, that became its name.
In 1859, Col. Richard Moody of the Royal Engineers noted the Stanley Park peninsula’s strategic importance and made it a government military reserve.
There was still some logging, however. Capt. Edward Stamp wanted to build a lumber mill at Brockton Point in the early 1860s, and even cleared some land before opting to build Hastings Mill at what is now the foot of Dunlevy Avenue.
Kheraj thinks most of the early logging in the park was around the perimeter.
“The greatest likelihood is that there was highly selective logging along the edge of the peninsula, where loggers could fall the trees directly into the water,” he says. “There’s an extensive series of interior photographs in the (Vancouver) archives, and it’s very densely forested, right (up to) the 1880s.”
When the park was first opened, visitors on the Georgia Street side came in over a bridge over Lost Lagoon, or paid 25 cents to be ferried over.
“The space between Second Beach and Lost Lagoon was filled in by the park board in the 1910s,” says Kheraj.
“It was a saline marsh: at high tide, the water would rush over and Stanley Park would be an island. (So) the park board pumped sand from the bottom of English Bay onto the isthmus between Lost Lagoon and Second Beach, to raise the land higher so it wouldn’t flood anymore.”
There was much discussion about what to do with Lost Lagoon. In 1912 the park board asked a famous English landscape architect, Thomas Mawson, to come up with designs for the Coal Harbour entrance to the park.
One design was for a causeway, another would have seen Lost Lagoon filled in for sports fields, and a third would have transformed the area around Lost Lagoon into a civic centre, with a sports stadium, a museum and a “round pond” in place of the natural lagoon.
The working class wanted the sports fields, the middle class favoured the city centre and the elite liked the “natural” style of the causeway. One thing they did agree on was that the natural “mud and marshlands” of Lost Lagoon “were undesirable, and aesthetically unpleasing.”
“That I think is one of the most interesting things — the naturalistic design of Lost Lagoon today is an artificial construction,” says Kheraj. “No one agreed that it should be left in its natural state, which is a muddy marsh.”
The economic recession that accompanied the First World War put an end to Mawson’s civic centre concept, and the Stanley Park causeway was built in 1916. Lost Lagoon was cut off from Coal Harbour, so fresh water was pumped in from the city water supply to replace the original salt water.
Meanwhile, the land Stamp had cleared for a lumber mill had become sports fields.
“Brockton Oval was like the first BC Place for Vancouver,” says Kheraj. “It was the premier sporting location for amateur sports in the Lower Mainland, primarily cricket.”
Other sports facilities (the golf course, the tennis courts) were developed behind Second Beach.
There were numerous other schemes for the park, but most were rejected.
“What struck me I think most going through park board minutes and early newspaper accounts was how much stuff people wanted to put in the park,” says Atkin. “There’s an old reservoir in the park, and somebody thought that would make a great drive-in movie theatre at one point. What’s interesting is that the park board managed to hold back from looking at it like ‘We can make money here.’
“They kept pushing back. So many things were rejected, versus the things that were accepted.”
That said, the park board didn’t leave much of the park in a truly natural state. There is very little old growth forest in Stanley Park. In nature, the park had a mix of trees, but over time the park board replaced many of them with Douglas firs.
“There was this argument that Stanley Park was this little island of forest, it couldn’t sustain a healthy northwest coast forest, so what the park board should do is remove all the hemlock and spruce, and replace it with Douglas fir, which they thought was more resilient for park purposes, and looked nicer,” said Kheraj.
“When you look at photographs of Stanley Park from the late 19th century, the trees are quite heterogeneous and ragged looking, and much thinner in terms of their foliage. But by the 1940s, it had the look that we see today, much puffier-looking, green, with a smoother treeline across the top, and no dead tree tops.”
Storms also played a big part in the look of the park. Stanley Park has been battered several times; thousands of trees were knocked down by Typhoon Frieda in 1962 and a big windstorm in 2006.
“We think of the park as something that evolved slowly, yet there’s these big things that hammer it every now and again and change the landscape,” says Atkin.
“Think of Prospect Point now. That whole drive from Prospect Point to the Teahouse is so vastly different (since the 2006 storm). It’s open, it’s light — that was previously a dark tunnel (because of the tree canopy). That storm completely changed that whole western face of the park.”
Many of the natural wonders tourists flocked to in the early days have changed. There are countless postcards of The Seven Sisters, a group of giant trees near Tatlow Walk and the Bridle Path, north of Lost Lagoon. But they were all dead by the 1950s, and were cut down.
“They were so popular that people basically killed them by walking on their roots,” says Atkin.
“The people stomped around so much around them that they had to be cut down, because they were a danger.”
The Hollow Tree was the most famous attraction in early Stanley Park; most everyone who visited Vancouver seems to have had their picture taken by the tree, whether on foot or in a car.
But the 700-year-old cedar was already dead by the time the park was created, and was ready to fall over after the big storm of 2006. Heritage activists jumped in and saved the Hollow Tree for future generations by propping it up with a man-made base.
The most popular tourist attractions today are the totem poles.
The first four poles were brought down from the North Coast in 1924 and erected at Lumbermen’s Arch by the Arts and Historical Society — ironically, about the same time the park board was in court trying to evict the last natives living in the park.
“They had two sets of prejudices,” said Barman. “One was that they didn’t like indigenous people as such. Secondly, they thought the ones from the North Coast were eminently superior, in part because they were further away, in part because they built really nifty totem poles. So they started collecting totem poles.”
The totem poles were moved to Brockton Point in 1960. Several more poles have been added over the years: the last pole to go up (in 2009) was by Robert Yelton of the Squamish nation, whose mother was born in Stanley Park.
An estimated eight million people visit Stanley Park each year. Many of them walk or bike around the seawall, which was begun in 1917 to combat erosion along the First Narrows.
The hero of the seawall was stonemason Jimmy Cunningham, who oversaw its construction for over four decades. There is a fabulous 1962 Sun story by Mac Reynolds about the 84-year-old Cunningham “routing nudists” from Third Beach so he and his crew could get to work on the latest phase. Sadly, Cunningham died the next year, 17 years before the seawall was finally completed in 1980.
But his labour was not in vain — thousands of people enjoy the fruit of his labour every day. The nine-kilometre seawall has become one of the most cherished urban trails in the world, in one of the world’s most cherished urban parks.
“What I’ve learned since I did the book is that Stanley Park really captures the imagination,” says Jean Barman. “I’ve met with people from around the world, graduate students from Germany and Europe who are working on Stanley Park and have come here to do research. It’s astonishing; it symbolizes Vancouver.”
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