Planes, trains and warehouses: Spanish Banks would not be the beloved waterfront it is today if these industrial plans had come to pass
The waterfront park along Spanish Banks is one of Vancouver’s most beloved spaces. But if the 1928 Point Grey council had had its way, it would have been industrial. Point Grey was a separate municipality from 1908 to 1929, when it joined Vancouver. On May 8, 1928, The Vancouver Sun reported its councillors voted five to three to approve a proposal by Vancouver Terminals Ltd. “to convert the residential area facing Spanish Banks from Trimble Street west into a highly industrialized area with terminal railway facilities, airport and wharves.” A “large portion” of the beach at Spanish Banks would have been reclaimed for docks and warehouses. The railway yards were to be connected “by a special line which will skirt the waterline along English Bay from False Creek to the proposed site.” Councillor Nichol Thompson seconded the motion to support the plan, contending that development on English Bay must come sooner or later. “Our province cannot live in playgrounds,” Thompson stated in The Province. Nonetheless, the plan had its detractors, including Point Grey residents who felt the industrial area would be a “severe detriment to West Point Grey, and spoil the bathing beaches and parks in that portion of Marine Drive.” Unfortunately, there were no illustrations with the 1928 stories to show what the proposal would have looked like. But there is a 1930 illustration in the Vancouver Archives for another scheme, an airport at Spanish Banks. The proposal is quite detailed, with two runways on the “aerodrome” side of the airport and a “seaplane basin” on the other side. ( This may seem far- fetched, but the RCAF had already established a seaplane base at Jericho Beach in 1920.) A “wireless station” was located on the northern side of the airport, beside a “sandy bathing beach” the public could access through a new road at the western end of the aerodrome. There was also room set aside for a “future airship field” with a “mooring mast.” Oh, and we shouldn’t forget a 20,000- seat sports stadium that was to be built along Marine Drive. Both plans fell by the wayside during the Great Depression in the 1930s, but politicians continued to dream up big plans for the west side waterfront. In 1930, park commissioner Jonathan Rogers outlined a plan for a Marine Driveway that ran along the entire English Bay waterfront from the West End to Spanish Banks. In 1957, the city announced a plan to buy up all the houses on the water side of Pt. Grey Road, which it wanted to demolish for a widened waterfront road. Homeowners proposed an alternative: dumping fill on the waterfront to build the waterfront road just north of their houses. Today, the proposal sounds crazy, but various versions of it were considered for years. In 1968, the plan called for fill to be dumped at the foot of waterfront cliffs to create a 2.2- kilometre drive between Kits Point and Alma Street. The cost would have been $ 2.6 million. Another proposal called for Pt. Grey Road to be extended through today’s Jericho Park so it could connect with Marine Drive at Locarno Beach. But the waterfront road envisioned by generations of politicians and planners never came to pass.