Proposed road would cut through Point Grey
There has been no end of wacky proposals in Vancouver. But one of the wackiest has to be a 1968 plan to build a waterfront road in Kitsilano by filling in the waterfront.
“A $2.6 million waterfront road creating more than a mile of new beach-park playground in the city was recommended Friday by city officials,” George Peloquin reported in The Vancouver Sun on March 30, 1968.
“The spectacular view drive would sweep 1.37 miles along the south foreshore of English Bay between Kitsilano pool and Pioneer Park at Alma Street.”
The Province reported “about 1.6 million cubic yards of fill would be needed to create the road, most of it sand dredged from the sea.”
The fill for the four-lane road would have also created “a new sandy beach 5,000 feet long, and 28 acres of parkland.”
The route would have been from Balsam Street to Alma, just north of approximately 100 waterfront houses on Point Grey Road.
The planners didn't think the new road would bother the homeowners, though.
“The steep cliffs rimming the back of the foreshore ensure that a development such as is proposed would cause a minimum loss of privacy to the upland tenants,” said the report.
The “upland tenants” were the homeowners. The Sun reported city officials had also looked at “clearing houses on the north side of Point Grey Road for an upland drive,” but rejected it because of the cost: “$6.6 million to acquire and demolish more than 100 dwellings and $1 million for development.”
Council was still interested in buying up the Kits waterfront over time. The Vancouver park board and council had been purchasing properties along Point Grey Road to create parkland since the 1950s.
On Feb. 25, 1969, council voted “to acquire all property north of Point Grey Road as it becomes available.” But it estimated it might take “20 to 50 years to complete the acquisition scheme.”
It eventually abandoned the idea because of the cost, but there are still six pocket parks along Point Grey Road where houses were torn down.
The waterfront road report had been commissioned by the city, which hired two engineering firms to do it, Swan Wooster, and Ripley, Kholm and Leonoff. They submitted a 100-page report.
The report noted the city had “envisioned the scenic drive as far back as 1929,” when it was buying houses on the English Bay shoreline in the West End for a waterfront park and drive.
It argued the “general aspect” of the Kitsilano waterfront along Point Grey Road was “one of untidiness and neglect.”
“Notwithstanding the neat, wellcared-for appearance of some individual properties,” said the report, “the impression of disrepair created by several dilapidated structures and the untidy foreshore is predominant.”
Many residents were not impressed with the waterfront road plan, however. H.G. Eakins of 3003 Point Grey Rd. said it would be “more of a throughway than a scenic route,” and would have no arterial connections.
“It's crazy,” Eakins said in the April 24, 1968 edition of The Sun. “It would start nowhere and end nowhere.”
Landscape architect Cornelia Oberlander said the road plan was “unimaginative” and had a “builtin obsolescence” that failed “to make the most out of Vancouver's natural beauty.”
She lambasted council for “restricting itself to roadway options,” and urged them “to seek development for purely recreational purposes — access to the beach by foot and not by car.”
A proposal for a second “scenic” road connecting Point Grey Road and NW Marine Drive was passed by council on Dec. 22, 1970. It would have gone through today's Jericho Park, which was then a military base but was being looked at as a future park.
But like the city's many freeway plans of the 1950s and '60s, neither the waterfront nor Jericho roads ever got built.
The stretch of Point Grey Road between Balsam and Alma is now known as the Golden Mile, because it contains some of B.C.'S most expensive real estate.
Nineteen properties on Point Grey Road made B.C. Assessment's top 100 list of the province's Top Valued Residential Properties, including three in the top 10. Lululemon founder Chip Wilson's home at 3085 Point Grey Rd. has the highest assessment in the province, $81.765 million.