1967: Strathcona rejects a freeway

From The History of Metropolitan Vancouver
http://www.vancouverhistory.ca/chronology1967.htm

 1967: Strathcona rejects a freeway

October 16 A headline in The Vancouver Sun reads: “Chinese seethe over Freeway.” This was in reference to the anger in the city’s Strathcona neighborhood over plans to run a freeway through the area—many of the residents were Chinese who had lived there for decades.

Wrote Taras Grescoe in The Greater Vancouver Book: “A San Francisco-based firm concluded that a waterfront freeway would best be served by levelling 600 houses in Strathcona and laying a ten-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.”

John Atkin, author of a book on Strathcona, has commented: “It was because of its mixture of housing and industry and the fact that it was the entry point to the city for successive waves of immigrants, that the East End name came to have a derogatory meaning. By the 1950s planners had declared it a slum for demolition, despite evidence to the contrary. By 1967, despite protests, fifteen blocks of the neighborhood had already been acquired and cleared for urban redevelopment when the city announced a freeway to downtown. Strathcona residents were horrified by plans to use the blocks in between Union and Prior for the freeway, connected via a new Georgia Viaduct to the larger network of roads that were to carve up the downtown.

The outcry from the general public, community activists and professionals was loud and clear about the lack of public consultation and the amount of destruction the new roads would cause. In the end the Georgia and Dunsmuir street viaducts were the only pieces of the system to be constructed . . .”

Fred Hume

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