Vancouver Sun ePaper

Little Mountain stadium never came to fruition

JOHN MACKIE jmackie@postmedia.com

In 1910 the Canadian Pacific Railway gave Vancouver, South Vancouver and Point Grey an option to buy Little Mountain for a park. South Vancouver and Point Grey were separate municipalities until they joined the City of Vancouver in 1929.

The price for what is Queen Elizabeth Park today: $125,000 for 95 acres. But the cities didn't pull the trigger on the deal until Point Grey voters approved it in a plebiscite Sept. 15, 1928.

For some reason the price had dropped to $100,000 in 18 years. But the CPR seemed glad to do the deal, which would enhance the value of the “Little Mountain subdivision” it was developing nearby.

To the CPR'S chagrin, however, local movers and shakers soon started touting a sports stadium for the new park. The plan went through two incarnations before finally fading on Aug. 8, 1931, when The Vancouver Sun declared “Deadlock Halts New Stadium.”

The park board wanted to limit seating to 15,000, with all seats on the south side, while the private promoters of the $175,000 scheme wanted to build 28,000 seats, including some on the north side. The CPR also insisted the stadium be 120 metres east of Cambie, which would have meant the stadium would have had to be partly built over a ravine. With negotiations at an impasse, the project was nixed. Still, it almost got built — the city allocated money for its construction.

There is an “aerial perspective view” of the stadium at the Vancouver Archives.

The design was by Sharp and Thompson, the architects of the Burrard Bridge. It's dated Oct. 2, 1930 and shows a grass oval with a track and stands on the south. In the illustration people are playing soccer.

The Canadian Olympic trials committee was a big proponent for the stadium, and it does look very Olympian, like a mini-version of the Los Angeles Coliseum, which hosted the 1932 Summer Olympics.

The stadium was to be just north of the peak of Little Mountain, dug into the mountain slope above West 29th Avenue. The plan also featured an open-air reservoir at the top of Little Mountain, and a tower between the reservoir and the stadium. It looks like a local version of San Francisco's Coit Tower, which was built around the same time.

When the stadium was announced in the Oct. 3, 1930 Sun, the paper said “the plans drawn by Mr. Sharp show a stadium 570 feet long by 290 feet wide with accommodation for 25,000 people. (But) provision is made for a later extension to bring the capacity to 50,000.”

Sharp and Thompson had pitched a similar stadium on the Kitsilano Indian Reserve (today's Vanier Park), but The Sun reported the province wanted $300,000 for the land, “in addition to the purchase price to the Indians.” So they set their sights on Little Mountain, which Ald. J.J. Mcrae noted was “already owned by the Park Board and would not cost the city a cent.”

The Sun reported the “advantage” of the Little Mountain site is that it was only a 12-minute drive from downtown, and the B.C. Electric Railway “says it can easily transport 1,000,000 people to the park, if necessary.”

That might have been a typo — Vancouver's population in 1931 was only 300,000.

Governments were being pressed to put money into public works in the Depression, and the civic, provincial and federal governments were reportedly ready to fork over $60,000 to help build the new stadium. The rest was to be raised by “public subscription.”

This didn't fly, and on March 13, 1931 a business group from Portland, Ore. offered to build a $175,000 stadium at Little Mountain at no cost to the city. It proposed to lease the space for $5,000 per year.

This was the proposal that was nixed Aug. 8. But the Portland group pivoted and proposed to build a stadium on land it had optioned in the area around 16th and Trafalgar. Vancouver's early stadiums were privately built.

Nothing came of it, but the Sharp and Thompson plan for a stadium on the Kitsilano reserve was brought up again by Mayor Gerry Mcgeer in 1936. But it didn't get built, for a second time.

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2022-08-06T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-06T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://vancouversun.pressreader.com/article/281565179527871

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