SkyTrain Explorer

Articles about walks listed in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1894143086/sillygwailo-20"><i>Sky... Explorer: Heritage Walks From Every Station</i></a> by John Atkin (see also <a href="http://www.justagwailo.com/skytrain/">the <i>SkyTrain Explorer</i> section</a> for photos).

Granville Heritage

Has it really been almost three years since my last SkyTrain Explorer walking tour? It sure doesn't feel like it. Not including the Metrotown Station tour, which only takes you through the mall, all that's left is Burrard Station, Stadium-Chinatown Station, Broadway Station, and, up until this weekend, Granville Station.

Starting a SkyTrain Explorer walking tour.

The route took me from Granville Station heading south to Smithe. Along the way, I gazed upon the Sears building renovation project and the Vancouver Block. Past Granville and Robson, I admired the facade of the Commodore Ballroom, a venue I've been fortunate enough to attend a few concerts at. Atkin points out the B.C. entertainment hall of fame plaques lining Granville Street and especially the one in from of the Orpheum. Along this section of the tour, changed since the book's publication date has been the tearing down and rebuilding of the building on the corner of Robson Street, formerly an optical store, soon to be an Old Navy store, and the closing down of the Granville Seven theatre.

Taking me along from Granville and then onto Smithe, Atkin directs me to walk up the stairs to Robson Square. How did I not until now visit this side of it? The view of downtown Vancouver is incredible. Did I know the multicoloured sculpure by Michael Banwell was there until yesterday? No, I did not.

After some confusion as to which route to take to get there (Hornby? through the square?), I found myself on the west side of the Art Gallery, where we see a memorial to Edward VII (Shakespeare quote!) and an entrance to the old law courts (now the art gallery) with Police and Sheriff signs outside. (I'd been watching a little bit too much Doctor Who, 2005 edtion, so I half expected the Doctor to pop out of it with Rose.) Through the art gallery's square, where so many protest has taken place, we are led to gaze upon Hotel Georgia.

All in all a short tour, just south down Granville, hang a right on Smith, then back north through Robson Square to the Art Gallery. For all the photos, visit my Granville Station SkyTrain Explorer page, or the set on Flickr.

New Westminster Explorer

Last Sunday, in an attempt to escape some personal doldrums, I set out to New Westminster to enjoy the walk outlined by John Atkin in his book, SkyTrain Explorer: Heritage Walks From Every Station. New West holds a strong place in B.C. history, having the distinction of being British Columbia's capital city, though it doesn't hold much in my imagination, spending most of my time in Vancouver or its suburb to the East, Burnaby. I've spent far more time in Surrey than in New West, and New West has always been closer!

Galbraith House in New Westminster

I followed the trail set out by Atkin except for a couple detours, both pointed out by him. I erroneously fully crossed the pedestrian bridge over the rail tracks, stopping past the point where Atkin recommended to see the back of the old CPR station, now The Keg restaurant. Heading back, onto Columbia, I wanted to see “the wonderfully illustrated neon and backlit plastic signs along Begbie and Front Streets denoting Ladies & Escorts, Mens and Licensed Premises”. Maybe I didn't look hard enough. My other detour was to take a look at Galbraith House on 8th (pictured), near the end of the walk. Though not in and of itself unwelcome, a phone call from my sister prevented me from finishing the walk in time to get back to my place in time for an appointment.

I liked walking around downtown New West, and look forward to walking the previous chapter's route, around Columbia Station. I wonder if the city will be as quiet as it was on that sunny Sunday.

This walk, more than others, drove home the sense that I am not a flâneur, someone who strolls the city in order to experience it and notice it, or at least resist the label. Things generally have to be pointed out to me, be it either my girlfriend ("hey, Richard, look at that!") or a celebrated Vancouver neighbourhood historian in a book. I neither seek out nor get a lot of resonance from exploring the city. I acknowledge that the act of noticing mundane things and documenting them fills me with a small joy every time I do it, but I'd hate for someone to make it more than it is. Lately I struggle with people attaching too much significant to regular things, in part because I feel left out from the significance-making but also in part because I don't care. I struggle with opinions held about the "city lecture set", people whom I call friends but wonder why they fuss over the history of a city which a large percentage of the residents don't even come from.

(For an interesting discussion on going from flâneurs to planners, see Grant McCracken's article on Morgan Friedman's presentation and advice on the subject. thx gordonr)

I undertook walking around predefined routes of SkyTrain stations because, one one hand, I sit at my desk too much and feel I can't participate in conversations about the city, but on the other hand, I love SkyTrain. To a guy who had train wallpaper in his room and who grew up 2 blocks away from a still-active small town train station, it's the neatest thing in the world. I don't love SkyTrain walks as much as the mode of transportation that gets me doing them. I don't love walking around unknown city blocks as much ... as much as what? It drives home for me the unanswered question "what do I love doing?" The question, part of a longstanding thread where I compare myself to others and come up short, haunts me because I surround myself with people who have figured this question out and are either doing it or seeking it out. It haunts me because if everybody has a story, then what's mine?

Patterson Explorer

Yesterday afternoon, needing some exercise and fresh air having spent Saturday indoors, I walked around the neighbourhood surrounding Patterson Station in Burnaby as part of the recommended walks in SkyTrain Explorer by John Atkin. Getting there by bike instead of SkyTrain was the main difference from the others I've taken, cycling down Gilmore, the Sea-to-River Bikeway leading along Patterson, it turns out, right to my destination. I locked my bike up at the station and proceeded on foot, with my GlobalSat DG-100 GPS logger in hand, taking photos with my RebelXTi. You can see the set in Flickr, as well as the map made out in Yahoo! Maps (zoom in a couple of times to see in more detail where I took the photos). I also mapped the walk out in Google Maps, since Atkin's directions were a little confusing initially.

Patterson

A couple of other notes: the switch to daylight savings time made for some mislocated photos. I'm not sure if it was the camera or the GPS unit which had the hour ahead, and luckily GPSPhotoLinker has a button to view where individual photos fit on the map, aiding in discovering this fact. God may strike me down for this, but I manually edited the GPX file that the DG-100 exports via its Windows-only utility, moving all the hours (all in GMT) back one hour. The map on Flickr is a fairly good representation of the houses in the neighbourhood appear.

Some discoveries: Patterson has two entrances, which I didn't know until visiting it. One closer to Burnaby's Central Park, and one above the bus loop. Also, I'm pretty sure that the house 5575 Jersey I photographed is not the same 5575 Jersey that Atkin mentions in his book. He says it's “a fabulous house which is almost lost from view because of the overgrowth of vegetation around it.” Either someone removed the vegetation or someone removed the house.

Needing a short break biking back home, and to make it officially an exploration worthy of the book's name, I hopped on a SkyTrain for one stop from Gilmore Station to Brentwood Town Centre Station.

Google Map of Chapter 10 from SkyTrain Explorer covering the neighbourhood around Patterson Station
Based on the directions by John Atkin. As usual, I venture off on small detours, like I did today on this route.

Rainy Royal Oak

The tour of Royal Oak Station last weekend (part of SkyTrain Explorer's walking tours), wasn't remarkable except for the huge Burnaby South Secondary School and a cul-de-sac in the shape of a barbel (at the appropriately-named Barbel Place). Then again, Burnaby, the suburb of Vancouver I live in, is not terribly remarkable either, despite the coolness neighbourhoods like Burnaby Heights (picnics every weekend at the park, the crazy old Italian guys playing and arguing over bocce, the restaurants and other cool shops on Hastings etc.). The size of Burnaby South Secondary is an indication of how residential the Royal Oak neighbourhood is. Not a lot of people got on or off at this station, but the basis for comparison is the high traffic Metrotown Station, which must have a crush of students on their way to SFU on weekdays. It was rainy and a little cold, but a little water from the sky isn't enough to discourage this Vancouverite from getting some fresh air and discovering my surroundings.

Five chapters in and five tours taken on the list of stations in SkyTrain Explorer (Main Street-Science World Station, Nanaimo Station, 29th Avenue Station, Edmonds Station and Royal Oak) it's probably time I invited people to come along with me. The best candidate looks to be Broadway Station, sometime late October or early November. I'll probably check out a copy of the book so that I'm not the only one who can read from it, and ideally I'd like to do it on a weekend day early in the afternoon. I might even post it at Upcoming.org as a self-promotional event. Even though he conducts walking tours himself, I'm sure John Atkin thought that people would (and should!) organize self-guided group tours using his book, and that encouraging people to explore neighbourhoods was what he had in mind when he wrote them.

29th

29th Avenue Station

Yesterday during SkyTrain's weekend maintenance, I went on a walking tour of the area around 29th Avenue Station as described in SkyTrain Explorer by John Atkin. It was actually a two-part tour, but the weather was nice and I had lots of water (and didn't feel like coming back to the same area to do the second part later on) which takes the reader on both two sides of the station. I posted photos in the 29th Avenue Station section of my SkyTrain Explorer page. Some of the more interesting sights on the tour were the Renfrew Ravine Labyrinth and John Norquay Elementary School (which wasn't technically on the tour, but on the detour I took on the way back to the SkyTrain station). The photos of the houses at 3140 Kings St. and 4598 Moss St. have some longer quotes from the book about the houses in question. Wally's Burgers wasn't where Atkin said it was, or, more likely, I didn't look hard enough after being tired from 2 hours of walking in the sun with no hat. I'll seek it out later, since just the name Deluxe Chuck Wagon Burger sounds delicious.

Edmonds

On Saturday, not feeling very well but wanting to get outside, I walked around Edmonds Station as part of my effort to follow the tours in SkyTrain Explorer by John Atkin. I've created a book page for the Edmonds Station chapter, which links to the photos I took with my Nokia N70. One of the shorter chapters, there wasn't much direction other than to walk around Byrne Creek Park, which was a nice little forest oasis in the urban jungle. I wish I was in a better mood to walk around the nearby train yard and control centre, which always looks interesting when the trains go by it.

John Atkin mentions a local group that helps preserve the park and educate school kids about the area: The Byrne Creek Streamkeepers Society is a group of volunteers dedicated to the stewardship of the creek, keeping it clean, monitoring the fish and other life of the ravine. They are one of eleven such groups in Burnaby. Formed in 1999, the Streamkeepers have worked to promote and educate citizens about the value of the creek and its unique habitat. Among other activities they help organize salmon fly release programs with school students and community groups to restock the creek. The park is home to coho and chum salmon, cutthroat trout, rainbow trout and an abundant bird population.” The park did seem very well maintained and clean, so they must be doing something right.

Main

Ontario Ends

On Saturday I took the walk around the Main Street-Science World SkyTrain station as suggested by John Atkin in his book SkyTrain Explorer: Heritage Walks From Every Station, and created a section for it here on Just a Gwai Lo. My favourite photos are Green Empty Benches, the signs at the end of Ontario St. (seen to the right) and the elevated SkyTrain guideways. It took a few minutes to spot the Seeds and Feed advertisement, but I found it after walking to the westernmost side of the block behind the building.

The neighbourhood surrounds False Creek, which, from the book, we learn “got its name from a notation made on a map by one of Captain Vancouver's crew who thought the body of water might be a river but turned out to be a 'false creek'.” Various sources, Discover Vancouver among them, say the member of Vancouver's crew was Captain George Richards.

I hear parts of Main Street south of Broadway are nice too. Almost 10 years in this city—at least the regional district—and I've never been to Q.E. Park. During the summer I shouldn't have any trouble finding an excuse to go.

This Much Maligned House Style

John Atkin: “The 2600 block of 24th is one block of nothing but Vancouver Specials all built in 1972. This much maligned house style is an effecient use of land, cheap to build (the shallow roof line is the maximum slope you can still use a tar and gravel roof on), easy to maintain and not as bad as commentators and urban critics make them out to be. In fact most efforts to improve the basic Special through zoning and design guidelines have led to the many nasty ill-proportioned home designs Vancouver's neighbourhoods get stuck with today. In its basic form the Special was a response to zoning by maximizing the allowable building envelope and floor space, and it was adaptable to various lot sizes, as can be seen on this street. Decorative schemes are quite varied with different railing designs for the balcony, brick and stone on the lower levels and a variety of trim details. It had a long run in the city with the first examples being built in the early 1960s and the last in the early 1980s when zoning bylaws changed.”

I walked up this street as part of Nanaimo SkyTrain Station chapter of SkyTrain Explorer: Heritage Walks From Every Station, from which the quote above appears (on p. 66). I took photos of the north side of the 2600 block [Flickr mirror] and the south side [Flickr mirror]. The vancouverspecials.com domain is already taken, of course, but it has a rotating gallery of Vancouver Special photos.

SkyTrain Heritage

A couple of weeks ago, while looking in the library for recent books on Vancouver's elevated light rail system, I came across SkyTrain Explorer by John Atkin. After flipping through it a bit, and reading some of the books descriptions of Vancouver neighbourhoods surrounding SkyTrain stations, I decided to give it a try by checking out the area around Nanaimo Station, and documented it with photos and commentary. I've even created a section for SkyTrain Explorer (it uses the 'expanded book' PHP snippet found on Drupal.org) in case I go on more heritage walks outlined in the book, and I plan on doing at least one chapter a month.

The author's website, Vancouver Walking Tours, though it looks like a 'static' website, upon close inspection he appears to update it frequently with the walking tours he conducts, not only in Vancouver but in other cities. If I can steal some time from work and other pursuits, I'll try to go on some and document them, possibly using a friend's video camera.

I've been living in this city for 10 years now, and don't really know the place. Walking around on guided tours—either self-guided or tour-guide-guided—should help shake the feeling that I'm missing something really great.