Parking in Downtown Vancouver – 1966

While not eligible for the “America’s Worst Parking Crater” contest,  Andy Coupland thinks these shots from downtown Vancouver in 1966 are revealing:

.

.

The lot in the left foreground is where Robson Square is today.  A bit of the Art Gallery (then the court house) is visible centre left, and, to the right, the apartment houses where, today, the Eaton’s block of Pacific Centre is currently being stripped (the post below).  Note the parking lot to the north of them, right at the corner of Georgia and Granville, where the second Hotel Vancouver had been demolished and the TD black tower would be built.

It looks like the original Georgia Viaduct is still in place (upper right).  If the freeways had been built, maybe some of those parking lots would still be in place.  That, after all, was the effect in American cities, where downtown land values, having been drained of residential and higher-density possibilities as the suburbs boomed, still justified surface parking lots.  Today, land values and the requirement for underground parking mean the surface parking lot on the Downtown Peninsula has practically disappeared.

How many are left?  Less than a dozen?

.

Here’s another shot from 1966, like the one above taken from the B.C. Electric bulding, now the Electra: