MAYOR HAD A PLAN FOR KITS RESERVE
Auditorium, stadium would have cost $2 million
The 1930s were a time of big public works schemes across Canada. But few were as grand as a 1936 plan for a $2-million stadium and auditorium on the Kitsilano Indian Reserve, beside the Burrard Bridge.
The plan was proposed by Vancouver mayor Gerry McGeer, whose administration was also building a $1-million city hall at 12th and Cambie.
“According to the Mayors’s scheme … a huge civic auditorium would face the western side of the Burrard Bridge where its southern end spans the Reserve,” The Vancouver Sun reported on Sept. 15, 1936. “Behind the auditorium a great stadium, capable of accommodating games on the Olympic scale, would run out to the west, the back wall of the auditorium forming the east end of the stadium.”
But there was a lot more to the scheme than just an auditorium and stadium. The drawing by architects Sharp and Thompson showed a variety of plans for the 76-acre site, which today is home to the Gordon MacMillan Southam Observatory, the Vancouver Museum, the City of Vancouver Archives, and the Vancouver Academy of Music.
“On the north side of the combined structure would be tennis courts, bowling greens, a shell bandstand, a rowing club and a landing for small pleasure craft,” The Sun noted.
“Behind the stadium, and still further to the west, a mammoth open air swimming pool is situated, and an artificial ( breakwater), ending in a small lighthouse, runs a short way out from shore, marking the entrance to False Creek. Two sides of the area would be surrounded by bathing beach.”
The Vancouver Archives has the original illustration of the plan, complete with a legend pointing out the various facets of the design.
The auditorium was reminiscent of Sharp and Thompson’s design for the 1931 Vancouver Art Gallery on Georgia Street, with clean art deco lines and elegant symmetry.
Sharp and Thompson also designed the Burrard Bridge, and the art deco columns at the foot of the bridge were replicated in the entrance to the auditorium/stadium complex.
The stadium wasn’t that big — it looks like it would have accommodated about 5,000 for soccer, lacrosse, rugby or football. It’s an update of a 1934 Sharp and Thompson design for a stadium and auditorium on the opposite (east) side of Burrard, where the Molson’s Brewery and Seaforth Armoury are today.
There was an armoury attached to the 1934 Sharp and Thompson design, but it didn’t get built because a rival architectural firm (McCarter and Nairne, who did the Marine Building) got the contract to design Seaforth.
The catch with both Sharp and Thompson designs is they would have been built on the Kitsilano Reserve, which stretched from the water to Burrard and First.
The site had long been a native village, and was designated a reserve in 1869, two years before British Columbia became a province and 17 years before Vancouver was a city. Originally 37 acres, it was expanded to 80 acres in 1877.
As Vancouver grew, however, the reserve was coveted by various interests. An 1891 Rand Brothers map shows a series of “proposed ocean docks” on the English Bay side of the reserve. In 1911, the Great Northern Railway reportedly offered $2 million for the site.
A scandal erupted in 1913 when the provincial government announced it had purchased the reserve off of 20 males from the Squamish nation who lived on the site for $225,000.
“False Creek Reserve is Sold For a Song!” declared a front-page Sun story on March 13, 1913. “Trickery is Charge of Squamish Indians.”
According to UBC’s Indigenous Foundations website, the federal government wouldn’t let the province take over the site, because the sale didn’t follow the provisions of the Indian Act. But the Squamish who had left didn’t return, and a squatter’s community grew up along False Creek.
The federal government bought out the provincial government’s interest in the site for $350,000 in 1928. Two years later, it gave the city a right-of-way through the reserve for the Burrard Bridge, which opened in 1932. Part of the site was also chipped away for the Seaforth Armoury.
During the Second World War, the site was leased to the Department of National Defence, which used it as a Royal Canadian Air Force station and depot. But the land officially remained a reserve until 1946, when the Squamish council “surrendered” the reserve to the federal Department of Indian Affairs.
Parts of the land were sold, including the Molson’s site. In 1966, the federal government handed what remained of the reserve to the city for Vanier Park.
A decade later, the Squamish went to court to try to get some of the reserve back, and in 2002 received 10 acres that had been expropriated for a Canadian Pacific Railway right-of-way in 1886 and 1902.