But first the competition had to be eliminated. Early in the century, Port Moody made a bid to become the chief port on Burrard Inlet by proposing an interurban canal that would cut across Coquitlam and connect the Pacific to the Fraser River. A group of Vancouver-based businesspeople countered with a 1912 plan to build a 15-metre high dam across the Second Narrows, a scheme which, quite incidentally, would have flooded Port Moody. In the same year Richmond, anticipating the opening of the Panama Canal, offered its own modest proposal: a gigantic seaport, with 35 kilometres of oceanfrontage on the west end of Lulu Island. Some speculate that it was only the outbreak of World War I that prevented the Vancouver Board of Trade from dynamiting the dykes and submerging its upstart neighbor.

Gerry McGeer, MP for Vancouver-Burrard in 1933 and for two terms the city's most relentlessly visionary mayor, coined the catch-phrase that would resound through chambers of commerce and tradesmen's clubs for decades, and find echoes in the prefab corridors of Expo 86. "This city of destiny," he thundered to an audience of businesspeople at the height of the depression, "set in such surroundings, would attract enough tourists from the United States to pay off our appalling gold indebtedness." He foresaw a time when a million American tourists would come to the city every year to visit the eighth wonder of the world, a 400-kilometre long scenic driveway that would span Indian Arm, traverse Stanley Park and gird Point Grey. With a nod to the sprawling "jungles" of False Creek--where the barefoot children of Vancouver's 34,000 unemployed were running around in pants made of flour sacks--he promised that with "Canadian labour, Canadian engineering skill and Canadian national credit," realizing his vision would "provide employment for an army of men and cost less than was expended in a single day of fighting on the Western Front."

Since McGeer, nobody has been more obsessed by Vancouver's destiny--and more frustrated by its reality--than Warnett Kennedy. The Glasgow-born architect came to Vancouver in 1952 to create Annacis Island, the first planned industrial community in the country, and stuck around to become an alderman, bęte noire of Harry Rankin, the powerful COPE alderman. In his books and magazine articles, Kennedy imagined what he called a "wet village on the west coast" transformed into a megalopolis, where vertical take-off aircraft would take citizens from the roofs of the West End's 100-storey apartment buildings to homes in the suburbs--the peaks of Grouse and Seymour. Key to his vision was the idea that tourists and future residents would come to mountaintop chalets to gaze out over the Fraser Valley's farmlands, which, overdue for a massive flood anyway, would have been left untouched by suburban sprawl.

Brave New Vancouver In 1931, the same year Aldous Huxley was writing Brave New World, the newly created Vancouver Town Planning Commission published a short pamphlet for high school students, describing its goal and methods. "The idea of planning is to prevent waste; it is a scientific attempt to direct the growth of the various components, residential, industrial and business, that go to make up a city along sane, and as far as can be foreseen, permanent lines." Drawing from the Bartholomew Plan of 1929, a massive attempt to make every detail of the urban landscape conform to a sanitary, rational vision of city life, the pamphlet urged the "students of today" to imagine the Vancouver of the future as an orderly place, where houses would be placed on their rectangular lots in a manner pleasing to the eye, where a gridwork of streets was to be serviced by a vast network of streetcars.

. Prepared by Harland Bartholomew & Associates, a Saint Louis firm that determined the form of more than 50 other North American cities, the plan described everything from the correct shape of curbs and lampposts to an aesthetically pleasing streetplan for the University Endowment Lands--once the unhygienic forest had been clearcut. Its chief aim was "to deter a haphazard and hodge-podge pattern which, in addition to its other faults, is so unsightly. Not only increased efficiency and orderliness but a more attractive community will naturally result as the Plan is gradually implemented."

Although it was never officially adopted, the 388-page Bartholomew Plan was the Gideon Bible in the top drawer of Planning Department desks for decades, a comforting presence when city planners were assailed by doubt. The fact that it was devised by an American (who was "slightly less interesting than the average bankloan officer," according to one of his contemporaries)--a flatlander whose vision of the ideal city came from planning dozens of Midwestern towns on landlocked plains--didn't seem to bother the civic employees of this mountainous coastal metropolis. And they obviously turned to it often: many of the artist's conceptions of sanely zoned city blocks in the Plan's yellowing pages look suspiciously like present-day streetscapes in Kerrisdale and Dunbar.

Bartholomew's pet project--one he proposed in every city he ever planned for--was never built. He wanted to see a grandiose civic centre on the site of the present-day Aquatic Centre (he initially toyed with the idea of filling in False Creek, but nixed it because of the site's industrial potential), a 13-hectare monument to order that would combine art gallery, museum, library, courthouse and city hall in one location.

Bartholomew and his cohorts were just one in a long line of architects, planners and civic dreamers that sought a home for a monumental civic centre. Theodore Korner, who eventually built the Burrard Street Bridge, won a 1914 design competition with his proposal to place a gigantic complex on what is now the site of the Queen Elizabeth theatre. C.J. Thompson sketched a bird's eye view of an enormous civic auditorium and stadium on Kitsilano Point, neatly obliterating all traces of both the Kitsilano Indian Reserve and a long-standing squatters' camp with a few strokes of his charcoal pencil. A post-war parks commissioner promoted a meandering Georgia Street lined with government buildings.

Fat City The ambitious planners of the fifties and sixties tried to pave the way for a world-class Vancouver--and if many of them had been successful it would have left a city with a core as vibrant and welcoming as downtown Detroit. If it hadn't been for the whining of shore-sighted citizens, businessmen from all over the world would now be cruising along a 60-metre wide freeway through the heart of Chinatown, or bolstering the local economy by doing lunch in the penthouse restaurant of the 55-storey tower where Christ Church Cathedral once stood.

If Vancouver today isn't the Fat City that planners of the fifties dreamed of, it certainly isn't for lack of trying. In 1952 the Lower Mainland Regional Planning Board, predecessor to the GVRD, announced that "within perhaps 50 years the whole area will be, geographically and otherwise, a miniature New York area, with the Burrard Peninsula as its Manhattan." This prediction provoked two reactions: bemused head-shaking from long-time residents of the hundreds of single family homes in the West End; and a cry of "Gee Whiz!"--from the young architects and planners who had enthusiastically swallowed the precepts of the Bartholomew Plan in high school civics classes. The budding technocrats immediately hit the drawing boards, drafting proposals for third crossings, downtown freeways and space needles, the very projects that would add spice to civic politics for decades to come.

A single obstacle stood between Vancouver and its destiny: urban blight. In a 1955 editorial the Province warned future world-class architects that this was a hurdle they would one day have to jump: "When decay is ignored, a city deteriorates in the same way as any organism that fails to renew itself. In a city, as in an apple tree, dead wood is unproductive and dangerous. It should be pruned away to make for new growth." The implications were clear: Vancouver was an orchard, low income neighborhoods like Strathcona and Chinatown were the dead wood, and a new generation of gardeners would have to slash and burn so that, one day the children of the city could enjoy bigger, riper apples.

And how do you like these apples: in 1956, a teenage Arthur Erickson drew up a plan that portrayed the West End as one gigantic apartment building, a stack of monster suites that culminated in 100-storey twin peaks at either end of the downtown. Planners at the department of transport proposed a hovercraft terminal for Deadman's Island, to shuttle passengers from the downtown to the airport. In 1963 the architectural firm Christiani and Nielsen unveiled an image of Coal Harbour with a new island off Stanley Park, part of a $58 million third crossing scheme. Cars were meant to follow a highway along Vancouver's waterfront, veer off onto a four-lane bridge that plunged into Burrard Inlet at a tunnel entrance set into "reclaimed land" off Brockton Point, and re-emerge at the other end of the tunnel on the North Shore.

All of these projects needed space for off-ramps, turnpikes, clover-leaves and toll-booths—in short, a downtown freeway system, one that city hall and the Canadian Pacific Railway had been discussing since the early fifties. In 1967 a San Francisco based firm concluded that a waterfront freeway would best be served by levelling 600 houses in Strathcona and laying a 10-metre-high overpass over Carrall Street, in the centre of Chinatown. Immediately protest came from every part of the city, and a crowd of 800 people gathered in city hall to shout down the consultants' proposals, The chairman of the city's planning commission resigned on the spot, and a year later the plan was scrapped. Apparently the spirited editorializing of the local papers in favor of cutting out civic blight with a concrete knife had influenced no one but a handful of architects.

All of which has made developers a little more careful about whose turf they choose to tread on, and the words they pick to describe cherished projects. Mirage's waterfront Casino Proposal, and the PNE's plans to expand Hastings Park, prettied up with delightful artist's renditions and glowing images of potential benefit to the community, were greeted with widespread public suspicion and eventually died. A new generation of planners seems to have learned its lesson; they're sick of imposing a pre-ordained vision onto a reluctant public, only to have its every detail fought tooth and nail.