A piece by Shawn Micallef in the current Spacing magazine, with photographs by Don Fairchild, which so well captures the exuberant character of this West End intersection at the height of summer.
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The gem at the end of Vancouver is the intersection of Davie and Denman. There is nothing like it in Canada, a perfect storm of nature and city where one flows into the other, two things people sometimes mistake as being opposed to each other working together to magnificent effect. Approaching the intersection from either street is a treat: from Denman there are fine English Bay and Kitsilano views, while Davie affords a view of Beach Avenue and the glassy highrise condos that create a kind of people-filled seawall that lead to Stanley Park.
On a sunny weekend day this is how this neighbourhood works: you walk along either street. There are palm trees, which to most Canadians doesn’t feel right but you quickly get used to it. You cross the intersection to the parkland. It’s filled with people, sitting on benches or blankets or looking at and playing with the public art. Then you reach the threshold of the beach — it’s a fuzzy barrier as grass and sidewalk just become sand, without any fuss. On a beautiful summer day, even into the late evening, Vancouverites will be sitting on the sand or on those long tree trunk beach benches that the West Coast do so well. They’ll be having picnics or drinking clandestine bottles of wine. Some people might even be swimming or wading. You can stare at the sea and the massive ocean tankers anchored out a few kilometers as the sun sets and forget all about the city but then turn around and there it is: civilization. The flow between one to the other is seamless and easy. One almost tumbles out of the city onto the beach.
Back on the sidewalk, just a block away along either street, it’s then easy to forget the sea is even there, so thick is the urban form. Denman is the kind of high street any city would want: it’s got all the services residents need (dry cleaners, pizza joints, burger places, little shops selling the stuff of daily life) and enough interesting places for visitors to occupy their time, all the way to Robson Street. Along the way there are buildings that have multiple floors of retail activity, like how many Asian cities exist (another reason this bit of town feels different than most Canadian cities). Davie becomes largely residential for a few blocks as it runs uphill towards the gay village, 5 or 10 minutes away, depending on your gait.
Running off both are residential streets that are mix of highrise, midrise and heritage homes. Like Toronto, Vancouver’s downtown peninsula has the ability to mix these rather diverse styles without the awkwardness one might expect. Many of the higher buildings have well designed entrances and humane, often artful, lobbies, making the transition from sidewalk to interior as pleasant and human scaled as one the beautiful bungalow with porch next door. It is about as perfect as urbanism can get.
Alas it looks like the new Cactus Club Cafe on the beach may have disrupted this flow somewhat at least visually looking south down Denman. I’ll have to visit when the summer weather comes to see if it hinders, helps or doesn’t matter.
Denman Street is a major arterial road. It’s often dangerous to cross, and often clogged with bridge traffic. There have been fatal accidents with pedestrians at the Denman and Davie corner. And although buses are stopped there, it’s a trial in patience usually waiting for a bus to bring one to or away from Denman and Davie as Westend service is very inefficient for a city. So, no, this really isn’t “urban perfection” at all, far from it.
Westender: That’s because you’re looking only at the street and not what the intersection does beyond the crossroads. The regularity of bus service is not really a prerequisite for a good urban intersection. The fact that the intersection bleeds into the beach and ocean make it, by far, one of the nation’s most unique places.
I’ve always thought that this intersection and the connection to the beach is really Vancouver’s primary public square, the place in the city where reality and hype most closely fit. Going down to this corner and over to the beach was always one of the joys of living in the West End when I lived there in the early 90’s. I’m sure there have been fatal accidents at this corner, although I suspect the rate would be much lower than many other places one could care to name. I never found it hard to cross the street since the number of controlled crossings and generally slow moving clogged traffic seems to leave plenty of gaps to get across. For those residents of the West End who are tired of this corner of the city, perhaps its time to move to a quieter neighbourhood.
hear hear,…
Approaching the intersection from either street is a treat: from Denman there are fine English Bay and Kitsilano views,
That was before the cactus club cafe..
I generally agree with previous comments – yes having “streets bleeding into the beach and ocean” was key, since that has been outrageously destroyed by City of Vancouver.
“about as perfect as urbanism can get”: that is a bit of an overstatement: either a settling for low standard or a lack of ambition. The intersection has obviously huge potential-but lot is untapped in it: Westender point out some problems:
* We are still in a car dominant environment where pedestrians are second class citizens
* They are some others which are consequence of the above…All those people on Denman don’t come for this street but you can feel that they are looking for some reason to stay, linger and mingle on it -Do you really believe that the pizza joints make it? – Denman is not fullfilling expectations (The cactus club is providing an answer, just at the very wrong place).
*The bus layover at Davie is also problematic in the sense it sterilizes the bottom of Davie.
I think some solution can be found to improve all these (see some suggestion at http://voony.wordpress.com/2011/04/25/denman-street/ )