Urban Miracle Vancouver’s Stanley Park Is A Mixture Of Legend, History And Exhilaration

A Salish Indian legend says the god Si’Atmulth, “The Rainmaker,” lives beneath Stanley Park. It’s not hard to believe. Stanley Park’s forest of cedar and hemlock and Douglas fir is so lush, so deeply green, that some form of divine intervention must be involved.

In fact, all of Stanley Park seems a little miraculous. It sits adjacent the bustle of downtown Vancouver, Canada’s third-largest city, and yet can seem as remote and exotic as places accessible only by kayak or seaplane. Walk the seawall, the six-mile promenade that circles the park, and you can encounter bald eagles swooping over the treetops, or seals poking their whiskery snouts out of the water to regard passers-by.

Don’t get hypnotized by the scenery, though. You might get run over. Stanley Park is a recreational playground for thousands of neighboring apartment-dwellers, and they make the most of it. Vancouverites are an athletic bunch, and they take to the seawall like geese to breadcrumbs, armed with hiking boots, running shoes, mountain bikes and in-line skates. When President Clinton jogged through here between his Vancouver meetings with Boris Yeltsin in 1993, he fit right in.

No, Stanley Park is not exactly a traveler’s secret. Eight million people pass through the park gates every year. But even on summer weekends it never seems too crowded. Stanley Park has room. With an area of over 1,000 acres, it is the largest urban park in Canada and 200 acres bigger than Central Park in Manhattan.

But what is truly unique about Stanley Park is its setting, not its size. The park is a peninsula, a tongue of land in the mouth of Vancouver’s harbor, and at every turn it shows off another spectacular panorama. To the south and the east, the city’s skyscrapers and the working port. To the north and the west, the snow-capped coastal mountains and English Bay, leading out to the Pacific Ocean.

One place where tourists and locals congregate to enjoy these views is Brockton Point, where manicured lawns and proper English gardens are watched over by totem poles. This is where Vancouver most looks like the British colony it once was. The remnants of the Empire are apparent here on the rugby field and the cricket pitches, where men from former colonies - New Zealand and South Africa and Fiji and India - play out in the midday sun.

“It’s not just the space, but all the people using it together that’s fantastic,” said Graham Gardner, a businessman from Sydney, Australia, who was touring the park with his family on rented bicycles. Vancouver reminded him of Sydney in that it enjoys a great deal of waterfront, but he was impressed that so much of it was available to the public. “It’s a great way to see all sides of the city.”

The local politics also make themselves apparent in Stanley Park. Like much of the Pacific Northwest, Vancouver has experienced tremendous growth in the past decade. Arguments continue to rage over the causeway which runs through the center of the park and provides a major route for commuters from the northern suburbs. Environmental concerns aside, the road may never be expanded because the entire park is also subject to lawsuits by the Salish people, who claim it as part of their ancestral homelands.

The greatest controversies in Stanley Park seem reserved for the fate of its animals. Vancouver city council recently passed a bylaw making it illegal to feed the raccoons and gray squirrels overrunning the park. Voters have also elected to close down the park’s cramped, antiquated zoo.

Now local debate has turned to the Vancouver Aquarium, the most popular attraction in the park. Since 1956, it has educated thousands of local schoolchildren about the intelligence of orcas and beluga whales. Those kids have grown up, and some of them are demanding that the aquarium’s whales be released.

Officials reply that the aquarium is also a research facility, and that what we know about whales has been from studying them in captivity. They also point out that the aquarium is a shelter for endangered species, such as Steller sea lions, and sea otters orphaned by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Whichever side of the debate you favor, it’s hard not to be impressed by the aquarium. There are over 8,000 types of animals here, everything from sunflower starfish and reef sharks to the varieties of salmon and crab served up in Robson Street’s sushi bars.

The most astonishing part of the aquarium, though, is the Arctic Gallery, where walls of glass open onto the icy blue domain of the playful beluga whales. Stand back a minute and you’ll even hear harried parents and bored teenagers gasp at the sight.

“No place in Vancouver generates such fierce emotions in people as Stanley Park,” says Mike Steele, an author who has written two books about the landmark. Since it is such an obvious symbol of Vancouver, Steele says, it is inevitable that many want to remake the park in their own image. One park commissioner loved golf, and now Stanley Park has a par-3 golf course; another loved tennis, and now there are tennis courts. Steele says the commissioners should instead adhere to the original purpose of the park and leave it a wilderness, a monument to what Vancouver was carved from.

And Stanley Park certainly has changed. For over 500 years, its beaches were home only to fishing villages of the Salish natives. Captain George Vancouver sailed into the bay and met the Salish in 1792, and soon after that the British established forts further inland from which they traded furs and explored the mountains.

The British government was so worried that Americans would invade this new colony that it annexed large tracts of land and turned them into military reserves. The peninsula which is Stanley Park today, with its sweeping views of the harbor and English Bay, was strategically perfect.

As a result, the peninsula was still undeveloped when the city of Vancouver was founded in 1886. The first city council had the foresight to ask that the reserve be turned into a public green space - though cynics argue that some council members were property speculators who didn’t want the reserve land to come on the market. In 1889, Lord Stanley, the Queen’s representative in Canada (and the same man whose name also adorns hockey’s biggest prize) officially opened the new park.

Now that land is worth $500 million, according to local real estate agents, and Stanley Park is a much busier place. But it is still possible to escape big-city concerns and crowds with a little effort.

Visitors rarely venture to the water on the western side of the park, and they’re missing something. This is where The Rainmaker dwells, where the forest is thickest, the sea life most abundant. This is also where the Salish people once pulled their dugout canoes on the shore and feasted on clams and mussels.

Now these places have ordinary names like Ferguson Point and Third Beach, and the locals show up at sunset carrying picnic baskets. They’re different people, but it’s fair to guess that as they eat and gaze upon the mountains and the sea, they’re thinking the same old thing: life in the Pacific Northwest can be pretty sweet.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: If you go There are several flights from Spokane to Vancouver (via Seattle) every day on Air Canada or Horizon Airlines. Vancouver is about three hours’ drive north from Seattle on U.S. Interstate 5. Like Seattle, Vancouver gets a fair bit of rain. Bring an umbrella. Also, the seawall promenade becomes crowded on sunny evenings and on weekends, when many people from the suburbs come into town. If you want to jog or cycle around the park with a bit more breathing room, try to do it on a weekday. Cars are allowed in the park but parking is metered, so be sure to have plenty of quarters or “loonies” (dollar coins, so nicknamed after a common Canadian bird). You can rent bicycles and in-line skates from one of many shops at the corner of Robson and Denman streets, near the park’s main entrance. Spokes (1798 West Georgia Street; (604) 688-5141) rents bicycles for $5 US per hour, and also serves while-you-wait espresso. Stanley Park borders on downtown Vancouver, so all of the city’s major hotels are a 20-minute walk or a short cab ride away. Reservations can be made through the tourist bureau Discover British Columbia, telephone (800) 663-6000. If you want to be right next to the park, try the Sylvia, a legendary hotel built in 1912, covered in Virginia creeper and facing English Bay. (Double rooms $55 to $120 US per night; telephone (604) 681-9321.) The Westin Bayshore, facing the harbor and the coastal mountains, is newer and more luxurious. (Doubles $195-$285 US; (604) 682-3377.) The park has numerous refreshment stands, but if you want a real meal, try the Prospect Point Cafe, which has a large terrace overlooking the harbor and the Lions Gate Bridge. (604) 669-2737. Better for more extravagant dining is The Teahouse at Ferguson Point, which has a sweeping view of English Bay. This seems to be the place to go for weekend brunch, which features such local delicacies as smoked salmon Benedict and wild rice pancakes with hazelnut butter. (604) 669-3281. Reservations recommended.