"We try to keep Kerrisdale as a village. Keep it nice, quiet, clean and peaceful." Kerrisdale Without The Canada Line

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"We try to keep Kerrisdale as a village. Keep it nice, quiet, clean and peaceful." Kerrisdale Without The Canada Line

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uploaded by TheVancouverObserver

By Elecia Chrunik and Linda Solomon for www.thevancouverobserver.com
Children once jumped on the train and rode for a nickel, leaving the clean streets of Kerrisdale behind for the bustle of downtown.

Bill, a retired businessman and former army artillery Bill, a retired businessman and former army artillery operator, remembers it well.  He has lived in Kerrisdale since 1923. He rode the Arbutus line as a child.
 
His wife, Doris, has the same childhood memories.  “In my day, it cost 5 cents to go downtown.  It was called the Interurban.  You could go to Marpole and to a bridge across to Lulu Island, which was what they called Richmond.”

 Then one day, Doris and Bill couldn’t remember exactly when, the Interurban shut down.  

Almost Revived, But Not Quite

A little history.  

The Cambie Boulevard Heritage Society posted the excerpt that follows at the time when the City of Vancouver hadn’t yet made its decision to bust apart Cambie Street  to extend its massive transit system.  

Plans were afoot to run a line between the Vancouver International Airport in Richmond and downtown and many people thought it made sense to use the Arbutus corridor's already existing infrastructure.

Arbutus was not only in the running, but it seemed to many to be the obvious choice.
 “Here's the Arbutus corridor,” the Heritage Society wrote, “a desolate and overgrown tract running in a well-shielded corridor through the heart of Vancouver's suburbs, close to University of British Columbia, dense housing areas and the airport. Wouldn't a logical person expect this route to be ideal for a train transit system, should one ever be necessary? The route is there. The land-use intrusion has occurred here years ago, and the neighbourhood has accommodated it, and in fact has grown around it..."

Whether logical people were in decision-making charge or not may be debated for years.  What is known, however, is that, illogical or not, Cambie Street was chosen.  

Proponents of the Cambie corridor argued that it made more sense to run the new subway line past  large potential users like Vancouver General Hospital and City Hall and the construction began on schedule to be finished in time for the 2010 Winter Olympics.   

About  $1.5 billion of federal, provincial and city funds was budgeted to build the new line.

“I’ve always thought it would have been a good thing to have brought the train back," Bill said.  "But a lot of what you thought was terrific in your childhood, doesn’t fit in with the plans of city developers.”

Keeping Out the Riff-Raff

In his West Boulevard barber shop, facing the tracks, Dino, snipped a client's hair, and said that in the thirty years he had owned his shop,  he had seen a lot of changes come to Kerrisdale.   "It has become more vibrant," he said.  

"It used to be a place where restaurants closed at seven.  Now they stay open until midnight."  A train station at the corner of Forty-First and West, the centre of Kerrisdale village, which gains part of its charm from the presence of the tracks, would have made it more vibrant still.

 His clients were not all so sure.  He said they were divided about whether bringing  mass transit  through the neighbourhood would have been a blessing or a curse, Dino recalled.  While he thought it would have been a good thing, the majority of those who sat in his chair feared that it would not.

 “People were worried that bad people would move in, like people from Vancouver’s East Side.  Of course, they were right, in a way.  We try to keep Kerrisdale as a village.  Keep it nice, quiet, clean and peaceful.”

 "It'll bring in druggies.  That was the absolute party line among the Marine Drive Golf Club set," said James, who grew up in Kerrisdale and but has since lived on Vancouver's East Side and in the West End.  

 "Noise was made in the right places.  Calls were made to say it wouldn't be good for the community," he added.  People like his mother felt, like "the unwashed riff-raff will come  onto our shores."   

Critics launched a "not in our neighbourhood campaign" and managed to shift the line east to Cambie.

Lucy McCullough hasn’t been around long enough to have witnessed any world wars, but she’s lived in Kerrisdale off and on for 15 years. The area has changed to adapt to the people who live here, she said. There’s been increase in the Kerrisdale Asian population, for instance, so now there are bubble tea cafes. And it’s gotten younger. “I see a lot of young moms around lately,” she said.

“It would have made more sense for the RAV line to go through here,” she reflected, although she doesn’t really see the point of the RAV line in the first place. “Getting to the airport is not hard. It’s getting to Surrey and Langley that’s hard.”

 But what’s done is done and Lucy said that now paving in the track to make it accessible for Kerrisdale’s budding population of new young mothers to push their prams along would probably be the most logical plan.

 “It’s all politics,” Dino said, putting down his scissors, and brushing off his client’s neck.

British Properties for the Upper Middle Class

Mirielle, 98, and Lorna, a friend, who visits Kerrisdale every second week from Horsehoe Bay in order to take Mirielle for a walk around the village, thought an Arbutus line could have been an asset to the city.    

Lorna compared what she described as “just bad planning”  to the design of the Lion’s Gate Bridge.  “They weren’t thinking about the future," she said.

 Mirielle said she hadn’t actually been to Cambie Street since long before the construction started or seen the gaping holes excavators and drills have achieved to make way for the cut and cover engineering.   

Mirielle travels via HandiDart, the city bus that services mobility impaired people, only as far as the parking lot of the Oakridge Mall, which is located on Cambie, entering on Forty-First Street.  

She noted that business at the mall had visibly dropped over the last year and expressed concern about Cambie business owners losing everything they had invested for years.  “That’s a terrible thing,” she said, shaking her head.  “It would have been simpler to put it in here.  But there are people here who think this the British Properties.”  

For readers who aren’t familiar with “the British Properties,” these lands look out from West Vancouver over the water to the city and are home to Canada's most expensive postal code.

James described Kerrisdale as the upper middle class version of the British Properties.  "The money isn't as large in Kerrisdale, but the attitudes are the same."

Good For the Dogs

At The Secret Garden Tea Company, well-heeled women sipped a wide variety of teas and lunched on dainty sandwiches and cakes served on multi-tiered platters at 1 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon.  A short twenty blocks away on Cambie Street, one can no longer sample the exquisite noodles at the http://www.thevancouverobserver.com/cgi-bin/show_articles.cgi?TOPIC=0&ID=195&ISTART=undefined&NSHOW=undefined&S=undefined [Don Don Noodle Café,] which recently shut down after sixteen-years of business.  Don Don, which was family run and owned, http://www.thevancouverobserver.com/cgi-bin/show_articles.cgi?TOPIC=0&ID=219&ISTART=undefined&NSHOW=undefined&S=undefined [got choked at the root along with some 50 other businesses that have gone under due to loss of revenue] since construction began and made it difficult to impossible for customers to access favourite Cambie Street cafes and shops.  

But at The Secret Garden would-be customers met a packed room and a waiting list.  They were told to come back in fifteen to twenty minutes and there might be a table available.   

 “The way one dear lady describes our neighbourhood is it’s the crème de la crème,” Bill said, putting his arm around Doris.  Just then a well-dressed gentleman went by Bill and Doris’s bench, pushing a coiffed white poodle in a stroller. Bill smiled wryly and returned to the subject of the vacant Arbutus corridor.  

 “If a person has a dog, it’s perfect,” he said. “You can walk the dog forever down the tracks.”
   
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