Under the Georgia Street Viaduct, 1939

There’s been bit of hubbub lately about tearing down the viaducts, and some misuse of history along the way. According to Councillor Geoff Meggs, the guy who’s been championing this project: “We’ll certainly right a historic wrong by removing the viaducts, which as we heard, once threatened to destroy both Strathcona and Chinatown.”

And in the same article, Carol Lee says the viaducts have acted as a “Great Wall of Chinatown” and have “significantly contributed to the neighbourhood’s gradual decline over the past 40 years."

When the viaducts were conceived, they were to be one component of a massive freeway project. The "historic wrong” was that Hogan’s Alley was demolished. How knocking them down for condos “corrects” the destruction of a low income neighbourhood is beyond me, as it’s very doubtful low income or marginalized people will see much benefit from the project. Clearly, most of the benefits will go to billionaire mega-developers Concord (who have been sitting on empty adjacent land for years) and the Aquilinis, a family dynasty that made a fortune from, among other things, building crappy housing and slum lordism.

As for the “Great Wall of Chinatown,” this was a completely different component of the freeway project, which would have been an eight-lane highway along Carrall Street to a third crossing on Burrard Inlet, essentially bisecting Chinatown and cutting it off from downtown. This didn’t happen. Chinatown’s decline had nothing to do with the viaducts. What the viaducts replaced was the old Georgia Viaduct, seen here in the 1930s. Its purpose was to provide a way to bypass the northeastern portion of False Creek, which has since been filled in, and the old CPR yards that are also long gone.

As someone who lives nearby, walks and cycles, but doesn’t drive, I’ve generally been in favour of removing the viaducts, because it opens up some exciting new possibilities. But the closer it gets to becoming reality, the stench of politics gets stronger and it’s starting to look more like business as usual of enriching developers at taxpayers expense (they say $115 million, which will probably mean at least $200 million). To me it would make more sense to leave these perfectly solid and not very old structures standing, remove motor traffic, and incorporate them into new development projects, perhaps turning them into an elevated park, like New York’s High Line.

For more on the freeway debacle, see Price Tags, here and here.

Source: Photo by Claude Detloff, City of Vancouver Archives #371-2242