To be sure that you don’t go around — or away — with the stereo-typed view of Vancouver as a somewhat artless, outdoorsy place populated mainly by people who regularly take half the day off I invite you to explore some of city’s out-of-the-way nooks and cran¬nies. These areas will give you some sense of the wide range of people who make the city their home.
Shaughnessy is a somewhat understated landscape originally created by what truly old money ever existed in this city. It was named for a president of the Canadian Pacific Railway (the early financier of Vancouver), Sir Thomas Shaughnessy. Prior to World War i, the favorite architectural style was Tudor Revival. A few ofthese grand old mansions, interspersed with every other style from mock-Georgian to northern Spanish, can still be seen behind hedges and leafy bowers.
A good place to walk is the area just southeast of Granville Street and West i6th Avenue, beginning at the circular avenue known as The Crescent and continuing along Angus Drive, which wends westward through this ultra-affluent neighborhood. The Crescent, an oval area with five streets branching outward, is a kind of mini-arboretum, with forty-eight varieties of trees.
In the early 1970s, a family by the name of Davis began restoring an 1891 wood-frame house in the ioo-block of West ioth Avenue (near Yukon Street) in the old Mount Pleasant neighborhood, just east of city hall. So splendid and authentic was the restoration that John Davis and others went on to save other turn-of-the-century houses on the same block, tinker with the landscaping, and persuade the city to add heritage lamps. The result is a fine old-world land-scape that shows Vancouver as it may (or may not) have looked at its finest moment a century ago.
The north side of Point Grey Road between, say, Waterloo and Alma streets is an architectural mishmash. However, if you have the good fortune to get inside one of these houses, or find your way down to the rocky beach in front, you’ll experience something of Vancouver waterfront properties to die for. At the junction with Alma Street, turn north and walk a short block along the eastern edge of Jericho Beach Park and past the Hastings Mill Museum, then turn right onto Cameron Avenue. Cameron is less than a block long, but it’s one ofthe city’s most desirable enclaves. To complete this Kitsilano walkabout, head back west along Point Grey Road, then south on Collingwood Street, lined with rambling Arts-and-Crafts-style houses built in the early 19005.
Strathcona remains a world apart. It’s an idiosyncratic, working-class district built up more than a century ago by immigrant laborers — mostly Jews, Russians, and Chinese. In the 19605, residents and political supporters of this area — east of Chinatown, and roughly bounded by Gore, Pender, Raymur, and Prior streets — defeated a city proposal to raze everything around for a network of freeways into the downtown; since then, Strathcona has mellowed into a true (and fairly politicized) neighborhood. It’s notable for its unadorned workmen’s houses and vegetable gardens; smallish churches and tem¬ples; humble groceries and varied parks. However, the drug-driven crime of the Downtown Eastside is never far away, which explains the heavily fortified doorways and swirling barbed wire on second¬story window ledges and patios.
Southiands is a rare pastoral retreat within the city’s boundaries — a horsey, garden, and hobby-farm culture in the extreme southwest of the city, south of Dunbar Street and Southwest Marine Drive, via Blenheim or Balaclava streets. Southlands Riding Club has long been a mecca for mainly female would-be equestrians, but cyclists, walkers, bird-watchers, and others seeking calm explore these country-like roads or make their way down to the north arm ofthe Fraser River at Deering (or Blenheim) Island.
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