Sun Tower. Photo: Tom Hudock
Despite it’s sleepy reputation, Vancouver has always been a brash city of big dreams and rough ambition, a noisy, sprawling brat of a frontier town. It’s fitting we mark noon every day with the triumphal blast of a ship’s horn, and sound the “all’s well” at nine ‘o-clock with the blast of a colonial cannon.
In keeping with that rash optimism, some of the tallest buildings in the British Empire were built right here in Vancouver: The Sun Tower and Dominion Building at the beginning of the last century, and just fifty years ago the Electra building, from which that raucous noontime horn first sounded.
More recently, our pedestal-style towers have revolutionized urban design around the globe, garnering our city international awards and acclaim for our revitalized downtown core.
Despite worldwide acclaim, however, Vancouver’s penchant for going vertical has inspired local opprobrium, and a rash of ad-hoc, poorly-vetted spot rezonings – the Mayor’s ill-planned STIR initiative in particular – has undermined support for new towers right across the city.
I’ve lived in towers more than half of my life, ever since I first moved to the West End in the late 70s, and I’ve always enjoyed that more urban way of living.
More recently I spent twenty years in Manhattan. Living on that island, with all it implies can be daunting. But Sex and the City notwithstanding, true New Yorkers don’t really live in New York as much as they live in one of the dozens of smaller neighbourhoods that dot the city, each as different in their own way as the five boroughs surrounding the city.
View west from our NYC apartment. Photo: Tom Hudock
We were lucky enough to spend seventeen of those years in Yorkville, living at the Claridge House at 87th Street and 3rd Avenue. We used to call it suburban Manhattan, there were so many moms with double strollers on the sidewalks, and everything seemed so clean and tidy after some of the neighbourhoods we’d lived in.
Generally speaking, neighbours in east side buildings go to great lengths to ignore each other, a way of maintaining privacy in tight proximity. But community still existed inside the building with the staff, who became a kind of second family. On a recent visit back, four years after leaving, we stopped by to say hi and ended up sharing emotional hugs and tears, all of us surprised by the staying power and intensity of the connections we’d made.
Outside the building, within a four block radius, our sense of community was very strong. My dry-cleaner, Jean, knew my voice so well I never had to introduce myself on the phone. Our wine store – Mr. Wright’s – would deliver anything we needed on account, trusting us to stop and settle up the next time we walked by.
We had a tiny Italian deli 2 blocks up the street with as good a selection of olive oil as Whole Foods but at half the price. The local chinese – Chef Ho’s – knew us by name and all our favourites, as did any of a dozen other local merchants. Six of our closest friends lived within blocks of us. That strong sense of local community and having access to the best of the city so close at hand gave us the benefits of small-town living with all the convenience of a big city.
Paris Place in Tinseltown
The beauty of that tower lifestyle was that everything we needed was within four blocks of our home. As a result, we didn’t own a car and never needed one in more than two decades there.
Here in Vancouver, we live in Paris Place, the very first condo tower built in Tinseltown more than fifteen years ago. By contrast, Paris Place has a very strong sense of internal community. Neighbours know each other, help each other out, and come out for all of the events we put on.
Our Christmas party was remarkable this year, with a huge spread of food donated by local merchants – thanks T&T! It was packed with many different nationalities, languages, ages, religions and races all happily breaking bread together and toasting the New Year in a kind of multicultural melange representative of the very best this city can be.
Paris Place Christmas Party
Our residents love Paris Place.
And we’re thrilled that another tower, the Woodwards building, has helped bring our community alive, making it possible for area residents to attend major cultural events, go to university and take care of their banking locally for the very first time, all while providing homes for 250 people who used to live on the street.
The last tower to be completed in our neighbourhood has just gone up right next to Paris Place. It’s one of twelve new social housing developments made possible by Mayor Sam Sullivan’s innovative partnership with the Province, magically transforming what was once an open-air latrine and shooting gallery into a new residence for single mothers.
I will readily concede that towers are not appropriate everywhere. Parts of Burnaby stand mute witness to that tragic fact.
But married to our transit infrastructure and embedded where density already exists, towers provide homes for the homeless and affordable housing for families that can’t afford $1,000,000 lots. At the same time, towers bring services within walking distance and help build community where once only chaos thrived.
Sunset from Paris Place. Photo: Tom Hudock
Towers are an important part of urban vitality and help ensure sufficient population density so that schools don’t have to close, library hours don’t have to be curtailed and three-year-olds don’t have to pay user fees at the park. And condo towers help reduce local taxes by sharing costs with more residents per acre.
In fact, if we actually had enough towers in our city’s core we might even be able to afford a recital and concert hall downtown, just like every other city in North America half our size.
Perhaps most importantly, tower living creates the smallest ecological footprint per resident of any type of housing. For all of these reasons, towers have played an important role in Vancouver’s history and will continue to have a rightful place in our city’s future planning.
If those eager to preserve the character of existing neighborhoods, a concern I share, would consider transit-based density as an approach that would see future development aligned with our transit infrastructure – on the borders of, rather than piecemeal dotted-throughout-and-destroying-the-character-of, existing neighborhoods – we could forge a new citywide plan for our 125th birthday this year that all could celebrate.
This approach would end the spot re-zonings that have raised so many hackles, while allowing well-planned development that is necessary to accommodate the thousands of new residents who continue to move to our spectacular city.
Vancouver has an extraordinary future as the western world’s gateway to the east. Our architecture and our dreams should reflect the audaciousness of that promise. Let that noonday horn roar and our downtown towers soar!
Woodwards Tower. Photo: Tom Hudock
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