Riley Park / South Cambie

The district of Riley Park/South Cambie is dominated by Little Mountain, physically the highest point of Vancouver, occupying its geographical centre and commanding a 360-degree view of the whole city.

In its earlier days as a vast forest the district’s most distinguishing feature was the old “beaver meadow,” now Douglas Park, which served as an elk pasture until the gold rush of 1858 brought about the extinction of elk in Greater Vancouver.

The first modern settler in the Riley Park/South Cambie area was William Mackie, a pioneer logger and old Cariboo gold miner. In 1874 Mackie marked off and claimed the 65 hectares centred on the former elk pasture. The next year Jeremiah Rogers built a skid road up to Little Mountain to access the fine timber that crowned the summit. He set up his logging camp at the pasture—lush forage for his oxen. The innovative Rogers rigged the skid road into a logging tramway using an old steam tractor engine in the first use of mechanized logging in the B.C. forest industry. After the timber had been removed, the rich soil of the former oxen pasture became the site of a small milk ranch. By the 1910s the cow pasture had become a Chinese vegetable farm while houses sprang up on the less fertile ground surrounding it. In 1926, surrounded by houses, the four city blocks were designated as Douglas Park.

The year 1874 also marked the cutting of the first modern trail through Riley Park/South Cambie. Funded by the provincial government, the False Creek Trail ran diagonally from what is now Marpole, past the foot of Little Mountain to Gastown. This first north-south route in Vancouver was abandoned the next year when the trail was upgraded to a wagon road along a different route. It was repositioned to the present Fraser Street and called the “North Arm Waggon Road,” since its purpose was to provide a land route to Gastown for the produce of the farms along the North Arm of the Fraser River. The junction where this road intersected the old Westminster Road (now Kingsway) became the site of the first local business establishment, a stagecoach roadhouse called the Junction Inn. After the newly created City of Vancouver acquired land for a cemetery on the North Arm Road at what is now 33rd Avenue, the future Fraser Street became known as Cemetery Road. Riley Park/South Cambie had more dead residents than live ones until Main Street was extended southwards from Mount Pleasant and the streetcar village of Hillcrest was built out in the forest of stumps near 30th Avenue in about 1910.

Many of the streets laid out at this time were surfaced with crushed slate from quarries on Little Mountain. In the 1920s one of these open pit mines was converted into the main water reservoir for Vancouver and the surrounding area was made into a park renamed Queen Elizabeth Park in 1920. Another of the open pits was transformed into a beautiful sunken garden, now a tourist attraction and a favorite summer-time site for wedding party photographs. In 1957 professional baseball came to nearby Capilano Stadium and in 1960 Percy Norman Pool opened in Riley Park next door to the stadium. In 1969 Little Mountain was crowned with the Bloedel Conservatory, a geodesic-domed indoor garden of exotic plants and birds from all over the world. Nearby Main Street runs down the centre of Riley Park/South Cambie and by 25th Avenue features the Antique Row shopping area.