Granville Bridge and Granville Street – 2: The creation of stroads

Further to this post on the Granville Bridge (and why the second one didn’t directly connect to Granville Street at the north end), Rick Jelfs sends in this archival shot of what the north end actually looked like at Pacific Street.

Here’s a picture of streetcar service at the north end of the second Granville Bridge, showing a 4th Avenue car coming off Pacific (from Richards) to head south on the bridge, curving over to Granville Street.  The view is to the northwest.

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And what it looks like today:*

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Here you can see the creation of a stroad.

Compare the difference between the two eras and the character of what were, in the past, streets of business and activity. After the construction of the third Granville Bridge in the early 1950s, the north end was reconfigured as a freeway-style cloverleaf – as pure an example of motordom design as ever achieved in Vancouver by the post-war engineers.

Pacific and other feeder streets were turned into roads to serve traffic, and became primarily a place for cars, not people.  If not appropriated and demolished, street-serving business died, to be replaced by automotive uses, parking lots and warehouses.  In other words, they became stroads.

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It may also explain the decline of Granville Street – once the high street of the city, one of the main streetcar lines in the region.  After the third Granville Bridge was built, high-speed traffic sailed off the ramps onto the downtown peninsula.  There was no connection of Granville to False Creek.

So why walk down there?  Lower Granville was like post-war Hastings Street: a place of old hotels serving as SROs, dubious pubs and bars, eventually sex shops and vacancies.

Now the City is aiming to rebuild the north end, removing the cloverleaf ramps, regridding the blocks, filling in the parking lots with residential development, connecting Granville to False Creek – and making it a place of streets and people once again.

Here’s a sketch prepared by the City’s UrbanDesign Studio in 2005 for Director of Planning Larry Beasley and Manager of Real Estate Services Bruce Maitland, to convey the development potential of a new “under Granville Bridge” neighbourhood and motivate the sale of related city-owned lands.  Once the economics looked attractive, the next stage was to remove the cloverleafs, square-out the blocks with new streets, and take advantage of the real estate opportunities to fund other projects – like a streetcar line down Pacific.

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Not surprisingly, it was the economic benefit created by a more intensive use of lands previously alienated by motordom design that made a better public realm a realistic possibility.  Otherwise, the politicians would have to explain why they were spending millions to make it less attractive for a car to move through the city at the maximum speed  allowed.   Same issue for the Viaducts.

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*  Or does it?  The Streetview shows Pacific, looking north, between Granville and Seymour.  But is that same view as the one above?  Or should it be compared to the view from Beach? 

BTW, Google Maps has changed its format – and so now there is no obvious way to get the embed details to link to a specific map.  Or they’ve hidden it so well, it’s not obvious to me.  If anyone has cracked the code, let me know.

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