No Hinterland Stadium Road Neighbourhood Statement of Significance – the University of British Columbia Vancouver Campus
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Birmingham & Wood Architects and Planners – Eric Damer, Historian No Hinterland Stadium Road Neighbourhood Statement of Significance – The University of British Columbia Vancouver Campus 11 December 2017 Birmingham & Wood Architects and Planners Eric Damer, Historian 1 No Hinterland Stadium Road Neighbourhood Statement of Significance Table of Contents 1. Introduction . 3 2. Study Area . 4 3. Brief History . 6 4. Key building and landscape elements over time . 10 5. Statement of Significance . 16 6. Strategies for building on area character . 22 Left: Google aerial of current playing fields Above: View north from Thunderbird Stadium parking lot, with Rhododendron Wood beyond Stadium Road Right: West 16th Avenue at Marine Drive Cover, right: View of campus, looking southeast, 1959 (UBC 1.1-1600) with future Stadium Road Neighbourhood site circled 2 Birmingham & Wood Architects and Planners – Eric Damer, Historian Introduction This Statement of Significance identifies features that are key to understanding the Stadium The area of the southern campus now termed the Stadium Road Neighbourhood was at the time Road Neighbourhood and the cultures that helped form it. These features can be found both in of the university’s establishment literally a piece of the second growth forest that helped frame the neighbourhood itself and in the surrounding portion of the campus that lies roughly between the campus clearing. This forest became agricultural research fields and later the site for the Hampton Place and sea, and between Agronomy Road and Wesbrook Place. university’s outdoor stadium – home to football games and rock concerts – far out in the hinterland beyond B Lot. This area has seen new development all around it: botanical gardens, playing fields, The use of “hinterland” in the title reflects the fact that until recently the university has viewed the research facilities, and residential housing. southern end of the campus (once the south campus, now mid-campus) as a kind of back yard, a place to put things without the formal organization and access of the north campus. The entire But of course, the campus lands, including the southern end, have never been a hinterland for southern end of campus was accessed exclusively from the malls of north campus until the latter its Indigenous people, the Musqueam. This is their un-ceded homeland, a life sustaining ecology half of 1960s. The campus’s west, south, and east boundaries at its southern end were defined by of landforms, plants, animals, and traditional cultural practices that make the land part of the second growth forest edge, to be cut down as more space became needed. themselves. Campus planners considering the future of the Stadium Road Neighbourhood now have an opportunity to imagine the place as an integrated piece of the increasingly urban campus During the earliest years of the university, this forest clearing was harnessed for use as agricultural landscape, and to consider the ancient cultural stewardship that has long been ignored. By doing research fields, fulfilling part of the central mandate of the early university to support the province’s so, they may create a place that truly is no hinterland. developing agricultural economy. But over time, growing numbers of students and academic programs at the university required additional academic building sites; the sheer amount of space The study is composed of three main sections: in its southern “back yard” made the area an irresistible target for campus growth, and land was appropriated to expand facilities on a project-by-project basis. Most of the non-agricultural expansion Brief History of the area and neighbourhood in the southern campus took the form of recreational infrastructure and research facilities – both To understand what might be important elements of the area, the study begins with a brief history requiring large areas. of the mid-campus area, including what is now being termed the Stadium Road Neighbourhood. The back yard nature of the southern campus lands began to wane with the widespread postwar The brief history is accompanied by a series of historical aerial photographs of the campus with embrace of the automobile by UBC faculty and students. To facilitate automobile traffic and access development of the area charted over time. to the expanding research campus, Wesbrook Mall was extended south almost to Marine Drive Statement of Significance and character-defining elements while Marine Drive itself was widened to handle greater vehicular access to the southwest corner of the campus; as well, West 16th Avenue was pushed through the forest to connect the city, the The values of the area are expressed in the Statement of Significance, and supported by the campus, and Marine Drive. In just a few years in the late 1960s, the southern end of the campus mapping of key building, landscape and cultural elements over time. The statement and mapping went from being the inaccessible back yard of the campus to its main vehicular entry point. Much together identify what is valued and why. The mapped key elements can be interpreted as of the agricultural landscape was transformed into a vast expanse of inexpensive parking at the character-defining elements for the area, including the Stadium Road Neighbourhood, and are southern outskirts of the built-up northern end of campus. Daily student life was often bracketed by organized according to the broad themes about the heritage of the campus as whole that are a trek between academic buildings at the north end of campus and B Lot south of Agronomy Road. outlined in the Vancouver Campus Plan. The area had become a postwar suburban sort of hinterland. Strategies for building on area and neighbourhood character Since the 1960s, as the demand for academic facilities has only increased, the devotion of so much land to routing and storage of the automobile has been replaced by a denser expansion of the The study concludes with some possible strategies for the consolidation of the values and built campus into its southern end, including new housing for faculty and students and the wider significance of the area as the Stadium Road Neighbourhood is planned. community, plus amenities for those new residents. This expansion has historically occurred in a rather ad hoc manner as funds and as needs cropped up. The un-integrated southward expansion of the campus has resulted in a hinterland of isolated initiatives with little internal connection and with little definition. 3 No Hinterland Stadium Road Neighbourhood Statement of Significance Study Area ACADIA UNIVERSITY ENDOWMENT LANDS HAMPTON PLACE WEST 16TH AVENUE 16TH WEST UNIVERSITY BLVD EAST CAMPUS WESBROOK MALL WESBROOK MALL WESBROOK PLACE CHANCELLOR PLACE DOUG MITCHELL THUNDERBIRD SPORTS CENTRE THUNDERBIRD PARK STUDENT UNION BLVD View of campus, looking southeast, c.1940s (UBC 1.1-115190) EAST MALL with future Stadium Road Neighbourhood site circled UBC FARM HAWTHORN MAIN MALL PLACE RHODODENDRON WOOD THUNDERBIRD STADIUM MID-CAMPUS THUNDERBIRD BOULEVARD THUNDERBIRD WEST MALL UBC BOTANICAL CONTEXT GARDEN SW MARINE DRIVE STADIUM ROAD NEIGHBOURHOOD 4 Birmingham & Wood Architects and Planners – Eric Damer, Historian Brief History UBC’s Point Grey campus appears today as a large, developed, and bustling community negotiate with neighbours, and how to participate in cultural protocols. They listened comprising the western edge of a thriving Greater Vancouver region. However, the campus to the teachings of their Elders and learned their identity in the context of their lands. site was intentionally chosen in 1910 because it was a hinterland to Vancouver – off in Creeks, ponds, rocks, bays, trees, and animals all had cultural and spiritual significance the woods of Point Grey, surrounded by ocean and stunning mountain scenery, a place to the Musqueam. Although decimated in large numbers by disease introduced by Spanish unsullied by the commercial interests of town, and with acreage that provided both a and British visitors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Musqueam buffer from the city and room for future academic research in service of the provincial lived on lands that until 1858 “were overwhelmingly a Native place” that made the economy. As the UBC campus took shape in the early years, a populated north campus, trading post at Fort Langley a few miles upstream merely an “island of British control.” with teaching, administration, and, to a small extent, student laboratory facilities defined After 1858, however, the Fraser River gold rush prompted a rush to colonize the province, the core of the institution, while agricultural fields and barns for research on the different mainly by British subjects, and relegate Native peoples to an inferior status living on facets of agriculture spread out over the university’s own “hinterland” at the south end of marginal reserves. By the time UBC’s site had been chosen, the original inhabitants had the campus. Over time, however, the hinterlands diminished as postwar Vancouver took largely been pushed off their traditional lands and onto a nearby reserve where they to the automobile, and as research, teaching, recreational, and administrative facilities were suppressed for many years by the settler society. UBC, as early campus plans spilled southward onto the former agricultural fields and forest. By 2000, the UBC south show, was conceived very much as an imperial university, complete with a permanent campus included residential neighbourhoods that suggested it was no longer a hinterland parade ground and drill hall for military cadets. A British publisher had even suggested at all, but a homeland to the new, long-term occupants. Meanwhile, members of the to Premier McBride, himself a staunch supporter of British imperialism and Canada’s university community were increasingly aware that the UBC campus had always been imperial role, that the university be named to honour King George V. Nowhere did the the homeland of the Musqueam, who insisted on a place in directing the future of the plans consider or include local Indigenous people who, like others living in British campus.