A City's Story: Vancouver (1967), col., 28 min.

the Twin Peaks called the Lions are well outside Vancouver a good 10 miles from downtown Stanley Park and yet so much do they dominate that city they are not only its trademark in some ways it's true hub and center the liens and the other mountains that form vancouver skyline are bulwarks against too much progress many fringes of the city have to be left almost untouched they must remain almost the way the glaciers left them a very few thousand years ago much of the countryside has perforce been allowed to possess its own soul today is the age of not being able to leave anything alone but here almost uniquely among big cities much has been left alone up through peculiar local wisdom but by the strong patterns of the environment visitors to Vancouver often claim that if you took away its mountains and it's sea it would be just another modern town but this word if is meaningless here and wholly unreal the landscape and the seascape are the two great realities influencing everyone at every moment but ever Mota's first brought in here [Music] men first came a century ago to cut the giant trees the tallest Douglas fir cut locally was over 400 feet high taller than any redwood or sequoia ever measured many a clipper ship had masts of Vancouver fir and the Royal Navy kept the mast forests at the entrance to the harbour from a few thin seams of coal along the waterfront it was deduced that Vancouver's real future might easily be to become a second Newcastle or even with luck another cardiff this dream if anyone remembered it would make us laugh today but although between the West End and Stanley Park there's a sheltered Bay known to everyone as Coal Harbour nobody remembers the old dream that gave it a name eventually the big Bane Harbor created a big city lying as it does between the convenient gap in the mountains and convenient channels to the open sea here the ocean roots of the Pacific converged upon the western terminus of Canada's first railroad from the Atlantic silt from Asia wheat from the Prairie were meeting at this crossroad [Music] from Asia came not only trade but new citizens to giving this far western town a Far Eastern look out look normally the Chinese or Japanese are Sikh who settles here becomes considerably westernized but the Westerners he lives among have over the years grown so used to oriental way he's both visible and invisible it may have changed them also in any event many of our rocks and waters and trees were already made quite Japanese by nature then too the city was created by people who came here simply because they liked it soft mild climate roses at Christmas are not unusual the only climatic extreme is the extremely long springtime but the only people who grumble about that are the ones who forget the rigor and tedium of icy winters scorching summers and no spring as for the raw geography of the place part of the local pattern was formed by old mouths of the Fraser River many times its present size because of the melting glaciers its north bank was the southern tip of the coast range the coast range ends suddenly here at the harbour entrance as if the lighthouse marked the event but really the whole city marks the end of the Great Barrier like the river we spread round the end of it the ice itself shaped the land dodging out inlets rounding the rocky contours and leaving grooves in the rocks still plainly red after maybe five hundred generations the Vancouver area forms part of the Pacific horseshoe of volcanoes and the last eruption of Mount Baker was only a hundred years ago Gardiner still find its ashes above older evidence of more local volcanism many an all black landmark is an old volcanic plug including the little mountain viewpoint one over familiar pattern is made by the impressions and comments of visitors they think of Vancouver as one thinks of Rio as just a picture postcard come alive they note an obsession with the Lions a bridge borrows this name and a football team they sometimes identify the whole town with a mere bridge a fate that happened to Sydney and San Francisco visitors think it rains all the time in Vancouver and some natives agree with them but but in the metropolitan area there are several climates and you can pick your own at the airport on the Fraser River the rainfall is about the same as that in Montreal and with a little more sunshine than in Montreal it's true that among the mountains of the North Shore it's much worse in the wildest parts of the hills there is over a hundred inches a year but even parts of the North Shore are dry enough to grow pine and juniper and other things that will die in a really sodden rainforest this party Vancouver's own fault but it seems to have a totem pole industry the old poles came from elsewhere and new ones are made by men from elsewhere one new pole was recently made in Vancouver for use in st. Catharines Ontario about 3,000 miles from the totem land it will be very wrong to forget this West Coast art but it seems also wrong to identify ourselves with it but to play games for tourists with it games that belong in Banff as of any other town it is said quite correctly that most of the newest buildings have no local style of their own they could be anywhere and everywhere one of the strangest complaints from outsiders is that we have no autumn colors on this damp and Misty Coast as in Japan our neighbor the vine maples have autumn flames that are almost as magical though not so delicate as their summer greens we get as much flamboyant color here as anyone could ever deserve as much as anyone should be able to stand without getting overwrought and nervous and besides we don't really need any violent danger signals about the coming winter for nothing very dangerous is in store for us if the eastern Reds in autumn are amazing as one must admit they are the Greens out here on the coast are amazing as even the Easterners admit they are especially in spring and summer though there are wonderful greens all year round and hence are boastful and tiresome slogan about this being an evergreen playground Easterners also think we both too much and too smugly and perhaps this is true they say everything grows bigger west of the Rockies maybe people talk bigger too but not all boasts are idle and it would be hard to exaggerate the strangeness and beauty of all the greens to be found in the coastal undergrowth three or four hours away by air the Hawaiian island of Kauai is the wettest and greenest spot on earth but our own greens are more varied and more kindly and they are on the very hem of a big city inside the suburbs visiting artists I think there is too much pink in Vancouver just now and they are right perhaps there is too much pink all over the world just now and yet we are also told there is not enough pink in our sunsets people are impossible to please Weller's on the Prairie explained they could never be happy on the coast because we lack their flaring skies at sundown so packed with dramatic violence we have other ways of being disturbed and of being happy but in any case our Sun sets on this edge of the continent are pretty enough without being vulgar we are told we are too dreamy and are not Canadian enough in some ways we may be guilty of that but if we are a daily looking at things and influenced by things that are simply not available to the people of other big cities then our being different is inevitable and it may not be wholly bad for us or bad for Canada they say the size and beauty of Stanley Park have made us blind and lazy about creating other parks downtown and this harsh accusation is all too true Stanley Park is so good it has been bad for other planning they say the CPR dominates Vancouver as its tracks nominate the waterfront long ago it was something of a CPR town and why not since it very much helped to create the city but that hero has long past the city scope has widened more than the CPRS has even the once-proud CPR district called Shaughnessy Heights now looks a little Edwardian and outmoded they say we are influenced by small groups of powerful men the vancouver club but the truth is that our minds and therefore our lives are more influenced by the North Shore hillsides just a continual sight of them than by any plans made for us by men and what the vancouver people themselves say about their own city more important what do they take for granted assuming unusual things are really quite normal they think it's normal at five miles from the old post office o'clock one can be in a complete and almost timeless wilderness city out of sight out of mind the huge cedar stumps were left by loggers long long ago they think it normal to catch salmon and trout in the shipping lanes see Coons and sometimes bear and deer in a city suburb to watch eagles and falcons along with shore and now and then the very rare sea otter to have seals and purposes and small whales sail about like yachts wildlife dwindles but it's amazing to have such things at all and land otter still breed under Burrard bridge in Falls creeks Midtown slum no one thinks twice about the vast number of Indian names in vancouver geography names like Capilano nor does anyone think it odd to play in the quiet forest of Capilano park three miles from stanley park it's still so wild a name Kitsilano doesn't sound outlandish an Indian Mission Church in the middle of North Vancouver is familiar and unnoticed Indians are not foreigners on downtown streets in a really new town like ours we can retain older things than the old towns do we have not disturbed local conditions so much thus we have an Indian graveyard in the shadow of a huge new block of flats I mean shadow to Vancouver people the Captain Vancouver of 1792 seems recent and real few big cities are named after recent friends and captain Dan Cooper is meeting with the Spanish explorers off the great sand bank still called Baez Spanish banks this too seems recent real and important and so do the Spaniards our city streets and districts are full of Spanish names Langara Quadra our buyers and so on not in the Gulf beyond Spanish banks our islands with Spanish names Gabriella Galliano Tex Aida and their names in our minds all summer long another thing we take for granted is that every city like ours should and can have firm edges to it edges that cannot be shifted and blurred and ruined besides the Seas edges we have another edge along the Fraser River besides natural horizontal edges there are fixed vertical ones as well no suburb will seek the snow and frost and gradients high up the slopes others say we take all our firm ages for granted and assume this is a standard thing but an assumption we believe the Orient is just outside the harbour well in some ways it is in a few ways that matter it is right amongst us all day every day many of us are seeing and using oriental objects without really thinking of them as oriental anymore they are just normal parts of our lives they are part of Vancouver even when a fashion such as growing dwarf trees is only a few years old on this coast such ideas take root fast and are naturalized Chinese artists from China as well as Chinese born here feel almost at home in our landscape and it works both ways they feel less exile than they feared and we find their work less foreign than some cities would but the big clue to Vancouver is how easily and quickly even be alone when you want that this yacht basin is crammed solid with gregariousness it just above it on Black Mountain there is nobody nobody at all even on Grouse Mountain so available by chairlift and gondola car you can step a few paces away from the tripperz and you are disengaged not only from them but from the whole city spread out below you there are thriving suburbs a few furlongs from either Bank of the Capilano River but the lone fisherman could easily be at the back of beyond and that is certainly where his mind is not the wooded banks from the fishermen others can be pioneers explorers thermos my mind to me a kingdom is this can be true anywhere if by luck you have the right sort of mind but it's so much easier here have been in some other cities most of the cities maybe all other cities of this size and the undergrowth thrives and remains beautiful when it's not being pushed around by anybody but the plants that we take for granted as being always there as our pleasant natural companions these are sold by Eastern florists as something special even in the very entrance to the Inner Harbor in the first Narrows the first Narrows which tourists catch is called the Lions Gate though you can't see the Lions from here even in the narrows with all its ships you can feel on your own with nobody breathing on you the cormorants like the other fishermen remain detached in the midst of civilization they have elbow room for what philosophies they care about never imagined we manage all things well we are killing off our lovely Arbutus trees by letting imported Scottish brooms spread over the rocks killing the Arbutus seedlings that can't stand competition we let picturesque old wooden houses fall into ruin I'll pull them down even before they go rotten aah believe it or not we let expert planners decide to pull the whole of our Chinatown down though the only people to enjoy that will be a small minority of sociologists in psychology we have left alone many good things and a few great unique things because thank God we have had no choice but to leave them alone but when we get a chance to butt in we can be as misguided as other towns in spite of our allegedly casual ways [Music] ah Cupid we still enjoy a little freedom from freeways but this can't last much longer we too will wear this hideous badge of an anxious age like our anxieties the freeways are always on the wrong scale in the wrong place for the wrong object as in most cities the amount of visual clutter is a nightmare there seems nobody to tidy it up after 10 years of nagging a few voters begin to notice it but not enough it will need 10 more years of nagging or 20 it doesn't do to believe all the artists who find the clutter rather charming and picturesque our artists here by the way is a vancouver born chinese who is bewitched by shabby streets on paper they're fine close to town we have left dwellings eat up our small supply of rich farmland one day in the only direction the city can spread it may devour the farms far up the Fraser River since the old hotel Vancouver was pulled down there has been no real center of town no focal point Burke's clock is not enough of a center the courthouse found beside the new Hotel Vancouver tries hard to be our focal point but doesn't quite succeed good bricks are made nearby but hardly anyone has used them since Edwardian days a few architects have started lately to use them in a gingerly tentative way and they seem quite novel to us [Music] stone buildings are rare here and get rarer stone houses are rarest of all in the background is a brick building with a little terracotta at its awkward age the older Berks building faced with terracotta went through a stage of looking ugly and is now starting to seem quite handsome again so you should leave things alone to see how they look later and this is true also the terracotta Hudson's Bay store maybe terracotta will return [Music] but in the main we seem to have gone pretty directly from wood to concrete without too much adventure I'm speaking here of materials substances [Music] we don't have enough street end glimpses and vistas of the ships that caused Vancouver and kept it going there is one delightful little street called Wall Street separated only from the commercial Wars by a railway track and a tiny clip that hides the track so that they have masts filling their windows as if they lived in Copenhagen or Amsterdam where ships and dwellings enhance each other Wall Street has its grain elevators too but we haven't enough has yet of this kind of beauty and romance outside our own windows also among our naughty tricks we have too much smoke not always and not everywhere and I know it can be beautiful but and now let us leave the list of our sins or some of them and list the things or some of them that give the place some of its qualities when you add several of them together you may well find the place has a flavour of its own we think it has every port has ships and sailors but few sailors can ever have confused Vancouver with the other cities of the world even though Vancouver and Yokohama have now officially declared themselves Sister Cities by adoption [Music] one flavour comes from outside industries based on the city itself we have canneries in the area and thousands of fishing craft to live in the harbour and river when logging balloons were working on the North Shore lately you could see them right from downtown office windows log wounds are towed from far away to the mills round the harbor in the river though the booms are being replaced more and more by great log barges Vancouver is a university town very much so with two large universities on its outskirts east and west and the city lying between them the newer one Simon Fraser University is named after an explorer who did not always know where he was and this can remind us that students don't always know where they are either but at least this dramatic courtyard feels different from all other places the older University called UBC is new enough its oldest building dates back to 1925 and you can prove this date by a stonemasons joke over the doorway 1925 was the year of the Scopes trial the Monkey Trial in Tennessee one carving shows an old rustic fogey called under for fundamentalist and the other shows a monkey called evolve which of course means evolutionist the oldest unrestored structure in the area is the wall at the lighthouse a foundation for an older lighthouse built in 1874 to us that's ancient it's hard to keep remembering just how new we really are Vancouver is of course bathing beaches maybe a dozen of them I don't know if anyone has ever counted them one of them is many miles long and some are tiny and all of them are wonderfully empty except between June and the end of August even in the hot weather you can find the rocky shores of scarce and lovers away the rocky shores its pleasant to live in a city that smells of seaweed and of copper paint and yellow cedar our native Cypress so good for both building the smell of red cedar boughs and Oh of red cedar when it's split the smell of Cottonwood blossoms driving over the bridge on a spring evening the smell of driftwood beach fires and a forest fires too sometimes and sawmills burning waste Vancouver luckily is in the small coastal district where the Western flowering dogwood flourishes far more than Haussmann's cherry trees are these the loveliest of trees wearing white for Eastertide and telling us that our mother the earth is a maiden again Vancouver is a blaze of Vine maples wearing red for harvest I'd offer Halloween across the Gulf on Vancouver Island they have many lovely trees and shrubs and flowers denied to us but we have the glories of the vine maple a thing denied for once to those proud Islanders there is much to make an Englishman feel at home here Hawley for instance and the Union Jack is still seen now and then quite frequently really and the wild roses mentioned by Captain Vancouver and foxgloves growing wild enough to delight Beatrix Potter herself and lavender that finds the climate so very agreeable and rosemary which means dew of the sea Rose marina rosemary for remembrance live memories of English gardens in not enough cities can you see the rocks that form their skeletons maybe this is a matter of taste but to some of us if we grew up in Vancouver cities without rocks seem to lack shape and texture visitors say you boast as if you made the mountains yourselves no we don't the mountains made us we are the proud children not the proud parents Vancouver is a good place for a great variety of weather's ever changing the weather's personality is split a hundred ways but hardly one of them stays mean for long and in a good year it can imitate the famous white light of Genoa a violet light not often seen outside Ireland and a blue and white effect from Dutch tiles to name only three it's a good climate for eccentrics and they thrive here it doesn't do to ask an eccentric why he is doing these things not so long ago in the West one didn't ask questions at all that was the golden age many of the best individualist still take to houseboats in a day when such freedom is against the tide the patterns of the tides at least not only make horizontal patterns on the surface of the sea but make vertical patterns with the rise and fall changing the angle the sea makes with the eye to influence the view there are patterns lovely ones of islands and ridges all sorts of patterns influenced us daily I don't mean our inner rhythm is always in accord with nature that's hard in any city but it may be easier here at least we know man is not the master of nature master and man let me give you the most rapid clue to our state of mind when the Vancouver servant of a large firm is ordered by his masters to move to a better job in Eastern Canada he sometimes refuses to obey even if this leads to his dismissal it doesn't mean we would all refuse but it does mean something very important he may think his reason is very simple for instance well Vancouver may be the only big city where you can saw your own firewood inside the city on the surface it's not much of a reason but just think of all of this implies it also is a clue [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: vanalogue

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Id: VmPZdFfvyjc

Length: 28min 14sec (1694 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2020