West Vancouver
by Kerry McPhedran
You have to love a community that routinely serves draf beer in a pie bakery, cappuccino by the library’s fireplace and pancakes in the Hollyburn Funeral Home’s parking lot every June for the Community Day Pancake Breakfast. Flapjacks to die for.
Yet West Van, as locals call their village-minded corridor community that stretches along 28 kilometres of shoreline and up the south slopes of the 100-million-year-old Coast Mountains, is missed by most tourists, who veer off onto the Upper Levels Highway bound for Whistler or the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal.
This is ironic. For although the Spanish explorer Jose Maria Narvaez and Captain George Vancouver also sailed right by in 1791 and 1792, West Vancouver really began as a popular summer holiday destination.
From the 1880s to the 1900s men and women canoed and eventually ferried across from Vancouver to picnic or camp in the fresh air upwind from what was literally “the Big Smoke” in those early land-clearing and logging days. Every May to September a “tent city” sprang up along the shore from present-day Ambleside village to 23rd Street.
By 1886 smart speculators had already bought up most of future West Vancouver. James Blake preempted the first 65 hectares in 1872. A succession of firsts quickly followed. In 1873 the first white resident, Navvy Jack Thomas, a Welsh deserter from the Royal Navy, and his wife Row-i-a granddaughter of Chief Ki-ep-i-lan-o after whom the Capilano River was named) moved in. Their house still stands in Ambleside. It is the oldest continuously inhabited residence in the Lower Mainland. In 1874 the first lighthouse was built at Point Atkinson.
By 1912 the place was humming, thanks to a regular ferry service that started in 1909, triggering a small real estate boom and relieving many families from the grim row across the treacherous tides of First Narrows to attend church in Vancouver. Waterfront lots in what was then called “West Capilano” went for $4,500; others for as little as $450. The District of West Vancouver was incorporated on March 15, 1912. From that seaside hamlet with a 1912 summer population of around 1,500, West Vancouver has grown to a municipality of nearly 42,000. A curious mix of old summer cottages, modest homes and multimillion-dollar waterfront estates, West Vancouver has no industry and no tourist attractions beyond the Park Royal Hotel and those that drew the first tourists: beaches, forests, mountain trails and ski slopes.
West Vancouver’s largest source of revenue is property taxes and its biggest business is the municipality itself. West Van has its own police force and its own beloved “Blue Bus” system as of February, 1996, the first transit system in Canada to be totally wheelchair- accessible. With 27 per cent of the population over 60 (a 54 per cent increase in the past 10 years), this is good thinking.
West Vancouverites can also lay claim to reading more library books and earning more per capita than any other Canadians. They spend a chunk of it in Canada’s first shopping mall, Park Royal, built in 1950 on lands leased from Squamish Indian Reserve No. 5. (The December, 1996 winning of more than $13 million in the 6/49 lottery by restaurateur Gary Troll will raise that per capita figure even higher!)
The Vancouver Sun’s award-winning editorial cartoonist Len Norris delighted in spoofing West Van’s slope-side living. A resident himself, Norris drew genteel West Vancouverites (who conveniently peopled such real places as Tiddley Cove) gardening with one leg shorter than the other or grumbling about the Pacific Great Eastern Railway (now BC Rail) the initials PGE corrupted to mean “Past God’s Endurance.”
Long before the PGE first connected North and West Van on New Year’s Day, 1914, the earliest known settlement was a Coast Salish village at Sandy Cove. Europeans settled in their own string of small, self-contained west-to-east communities. Ambleside commemorates its “father of West Vancouver” in John Lawson Park. Dundarave was named for the Scottish home of R.E. Macnaghten (and the streets named for British prime ministers).
Caulfeild owes its bucolic setting and spelling to Francis William Caulfeild, an English gentleman and scholar who laid out the village “according to the contours of nature,” including the paths of wild animals and cows. Now only a street, Bellevue was once a subdivision adjoining Dundarave. Dubbed “Vancouver’s premier suburb,” Bellevue’s ads promised “A lot in Bellevue is a joy forever; two lots is rapture.” Further west Colonel Albert Whyte pressed for the 1914 spelling change from White Cliff City to Whytecliff. Only a few families lived in Horseshoe Bay year-round until Dan Sewell arrived in 1931 and opened his marina and the Whytecliff Lodge. (Electricity had arrived in 1922; direct telephone to Vancouver in 1928. But by 1930 Only 48 of West Van’s 100 kilometres of road were paved. Many streets still lack sidewalks and longtime residents prefer it that way.)
In 1926 West Van’s council lowered the boom on what little logging and fish canning remained. The 1926 town planning act banned any new industry, opting for an exclusively residential municipality with minimum lot sizes. (The Millerd family ran the Great Northern Cannery, built in 1891, until 1967. It is now the site of Environment Canada’s Pacific Research Laboratories.)
West Van’s new policy ultimately saved its goose. It caught the eye of Ireland’s wealthy Guinness family during the Depression. The Guinness’ British Pacific Syndicate paid less than $50 a hectare for 1,600 scenic hectares on Hollyburn Ridge to develop as the prestigious British Properties around the Capilano Golf and Country Club.
In 1938 they built the $6 million Lions Gate Bridge in order to increase lot sales. (Fifty years after the start of construction Guinness would add lights as an Expo 86 gift.) The familiar British slogan “Guinness is good for you” could well have become West Van’s civic motto. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth drove across in 1939 to officially open the British Empire’s longest suspension bridge. By 1947 the ferries had stopped. The little 1913 ferry building became a bus depot, then a community gallery.
It was individual houses that ultimately put West Van on the map. From 1945 to 1975 West Vancouver was a centre of award-winning Canadian residential design (inspired by the natural landscape) that culminated in the approach recognized as the West Coast Style. There are literally hundreds of modern houses by such designers and architects as C.B.K. Van Norman, John Porter, Ned Pratt, Arthur Erickson, Fred Hollingsworth and Ron Thom.
In 1959 rezoning of some 20 hectares permitted 78 high-density apartments in Ambleside. The Crescent Apartments (1961) was West Van’s first highrise condominium. Some along the waterfront notably Villa Maris, aka the “Pink Palace” are in Miami pastels.
West Van is changing. New neigborhoods have spread across the so-called “Land Above the Upper Levels.” West Van’s beloved 15-block seawall connects lively Ambleside and two-block long Dundarave, the latter still crowned by the British Properties once exclusive to the point of racism but now peppered with the Mandarin, Cantonese, German and Iranian accents of new residents.
There are still familiar landmarks of West Van’s heritage, many listed in the West Vancouver Heritage Inventory. Among them: Caulfeild’s charming St. Francis-in-the-Woods Anglican Church (with Willian Morris windows) and Gertrude Lawson’s house (now the West Vancouver Museum and Archives), built of stone carried as ship’s ballast from New Zealand.
Other bits of West Van’s history survive. Chief Joe Capilano, who travelled to London in 1906 to discuss Indian land rights with King Edward VII, overlooks Park Royal from his Keith Road mausoleum. A grove of eight apple trees and one cherry tree near the sixth hole of Gleneagles Golf Course are remnants of the Peter Larson Ranch. The leafy canopy of horse chestnut trees on 17th Street was planted in 1934 by Boy Scouts to commemorate the visit of Lord Baden-Powell.
Best of all, enthusiastic residents still exercise a pioneer sense of fun. Each year they head like happy lemmings for both the Capilano River Duck Race that sends 30,000 yellow rubber duckies bobbing down the Capilano for charity, and the Coho Festival, which celebrates the return of the salmon that spawn up the same river. They fish and stroll the three ferry-less piers.
Citizenry block off Marine Drive at the drop of a hat and do so for the August Dundarave Hoe Down, June’s Community Day Parade and on Remembrance Day. Veterans march, Harvards fly overhead, the band plays, tears are shed, wreaths laid and tea and cookies served in the library for all. Around that stone memorial, as Bruce Ramsey notes in A Place of Excellence, his chronicle of West Vancouver, have stood medal-bedecked men who saw service in Canada’s Northwest Rebellion, India’s Northwest Frontier, the Zulu campaigns leading to the Boer War, World War I and World War II, as well as Korea, the Suez, Vietnam, Cyprus and Bosnia. For all the changes West Vancouver is still a good place to return home to.
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