More than 50
memorials dot Vancouver’s Stanley park. But once you leave the park, will you
remember even one?
By Stephen
Osborne
In the
beginning
A
year after Vancouver became a municipality in 1886, the first city council
petitioned the federal government to lease 400 hectares of land to the city to
be used as a park. Originally a forest of old growth trees that was home to
Musqueam and Squamish First Nations, it was then a marine base for the Royal Navy.
The British government handed over the largely
logged forest land, and on September 27, 1888, Stanley park was officially
opened. Since then, the park has undergone immense changes. In 1937,
construction began on the lions gate bridge, which linked the park to north and
west Vancouver a year later. And though it took more than 60 years to build,
the 8.85 kilometre long paved seawall
that skirts the park was finally completed in 1980. Stanley park is now the
third largest city owned park in north America (behind Chapultepec park in Mexico
city and the golden gate national recreation area in San Fransisco) and hosts
more than eight million visitors each year.
More than
monuments
Whether
you’re nature or sports enthusiast, a history buff or just looking to get out
of the city. Stanley park has something for almost everyone. Tennis court, lawn
bowling green and 18 hole pitch and putt golf course cater to the sports
minded, while second and third beaches and the Oceanside heated pool and water
park are ideal for water lovers. Some 30 hiking trails weave through the park,
and the seawall offers a route for running, cycling, rollerblading, or simple
strolling. A 15 minute ride on the miniature railway, with a replica of the
engine that pulled the first transcontinental passenger train into the city
1886, offers a glimpse into the past, along with the faded gentility of the
Stanley park pavilion (built in 1911). The Vancouver aquarium, Canada’s
largest, opened in 1956 and houses thousands of sea creatures, including six
beluga whales. The parks also has four restaurants and host of horticultural
treasures.
When
you enter the leafy precincts of Stanley park, at the edge of downtown
Vancouver, the first thing likely to escape your attention is the bronze statue
of lord Stanley flinging his arms into the air on the grassy knoll just inside
the park entrance. The second thing you are likely to forget, only metres away,
is the statue of Robert burns, the Scottish poet, clutching a sheaf of papers
to his chest. Cross over the lawn, and you come upon the elaborate but somewhat
faded memorial to queen Victoria (“Victoria the good”. Reads the plaque.
“erected by the school children of Vancouver”). In a moment, it too will have
vanished from your memory. Monuments which are intended to make us remember
tends to make us forget nowhere more so than in Stanley park, where dozens of
them sit tucked away and lost among 400 hectares of forests and pathways, lawns
and beaches, playgrounds and tennis courts and lawn bowling pitches, where they
persist in the landscape as in a dream. Lord Stanley was governor general of
Canada in 1889, when he dedicated the park in his own name to “ people of all
colours, creeds, and customs for all time. "The remains of the original hollow
tree still sit in Stanley park as a memorial to the 800 year old,17 metre wide
red cedar".
A
short hike away from his memorial lies a mini-forest of trees planted in honour
of the plays of William Shakespeare : oak pine, hemlock, beech and cedar, among
others, each assigned an appropriate line of verse tiny plates. The bard
himself is represented by the profile of a rascally looking gent with a goatee
mounted on a chimney like structure. He reminds us less of Shakespeare (“not of
an age but for all time”, reads the plague) than of a frontier city making a
claim to high culture in 1916, just as the memorial to Queen Victoria reminds
us of the same city making a claim for imperialism in 1905. Monuments such us
these propose a kind of ideal history that reflects the way someone else once wanted
things to be.
Facing
Burrard Inlet can be found a splendid dragon’s head that turns out to be a
replica of the prow of the SS Empress of Japan that, according to the plaque,
”plied these waters” at the turn of the 20th century. From here, you
can see the bronze likeness of a girl in a wetsuit perched on a rock a few
metres from shore. She represents “Vancouver’s dependence on the sea”,
according o the inscription. How that
might be so is unclear. A nearby boulder bears the name of the man who planned a
sawmill in Stanley park in 1865, and behind it is long balanced on two smaller
logs in the manner of a lean to. This is Lumbermen’s arch, itself a memorial to
the original arch built in the form of the Greek Parthenon on Pender street, in
downtown Vancouver, so that the duke of Connaught ( another governor general
and the son of Queen Victoria ) might be driven beneath it in a parade 1912.
Such
are the apparently random contents of public memory. A camellia bush the
centenary of Francis E. Willard of the woman’s Christian temperance union. A
dogwood tree memorializes John Drainie, actor and broadcaster. A rhododendron
garden reminds us of Ted and Mary Greig, “pioneers in rhododendron culture”.
Even
bits of the park itself are memorialized. The hollow tree, for instance, is
remembered by its own hollow stump, which sits next to a rustic sign that
reads, “hollow tree”. And the seven sisters, a once beloved stand of tall
evergreens, is commemorated by a plaque and a planting of seven fir trees,
whose purpose is to invoke the spirit of the originals. A totem pole near
aquarium is dedicated simply “ to the children of the world”. And a group of
eight totems near Brockton point reminds us briefly of the first inhabitants of
this coastal land, and in their picturesque aspect (unlike the other memorials in the park, the totems
are always surrounded by crowds of admires taking photographs), they serve as
the occasion for forgetting the first peoples at the same time as we appear to
remember them.
Also
near Brocton point, hidden in a leafy glade by the harbor, an imposing Celtic
cross rises from a stony pedestal, erected “ in memory of eight persons who
lost their lives on the Chehalis sunk by the Princess Victoria on july 21,
1906, at 2 p.m. opposite this spot”. You look out over the traffic on the
roadway, past the stream of walkers and joggers and rollerbladers on the
seawall, to the blue waters, and you look at your watch to compare the time.
How great was the loss to move shipmates and friends to this extravagance? You
are completely alone in the glade.
The
grandest of memory traces hidden away in the Stanley park and possibly the
least known sits off to the side of Malkin bowl ( itself a memorial to the wife
of a former mayor ), where a pair of huge bronze eagles stands sentinel over a
fountain dedicated to the visit of Warren Gamaliel Harding, twenty ninth president
of the united state of Amerika and charter member of the Kiwanis club of Marion,
Ohio. In July 1923, Harding’s scandal ridden administration was crumbling, and
he was looking for favourable publicity away from Washington, D.C, where
several of his senior advisors had already committed suicide. He arrived in
Vancouver in a swallow tail coat and top hat and delivered a windy speech that
was later inscribed on stone slabs next to two enormous bronze goddesses
wearing flimsy robes and learning on war shields. “ no grimfaced fortification
marks our frontiers”, you read, and already you feel the president ‘s speech
erasing itself from memory,”…not of perishable parchment, but of fair and
honorable dealing”. By the time you turn
away, you have forgotten all of it words, dates and even the name of the twenty
ninth president. Before leaving the park (with monuments yet unseen, yet to be
forgotten, dedicated to, among other things, a sprinter, several military
personages, a chief forester, the honour of seafarers, the game of cricket,
peace between the children of the former Soviet union and Canada and the legend
of Skalsh the Unselfish), you find the grave marker of Pauline Johnson near
ferguson point, in a dark grove occupied by a family of ring tailed raccoon. A
slab of rock, a trickle of water, the necessary plaque. Here lie the ashes of
the best loved of Canadian poets, Tekahionwake, daughter of Mohawk chief, at
rest in the park that she had come to love in the last years of her life. Her memorial
was sanctioned by the Duke of Connaught ( already you have forgotten his
connection to Lumbermen’s arch ) who convinced park authorities to allow the
only official burial to be performed in Stanley park in 1913, a date that
vanishes from your mind, as will even this place, which is beautiful, quiet and
lonely, and already fading away.
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