Here’s a review of Robson Square by Jake Tobin Garrett in Beyond Robson – a byline I’ve not seen before.
Yesterday, I went back to Robson Square to check out the first phase of its reopening–the underground ice rink, which hasn’t been there for many years.
It was an Olympic dreamworld down there, with LED lights in our official pastel green and blue colours,
a jazz band performing at one end, and the Olympic logo plastered around competing for space with the large GE logos stamped onto the surface of the ice and set to remain for a few months (it is the GE plaza after all).
It was the first time I had seen people taking the time to come off the consumer flow of Robson to walk down the stairs and check out what was happening beneath the street.
Could this be the rebirth of our public square?
More here.
After they replaced the domes they replanted – of all things – the same style of yew hedge that had previously BLOCKED all views from the street down to the sunken plaza.
When first planted, the hedges must have been about 4ft or 5ft tall – still performing their view blocking, isolating function – that’s what hedges do – block out the neighbours – give privacy.
Luckily, someone at BC Buildings Corp. must have woken up and the hedges were trimmed down to maybe 2ft tall so that you could actually see over them and down through the new domes to the plaza below. Hopefully they’ll be trimmed to that height on an ongoing basis (hedges do grow quickly).