Vancouver wasn’t the only B.C. city with plans for freeways and ‘urban renewal’ in the 1960s. Over in Victoria, they wanted to transform the decaying Inner Harbour, still largely industrial, and what came to be known as Old Town (note the “skid road hotels” on Johnson Street at the centre top of this 1967 map).
First thing - you gotta have a freeway, preferably running through a poorer part of the city and cutting off the waterfront:
(This view is looking south towards the Parliament Buildings in the upper left corner.)
The proposal came with the usual assurances:
This will inject new prosperity into the older and blighted area of the core. In addition, valuable capacity on downtown streets now being taken by through traffic, including lumber trucks, will be free when these vehicles can reach James Bay on the West Victoria freeway without touching downtown.
Then you build some highrise towers right next to the water:
This is the infamous Reid Centre proposal for the old Ocean Cement site off Wharf Street. Victoria still hasn’t figured out what to do with the location:
After two contentious years, the towers were reduced to two semi-circular towers of 11 and 14 storeys but this failed too. The Province bought the land in 1974 for $1.7 million and imposed a freeze on development. It was followed by two more failed plans by Bawlf (in 1978 and 1987) and a failed plan by Hancock, Nicholson and Brook in 1988.
Thanks to Robert Randall for these images and quotes, collected by UVic geography student Jesse Dill.
I grew up in Victoria. I have a vague recollection of the Reid Centre project, but there never was a freeway proposal of the type portrayed in this creative sketch.
Perhpas someone is trying to make a bogey-man out of what was called the Blanshard Street Extension. That’s how you reach downtown today if you stay on Hwy #17, but it has stop lights and a speed limit of 50kmh once you’re south of Saanich City Hall.
Just a quick question. What report or document were these pictures and quotes taken from? I realize you named two individuals as your source, but I am curious as to the ultimate origins of this material. I tried doing the Google thingy on the names you referenced but neither of them seems to be an active blogger.
Budd, you must have missed my detailed reply when you last doubted the above claim last September. Yes, there was a proposal
There was a flurry of reports generated by different levels of Government during this decade of “progress”. The most notable one was commissioned by the precursor to the Capital Regional District, the Capital Region Planning Board. All these reports are at the Victoria and Provincial archives.
If you’re still in doubt, consider the unfortunate hundreds of residents of the Blanshard-Rose neighbourhood, whose houses (most dating from 1890-1918) were demolished to make way for the only part of the freeway plan that came into being.
Not only are much of the contents of the Victoria archives not online, a vast quantity–box after unopened box–remain uncatalogued.
You’re revisionist history of the Blanshard-Rose area is quite disturbing. My family knew Mayor Alfred Toone, who died in office of a heart attack. One of his personal missions, as a Mayor who came from a working background, was the creation of the social housing complex in that area. Today when you drive by, it still looks attractive and well-kept.
As I said above, the Blanshard Extension road project was never a freeway, only an arterial road. But why let facts get in the way of artistic mythology?
I make no judgment on whether the Blanshard Court housing project was a success or failure–only that dozens of low-income homes were demolished in order to create it. Nothing revisionist about that. And certainly, many of the evicted residents eventually found there way back to reside in the new Blanshard Court. However, Blanshard-Rose was certainly no worse than the James Bay district of Victoria; also called “urban blight” in the 1960s only to become a treasured heritage neighbourhood today.
Mayor Toone indeed died in office in 1966. It is interesting to note that Mayor Haddock suffered a heart attack in July 1971 at the height of the controversy over the Reid site project pictured above.
As for your claim that Blanshard Street wasn’t intended to be a freeway, here is a direct quote from the 1965 Capital Region Planning Board report:
“This means that the vehicle having a downtown destination need not leave the north-south freeway system with its average speeds of 40 or 50 mph until it reaches an interchange near Johnson St. bridge 500 yards from downtown.”
“This will inject new prosperity into the older and blighted part of the core. In addition valuable capacity on downtown streets now being taken up by through traffic, including lumber trucks, will be free when these vehicles can reach James Bay on the West Victoria Freeway without touching downtown.”
This mad rush to eliminate “urban blight” also extended to the attractive little neighbourhood of Fernwood. From the same report:
“Minor adjustments to local commercial areas include the elimination of the blighted Fernwood-Gladstone shopping area”
[six square blocks north of Vic High School and west of Fernwood Road]
http://flickr.com/photos/51776830@N00/1782136281/
I’ll accept that you have a local government source on this subject, the Capital Region Planning Board. However, that is not the BC Highways Dept who would have had to have been involved for any of this to be a serious plan, as opposed to someone’s pipedream.
I recall when I first moved to Prince George in the 1970s they had a City Planner who had drawn some entirely speculative sketches showing several bypass and ring road constructions. None of it has ever materialized in the form he had in mind, though perhaps the Foothills Bridge and Boulevard might be thought of as the real world residual of these once-upon-a-time Champs Elysees. The “planner” in question had to quit a couple of years later when he got into some legal difficulties.
As to the “substance” of the scheme, the nature of your VicWest picture, a roughly done freehand sketch, little more than a saleman’s gee-whiz chart indicates to me that this was hardly a serious plan in anyone’s mind, including those of the author(s). Furthermore a freeway with speed limits of 40 to 50 mph is not a freeway to begin with, by either North American or European standards, and the notion of an interchange at Johnston Street is too laughable for words. Where would the property have come from? Were they going to blow down the the Carnegie Library building? What about the BC Electric Building? It was still pretty new at that point.
The term “freeway” is a generic term meaning any express roadway free from traffic lights, stop signs and traditional intersections. 50 mph is a reasonable speed for the era and the type of freeway (this would not be the Autobahn or M1). The practicality of constructing such a system may have been doubtful but the intent was serious. The same CRPB report recommended construction of a lower causeway at the Inner Harbour–a much smaller scheme that was completed virtually exactly as envisaged in 1965. From reading the CRPB Plan and understanding the context in which it was written it was no pie-in-the-sky wish list but a high-level plan intended to outline the broad steps required to ‘modernize’ Victoria. The Board felt that because much of the land was still under public ownership, “a measure of realism” made this plan frighteningly possible. The highway department wasn’t involved because this report was the first step in the plan.
Another part of the Plan recommended a vast shopping mall/parkade on the block between Johnson and Pandora, in the area marked “Skid Row Hotels.” This idea fizzled and was postponed long enough to allow Sam Bawlf’s much more sympathetic “Market Square” redevelopment to occur in the same location a decade later.
Transit is given short shrift in 1965. Buses hardly rate a significant mention. The Plan says, “The tendency is for the public to walk less”, making the placement of parking important.
“The term “freeway” is a generic term meaning any express roadway free from traffic lights, stop signs and traditional intersections. 50 mph is a reasonable speed for the era and the type of freeway (this would not be the Autobahn or M1). The practicality of constructing such a system may have been doubtful but the intent was serious. ”
Generally any freeway built in the United States or Canada since the end of WW2 has been designed, as have Ontario’s 400 series highways, for a speed of 120 kmh, or about 70 mph. I believe a good general definition of a freeway is a divided, multi-lane, controlled access highway with uninterrupted flow, that is interchanges, not intersections. And if it’s not an “Autobahn or M1″, then it’s not a freeway.
Given the quality of the sketch it was hardly a serious plan. In addition, the Capital Region would not have had either the legislative authority or the financial resources to undertake any highways projects. Perhaps they thought someone at Highways (P. A. Gaglardi?) would browse the document and decide to bless them with tens of millions to undertake some parts of the work. And on that point, do you know who actually undertook the Blanshard extension? Was it Victoria and Saanich municipalities, or the BC Govt? And who did the expropriations for the ROW?
Robert, I found an interesting history of sorts of the Blanshard extension in the provincial Hansard, remarks by Dr George Scott Wallace, MLA for Oak Bay, in June of 1976.
http://www.leg.bc.ca/HANSARD/31st1st/31p_01s_760629z.htm#03288
If memory serves, I believe that concept sketch of the Vic West freeway was published in Segger & Franklin’s 1996 book, “Exploring Victoria’s Architecture.”