Al Clapp was the brains behind 1976’ s Habitat Forum
Proponent of the Granville Island Public Market dies at 83
Alan Clapp, organizer of the influential Habitat Forum on housing in the 1970s and a key person in the revitalization of Granville Island, has died. He was 83.
Clapp was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in January. He died Tuesday at home in Victoria after coming home from a hospice, said Geraldine Glattstein, his common- law partner of almost 30 years.
She said he died with his dogs Pancho and Bandido around him.
“He died exactly as he wanted it,” she said. “I believe that he was waiting to come home to die.”
Born and raised in Vancouver, Clapp was an influential broadcaster and founding producer of an hourlong evening newscast on BCTV ( now Global) on Labour Day in 1968, said Cameron Bell, the station’s legendary news director. The hour- long format was then unheard of in local TV.
“He brought an almost revolutionary vision to television news — focusing on the role of film in the telling of a story,” Bell said. “Al made enormous contributions to the life of B. C. We who worked with him on any of the several projects were awestruck by his dedication and energy, commitment and vision. As friends, colleagues and British Columbians — we will remember him fondly and miss him.”
Clapp originally had an idea for a farmer’s market in an industrial building on the north shore of False Creek. It eventually moved across the water to Granville Island which the federal government redeveloped in the 1970s.
Clapp was described as a “harebrained weirdo” for organizing Habitat Forum, a parallel conference to the 1976 United Nations Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver.
For the forum — which became much better known than the official conference — Clapp converted five abandoned air force hangars next to Jericho Beach into a conference site. Hangar 3 was decorated with a huge Haida mural by Bill Reid. In another, Clapp built the world’s longest bar. An estimated 15,000 people came to the site each day during the forum, which ran for two weeks.
Among those who spoke at the forum were Mother Teresa, anthropologist Margaret Mead and futurist Buckminster Fuller. More recently, Clapp was working to save the Challenger map of B. C. It’s described as the world’s largest relief map built out of 986,000 pieces of wood. For years, it was in the PNE’s B. C. Pavilion until it went into storage after the building was torn down in 1997.
Glattstein said she plans to announce a celebration of Clapp’s life at a location in Vancouver in a couple of weeks.