Hastings/Sunrise
by Bruce Macdonald
For centuries if not millennia the sheltered bay at the northern edge of the district of Hastings/Sunrise provided a natural stopping point, Khanamoot, for local native peoples beaching canoes on their way to pick berries or hunt deer and elk in the productive grounds surrounding Deer Lake and Burnaby Lake. This old trail led all the way to the Kwantlen settlements on the Fraser River where the gold rush town of New Westminster was to appear suddenly in 1859. From there in 1863 Colonel Moody of the Royal Engineers decided Khanamoot was the logical place for a future saltwater port to develop. He supervised the creation of a government town reserve that became known as the Hastings Townsite. Today the district of Hastings/Sunrise comprises the northern half of this original reserve, occupying the northeast corner of Vancouver, the area east of Nanaimo Street and north of Broadway. The word “Sunrise” was not associated with the region south of 1st Avenue until the 1940s, when a new subdivision named Sunrise Ridge was built and a nearby park was named Sunrise Park.
In 1865, during the construction of the second sawmill on Burrard Inlet, the Colony of British Columbia upgraded the old native trail to a stagecoach road and the Brighton Hotel was built at Khanamoot as a seaside resort for holidaying residents of New Westminster.
In 1869 the site was renamed Hastings after Rear Admiral Hastings of the British naval fleet stationed on the Pacific coast and the first subdivision lots in the future Vancouver were put up for sale. Sawmills and shingle mills were built and in the following decades the Hastings Townsite was logged over for its giant cedar, fir and hemlock. A real town never developed there, however, even after the Canadian Pacific Railway came steaming right through it en route to Gastown. Despite its slow and humble development, Hastings still earned a significant spot in the history of Vancouver as the site of the city’s first road, hotel, wharf, post office, museum and subdivision.
In 1888 the province designated 65 hectares just to the south of Hastings as a park for the “recreation and enjoyment of the public.” Although its use strayed from that of a “park"--as a horse racetrack, an amusement park, sports facilities and buildings for the Pacific National Exhibition replaced the original creeks and forest--in 1994 the province finally recommitted itself to the future redevelopment of Hastings Park as a major East Side park. 1997 would be the PNE’s last year at Hastings Park.
Significant residential development of the Hastings Townsite began only after Vancouver spread outwards to the area around 1911, the year the landowners of the Hastings Townsite voted 1,200 to 1 to join the City of Vancouver. Then the stump clearing and road building began in earnest, and large landowners such as John Hendry, the owner of the Hastings Sawmill, and Joe Martin, the former premier of British Columbia, sold off their holdings to thousands of working-class people. The building boom took off in the 1920s and by the end of the 1940s most of the available land was covered with single family housing. Despite the complete industrial development of the waterfront, at the old site of Khanamoot and Brighton a new park was created and New Brighton outdoor pool was opened in 1936.
The year 1954 saw Hastings/Sunrise’s debut on the national and international scene with the construction of the largest sports stadium in Canada at Exhibition Park--Empire Stadium--for the main site of the British Empire Games. Today a large bronze statue of two runners, Roger Bannister and John Landy, depicts the Games’ most spectacular event, the Miracle Mile. Empire Stadium then became the home for the newly formed B.C. Lions football team.
Since the 1890s the centrepiece of the Hastings/Sunrise district has been Hastings Park, located at the crossroads of a number of major transportation routes. Here the CPR enters Vancouver, the Trans-Canada Highway is carried across Burrard Inlet by the Second Narrows Bridge, and a Canadian National Railway tunnel emerges to lead to a rail bridge across the Inlet. The south end of the CNR bridge is near the Alberta Wheat Pool elevator, the largest oceanside elevator in the world.
Hastings Park became the home of professional hockey in British Columbia in 1970 as the Vancouver Canucks joined the national hockey league and, in 1974, it became the home for Vancouver’s professional soccer team, now the 86ers. Despite this, no sporting event ever drew as continuous and deafening a response from an audience as Elvis Presley in 1957 and the Beatles in 1965, when they strained to be heard above audiences at Empire Stadium committed to non-stop screaming.
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