Shall we head back to the miniparks?

This one goes by The Beaconsfield, a 1909 structure that was “one of the first large apartment blocks to be built in the West End”, according to the Vancouver Heritage Foundation, and still providing an imposing brick facade to this day. 

There’s also a quirky rock structure, which provides something to look at or climb if you’re a small child, and the requisite garbage cans and streetlights. 

In other words, it’s a minipark. But a slightly more interesting one.  

We’ve covered most of the complaints that were brought against the miniparks in the 1970s and 80s, but there was a particular one reported by The Vancouver Sun in 1982. While most would identify the park as being next to the longtime home of Gordon Neighbourhood House, at the time it was the only minipark to be built facing single-family homes. 

There was originally a plan for swings and climbing bars at this park — but “the committee decided to abandon plans .. after area residents protested that it would create unnecessary noise and attract too many children to the site.” 

So, there’s that. 

With so many parks in the city, it’s inevitable that some of them will need more TLC than others, but it’s particularly noticeable at Thunderbird Park, where exposed rust permeated through the 1980s play structure, and the noise from cars on Hastings heading to Highway 1 roars through the trees.

With a small field and a few trees, it’s certainly possible we have underrated (slightly) this park, but the lack of amenities outside the dying play structure left us with disappointment, so here it sits.

Next year though, it will get a higher ranking, as the playground was replaced in 2022.

Unfortunately for this project though, the park board thought so little of the upgrade that they didn’t bother to update their website where they list more than two dozen renovations across the system, perhaps symbolic of their care for this area over the years.

And so, for now, here it sits.

What does $590,000, modern urban design principles and copious references to a city’s diverse background get you? 

Sometimes, just a weirdly unsatisfying modernist park. 

Sun Hop Park, named for a company that operated a block away in the 1920s, and paying homage to the Chinese green grocers of the era, is less than a decade old. It was converted from a traffic triangle next to a parking lot in 2013, at the same time the same parking lot was being converted — in the best traditions of early 21st Century Vancouver — to a mixed-use market condo.

According to Park Board Minutes at the time, open houses revealed that people wanted a place that prioritized “social gathering, seating, respite from the traffic on Main Street, green space, public art, incorporating historical context (especially the Palm dairy), a gateway to mid-Main, interactive elements, memorable experience, and expression of the community.”

That’s a lot of stuff to jam into a small triangle of land beside a busy street. Which might explain why Sun Hop is such a jumbled mess. 

The dominant feature of the park is a curved red pergola, in theory looking like giant bendy straws you could have seen at the Ice Cream shop that operated on the site for 37 years. 

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t look like bendy straws! In theory, greenery was going to sprout on top of the pipes, but in reality there’s one sad vine on one sad curve, giving the impression of an unfinished art project.

Answering the question “what if you had a piece of land with a beautiful view and did nothing to improve it?”, Quadra West continues our theme of underutilized pieces of land on the city’s west side. 

The grass is sloped, so most games of sport are out of the question, but it provides a lovely view of Downtown and the north shore, perched as it is right on top of the ridge that serves as the unofficial demarcation of Dunbar. 

But the lack of even a single bench is perplexing, and no doubt a disappointment to people who might enjoy more complex inland parks in that quadrant of the city.  

There were lots of small sagas during the great 1980s West End minipark debate: some property owners complained it would cost them an extra $5 a month, people in favour of the parks accused council of constantly dragging their heels, at one point different churches got into a skirmish when a large one complained the miniparks could prevent proper fire access.

Debates around the role of parks never stop in Vancouver, their locations just move — today the Jervis and Burnaby minipark is innocuous, but it has a number of nice benches, some pleasant overhanging trees, and on a sunny day a view of English Bay.

And really, isn’t that enough?

We’re still deep in the midst of Park Board territories that aren’t fully formed parks, and this is among the most interesting — a 350-metre strip of land of Vancouver, accessible only by walking past a giant bus depot.

When you arrive, it amounts to a pleasant but somewhat-too-industrial walk to a picnic table next to the Fraser River, after which you walk back the way you came.

In the future, the idea is that it will seamlessly connect to an integrated greenway along the Fraser, instead of being part of a patchwork of corridors. 

But if you’re interested in a picnic date next to a bridge, a river and about 200 buses, it’s for you.