Category: interventions, performances & gardens
Originally a confluence of gullies and streams with miles of estuary channels, the twentieth century saw garbage, fill, culverts, sewers and increasing amounts of asphalt. Future decisions best centre on re-establishment of native wetlands and woodland along with more urban food production, recreation, and socializing.
Both the Columbus Monument and the East Van Cross steal a panorama across Skwácháy̓s and the city. The 1986 Monument is dire: more evocative of a place for ceremonial sacrifice than the ethnic propagandizing of the Italian-Canadian organizations that built it. A generation later, Ken Lum’s ‘East Van Cross’ is another imposition already out of place and redundant: increasingly irrelevant. For inferring conquests and erasures of Skwácháy̓s, the sword and the cross today fall flat, are almost tacky. The heaviness of the Columbia Monument without the statue suggests failed kinds of domination. Whereas the Van East Cross has the odour of marketing of both real estate and stale religion. These cluttering anachronisms lean west towards a series of estuaries where creeks once met and flowed slowly into the sea.
Thanks to artist Oliver Kellhammer who showed me this place during some of our urban field studies on May 26, 2018. That day, Oliver Kellhammer stated that sees the side as the most important public art piece in False Creek especially as the actual statue was stolen and never replaced. He referred to the site as “the perfect non-space.”
The beach house 1016 East 7th Avenue is one of the last architectural remnants, this far east and south in central Vancouver, of a young city and the sea. East Seventh at this point merged with the beach and the tidal flat. The current architecture reflects the shift in function from shack to fortress. For example, there were no sky-lights originally, nor a gate to the verandah, and no Gingko trees [a post-Holocene flourish] or much landscape at all. On of the few remnants of the local landscape is sword fern, Polystichum munitum.
Now for sale with a price that precludes all but the affluent, the building was a simple second home, at best a tasteful shack with a verandah for reviewing the sea, that drifted into abjection as Skwácháy̓s was filled with garbage. To reimagine this building’s original life is to recall the city’s lost options and ongoing follies.
In contrast to the Columbus Monument that looks rapaciously west, the view from the heights of Means of Production Garden look north and east. Another poetic viewpoint, “MOP” is a more hopeful centre of The Terminal City. Initiated over a quarter of a century, originally design and guided by environmental artist, Oliver Kellhammer, the garden was originally for growing organic materials for making art.
Given the destruction of much of the biodiversity of Skwácháy̓s, over the twentieth century, MOP is an ecological and cultural oasis and laboratory for central Vancouver.
I recall my father in the 1960s inferring that False Creek Flats were destroyed for real estate speculation by the Canadian Pacific Railway. While such a set of decisions, would have involved a few more actors than simply the ‘CPR’, these two maps from 1898 suggest that the City was being laid out to include and not destroy this inlet and its salt marshes.
The 1898 Tourist Guide Map of Vancouver includes some streets clearly situated along the shores of upper False Creek — including the now erased Crabtree Lane near what is today Charles and Vernon. And the deepest arm of the tidal inlet extended to just below today’s Russian Orthodox Holy Trinity Church between Campbell and Raymur at least half a block north of with is today Union Street (formerly Barnard Street with today’s East Georgia parallel and one block north).
In the Panoramic View of the City of Vancouver 1898, a village has formed on the north side of Upper False Creek Flats with the south side still rural. While there is industrial activity in lower False Creek, the upper parts appear relatively tranquil. There appears to be a bridge, over that deep arm of the inlet, on what is today Union Street between Campbell and Raymur.
