“Green my ass”.
That’s just one comment the Westender received since it was announced that city council has voted to permanently close the 800 block of Robson Street to all vehicular traffic. That’s the strip between Hornby and Howe, the closure an effort to supposedly reflect the original intention of Robson Square, uniting the law courts to the south and the art gallery to the north in a three-block, pedestrian-only plaza.
Your Rants came in fast and furious.
“There is already a square on the north side of the art gallery. Did you people forget it?” writes JL Brussac (he also of the “green my ass” comment). Another reader, Paul Donovan, suggests the permanent street closure “creates a lot of fuel and time waste. Big headaches for older people and the bus system.” Reader Kathy O’Brien was definitely fired up. “As a citizen of Vancouver and a resident of the West End, I think that this is a terrible decision, and I am quite sure that I am not alone”.
One of the few Raves arrived from reader Mally Dixon, who feels “Vancouver lacks a central city square like London’s Trafalgar Square […] I believe this was the original plan and I look forward to seeing it come to life at last.”
As mentioned, if you were to rifle through Vancouver’s pages of time, Mally is right. It’s hard to imagine, but in the 1960s, the two blocks south of the art gallery were sprawling, ugly, street level parking lots. When famed architect Arthur Erickson and his firm were hired to redesign that corridor from Georgia to Nelson in the early 1970s, the idea was to build something that looked like a skyscraper laid on its side, and for the entire area to be pedestrian-only. Erickson originally wanted Vancouverites to “walk all over it”.
And yet, even after Robson Square’s completion in the early 1980s, 800 Robson Street has always remained a roadway for inner-city traffic flow purposes, and it’s been that way until the closure during the 2010 Winter Olympics. That went well, so the city has been shutting the block down each summer since. I’m sure you could handle that, but all year long? Permanently?
I’m a booster for public space, but Erickson had this problem covered, literally: there’s already a Robson Square pedestrian thoroughfare uniting the art gallery and the law courts: the underpass concourse that includes the outdoor skating rink and the downtown UBC campus.
If that block of Robson Street is permanently closed, it leaves Davie Street as the only two-way, inner-city artery directly connecting the West End and downtown, and that’s not enough to serve the population properly. The closure of that single block will permanently shut down all wheeled traffic. Besides cars, that includes buses, taxis, and even bicycles (unless an unannounced bike lane is part of the future plans).
Erickson’s original vision for Robson Square may have been pedestrian-only, but know this: in 1974, a year into the project, he agreed with the city and province that a limited, vehicular thoroughfare was still needed: “The only traffic through the square will be inner-city buses, linking the West End and False Creek. Since buses function as people movers, they are seen as a compliment or enhancement to the pedestrian activity of the civic square.”
It was likely Erickson making a compromise. Forty-two years later, it still sounds like a good one to me.
