This morning, I’m writing down some talking points in preparation for the walking tour I am leading about Broadway for the Canadian Association of Planning Students conference in two weeks. The walking tour is going to touch primarily on the regional implications of the TransLink’s UBC Line Rapid Transit Study and the City of Vancouver’s Central Broadway Planning Program. And it’s a ton of fun because I get to talk about all the stuff I’ve accumulated in my head through thinking about this stuff for the Vancouver Public Space Network.
It’s giving me a chance to sort through a lot of my thoughts on Broadway. One of the neat, breath-taking, completely unintended side effects of that is that I’ve been able to remember what Cambie and Broadway looked like before the Crossroads Building came in — something buried so much in the tangle of details and gradual change, that until now I couldn’t even bring it to mind when I tried. Things like,
there was a mall. it was tacky and pink coloured, and had this weird courtyard-surface parking-mall layout. Fairchild Radio was based there. There was a coffee shop and a clothing store right off the street. A corner of the mall had a noodle shop, where there was seating facing the street. I remember grabbing coffee to take the 99 to UBC (on one of the rare occasions I did, as I probably went to UBC a grand total of 15 times between 2000 and 2009).
my parents bought our first car in Canada, a 1989 red-coloured Taurus, at the Ford dealership that was on the block across the street from the Wendy’s. I kept the balloons branded Stadium Ford given to me by our car salesman in a drawer in my desk for a really long time, because I’ve always been a bit of a hoarder. That was the car my mom drove to temp assignments before she got her job at the School Board. One time, she got stuck during a snow dump leaving work in
AbbotsfordDelta (maybe there was a ditch involved?) and a friend’s parents had to drive me home — all 4 blocks! — from daycare.the car dealership was eventually re-purposed into an outdoor sporting goods store and a Doppler computer parts store. The TV show Sliders filmed there (which I was a massive horrible fangirl for), and the main character worked as a salesman at that store. My brother has a deeply personal story about that store that really set the tone for him and I as siblings for a really long time. (I would later see the actor for that main character walking down the street on Robson in the late-nineties, after my fannishness got really, really embarrassing.)
the design of the Canadian Tire on the block north of the Ford dealership is basically exactly the same as the Canadian Tire at Hastings and MacLean in East Vancouver - surrounded by parking, grey steel-like massing. (Incidentally, I lived next to that one for a little while — and it is, too, right next to a car dealership.)
I will never have stories quite like this for any other place in the world. But everybody’s got stories like this, and we also never stop making new memories and stories. And now I live here and have all sorts of other reactions to the intersection, as a completely different brain-layer than the stuff in this post. I’m glad they are still there.
