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.