ABOUT THE AREA

Vancouver, set like a jewel...
by Jack Kintner

Since it outgrew Winnipeg, Manitoba in the 1920's, Vancouver is now the largest metropolitan area in Western Canada. Vancouver is home to a growing community of nearly 2 million people who enjoy one of the world's most modern and liveable cities in the Pacific Northwest. Set like a jewel in the incomparably picturesque Fraser River delta, Vancouver meets the Georgia Strait at the foot of the imposing Coast Mountains. Like the city itself, the spectacular geography at first seems like too much has been crammed into too little space, but it works, and as visitors soon find out, it works beautifully.

Vancouver is not old, even for the west coast. It's namesake, Englishman George Vancouver, explored the area over two centuries ago but European settlement in the area began in New Westminster and across the strait on Vancouver Island. The largest native settlement was an ancient Musqueam village on the north arm of the Fraser River near its mouth, today the Musqueam Reserve. European settlement was accelerated by "the yellow metal that makes white men go crazy" when gold was found on sand bars in the Fraser in the 1850's and 60's, starting a gold rush that spread over much of the area.

Lumbering began soon after on Burrard Inlet at what was informally called Gastown, a name the gentrified neighborhood still uses. The official name, Granville after the Colonial Secretary, was changed to Vancouver at the suggestion of the Canadian Pacific Railway when it located the western terminus of its transcontinental railroad on what is now Main Street east of False Creek. It was incorporated in 1886, the same year a major fire all but wiped out the town.

Especially with the decline of forest and fishery resources, Vancouver lacks a central
defining industry or product, such as Winnipeg's grain or Alberta's oil. Instead it's a diversified mercantile beehive that thrives on trade, tourism and a vigorous entrepreneurial spirit promoting everything from a burgeoning high-tech industry to hydrogen-powered cars and a film industry so busy it's locally referred to as "Hollywood North."

Though traffic sometimes seems a bit heavy, it rarely “gridlocks” because Vancouver has not tried to solve its congestion problems with freeways, concentrating instead on keeping everything moving even if at a snail's pace rather than simply moving traffic jams around faster by freeways from here to there. There are no freeways within the city of Vancouver itself, and only two in the area - the Trans-Canada Highway which skirts around Vancouver’s northeast corner before heading north across the Second Narrows Bridge to Howe Sound, Whistler, and Highway 99, and the continuation of U.S. Interstate 5, which connects the Peace Arch border crossing with Vancouver’s southern boundary. A spur, Highway 91, connects with 99 in both Delta and Richmond farther north providing an alternative via the striking Alex Fraser Bridge to crossing under the Fraser in Highway 99’s Deas Tunnel.


Vancouver has fought to retain its family neighborhoods, albeit with house prices in most areas now well into the stratosphere. It's done it with networks of light rail plus the many bridges and tunnels over various inlets off the Strait of Georgia and the ubiquitous Fraser River. It has kept the downtown core populated by building up, much like Honolulu or Hong Kong, with a forest of high-rises best seen by driving into the core of the city on Cambie late on a sunny afternoon or from English Beach near Stanley Park. The many high-rises can make you feel a little like an ant lost in a hair brush, but with so many living downtown the city has a vibrant urban core second to none outside Europe.

JACK KINTNER is a freelance photojournalist whose work appears in several area magazines and newspapers. A native of Port Angeles, Washington, he lives in Blaine with his lovely wife Linda and their two dogs, a Border Collie named Duke and a loveable if somewhat loudmouthed coyote cross named Dutchess. When not working or fly fishing he can often be spotted in the skies above Blaine is his yellow J-3 Cub named Butterfingers. Jack Kintner can be reached by emailing him at jack.kintner@verizon.net

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