Streets ó they all have names, but have you
ever wondered why they have the names
they do?
Hi, I'm CBC Vancouver's municipal affairs
reporter Justin McElroy. In recent years,
there's been a trend of looking at
individual street names, often for
historical figures who haven't aged well.
But what about the rest of them? In the
City of Vancouver, streets were often
named in a haphazard, random way, but this
has never been fully explored because
nobody in their right mind would try and
analyze every single street name in the
city ó until now. When you exclude numbered
streets and only count things the City
of Vancouver explicitly calls a public
street,
there are 651 of them in this city named
for unique reasons and we're going to
categorize each and every one. So let's
get to it.
[Music]
For a lot of this we're going to be
relying on the 1999 book, Street Names of
Vancouver, by Elizabeth Walker and the
Vancouver Historical Society. It lists
the origins of basically every street in
the city or what they think it's named
for, but even then, there are 62 streets
with no origin. From Napier to Lily, to
Claredon... you get the picture. There
are a lot of them spread out all over
the city. So that's one big category done.
Another big category: golf courses and
not golf courses that, you know, are from
here. No, we have streets named after
golf courses in Scotland and England and
Boston. No less than three from Toronto
and Highland Park, Illinois ó home of the
all-male membership of Bob O' links golf
course, or as we know it,
Bobolink. There are more streets in the
City of Vancouver named for golf courses
than there are for women and people of
color combined and the city's love of
golf streets could have been even
greater, because in the 1960s, they wanted
to name seven streets in the new Musqueam
Park subdivision after golfers until
they were changed to names with
Indigenous terms, along with three others
in this subdivision. We also have a lot
of geographical-based streets. Beach
Avenue, because it's next to the beach,
Boundary because it's the boundary
between Vancouver and Burnaby, Main
Street because they wanted it to be a
Main Street, and so on. There's also a
couple of clever ones like Little ó just
one block long.
All right, next up, explorers. They came,
they saw, then a bunch of different
things happened, including centuries
later, a bunch of streets in Vancouver being named
for them. 15 from England, eight from Spain, seven
from France, one from Denmark and while
we're at it, we'll and throw in two
European statesmen from the 17th and
16th centuries and now we should be done
with Europeans, right? But we've left out
the monarchy, including two for King
Edward VI, three for Queen Victoria
and her family, 10 generic titles for
the British royalty. Oh, and I almost
forgot,
24 other famous British people and 25
other places in Britain. That's nearly 10
per cent of the named streets right there
and that's not even counting the
university streets in the far northeast
of the city ó four of which are in Britain.
we've also got two Greek mathematicians,
20 war battles and finally, wrapping up
the European section, there's stuff
named for George Vancouver, that guy who
navigated a ship around here hundreds of
years ago and so the city named a bunch
of things after his friends and the
shipmates and places he lived in. Moving
onto things from this continent, we've
got famous Canadians who aren't from B.C.,
famous places that aren't in B.C.,
including a certain street in New York
City and finally, all the provinces and
territories of this country except for
Newfoundland and Labrador and the
Northwest Territories. We've also got
First Nations that also aren't based
here, three streets named after Indigenous
people or terms, but with anglicized
spellings and Indigenous people who
aren't part of the Musqueam, Squamish or
Tsleil-Waututh nations whose unceded
lands Vancouver is on and do not have a
single street name directly for one of
their leaders.
Moving on. Remember how I said some of
Vancouver's street naming was random? In
the 1920s and 30s, there were a lot of
new subdivisions being built in the City
of Vancouver, which required a lot of new
street names and apparently there was
someone in the city's engineering
department, William B. Young, who had
the power to suggest street names.
Specifically he suggested street names
based on the works and characters of
19th century Scottish novelist Sir
Walter Scott ó 12 of them to be exact,
which means there are more streets of
this city named for his works than there
are streets named for women who were
born in Vancouver. We've also got streets
named for the two global festivals held
here, ones named for old hotels or fancy
houses on the street, ones named for
ships or things on a ship and ones that
frankly were hard to put in any category.
There are also plenty of streets,
particularly in False Creek, named after
industrial activity that Vancouver used
to do lots more of, including bucket
wheel. Not bucket wheel street, not bucket
wheel lane, just bucket wheel. Then we
have all the places named for other
places in B.C. ó most placed in a row ó and
finally, in the nonhuman category, plants.
But more importantly, trees. The tree
streets are a defining part of how this
city is named but amusingly the CPR
surveyor in charge of naming much of
early Vancouver, Lachlan Hamilton, wanted
the tree streets to go from A to Z. But
he was hands-off and when he returned
from a trip and asked his assistants
whether they had followed through, they
said they hadn't heard anything about it.
And that's why our tree streets are in
completely random alphabetical order.
Which leaves us basically with around
200 streets named for people from
British Columbia.
First up, landowners. When the city was in
its infancy, people would buy large plots
of land with no roads around them and so
when roads had to go in, often the person
with the biggest plot of land would get
that street named after them. There are
46 streets in total named for people
known primarily today as land owners, all
between 1880 and 1940. Now let me tell
you about the Canadian Pacific Railway
Company.
Basically when CPR agreed to end their
railroad in Vancouver instead of Port
Moody, the province gave them 6,000
acres of land and for CPR to
make money off that land, it needed to be
cleared, surveyed and filled with streets
and a lot of them ended up being named
for employees and managers of the CPR,
because that's the thing you can do when
you own a fifth of a city. We're also
going to include streets named for
people who work for different railway
lines or who were engineers or surveyors.
Which brings us to politicians. They
include seven MPs, seven premiers, six
early Lieutenant governors and a whole
bunch of MLAs ó some contentious, some not ó
all ultimately in the same category.
We're also going to include 28 civic
politicians in this category, including
10 former Vancouver mayors and people
like school trustees and senior city
staff. Hey, fewer than 100 left!
Including a few B.C. pioneers outside of
Vancouver, a few people whose biggest
claim to fame was chopping down trees
for houses and roads, and on the topic of
chopping down trees, five streets named
after owners and operators of the
Hastings Sawmill, the first major
industry in Vancouver. We've got nine
other prominent business owners, streets
named after the longest-serving owner
and general manager of the Canucks, and a
few Vancouverites who were hard to put
in any category. And speaking about hard to
categorize streets, we've got Valiant.
Named for the first Vancouver police dog
killed in the line of duty, shot in 1967
by a murderer on the run who was
escaping prison. And perhaps our weirdest
street name, Leg-in-boot Square. In
1887, a leg and boot washed ashore False
Creek and Vancouver police decided to
investigate this in the most rigorous
way possible:
By hanging that leg and boot at police
headquarters for a couple weeks waiting
for someone to claim it. Nobody did, but
90 years later, the city thought that
would make for a good street name. So
we've gone from 651 street names to seven. As
a young man, Leopold Bloch-Bauer fled
from Austria when the Nazis invaded, and
because he was Jewish, had his assets
seized. He moved to Vancouver, changed his
name to Bentley, and eventually had a
street name for the road that led to his
first sawmill, the beginning of a small
forest company that grew up to become
Canfor. Jack Oppal is the only street in
Vancouver named for a South Asian. He was a
pioneer in the forest industry and
fought discrimination, a key part of the
Indo-Canadian forestry heritage in this
province. Frances Fanny Dalrymple was
Vancouver's first public health nurse
and directed B.C.'s original training
school for nurses. Tilly Jean Rolston was
the first woman in Canada to be a
cabinet minister with an actual
department to run, introduced B.C.'s first
sex-ed curriculum and was the founding
chairperson of Theatre Under The Stars.
Samuel Greer owned land next to Kits Beach,
but the government gave it to CPR as
part of that 6,000 acres. He refused to
leave so the government sent a sheriff
to arrest him and then Greer shot the
sheriff before being arrested. And
finally, there is Worthington Drive and
Worthington Place, named for Douglas
Grant Worthington and John Robert
Worthington, brothers in the 28th armored
regiment in the fourth Canadian Brigade,
who died within nine days of one another
during the Battle of Normandy. And that's
a look at every single Street in
Vancouver and how they were named. For
CBC Vancouver, I'm Justin McElroy.