Posts from — August 2009

Here’s how yesterday’s event stacked up after some useful meetings between VPD and non-leaders and non-organizers of Critical Mass. I couldn’t find a single post-event report, suggesting the evening was quiet.

Final crop? This Mount Pleasant apple tree at 6th and Alberta, next to two homes marked for demolition, is loaded with fruit.

Just  blocks from the Olympic Village Canada Line station and the Olympic Village itself, an apple tree that may date from the early days of one of the city’s oldest neighbourhood is groaning with fruit — perhaps for the last time.

Development began in Mount Pleasant before the turn of the last century as logging ended and retail businesses sprang up at Kingsway and Main, where the waters of Brewery Creek were being turned into beer.

By the early 1900s, homes were rising closer to Cambie, where a bridge had been built across False Creek in 1891. In the 1950s, homes gave way to light industry. The area bounded by Broadway, Cambie and Main supports  thousands of jobs in the diverse businesses it takes to make the city run: laundries, garages, print shops, studios, metal shops and much more.

Somehow, two homes survived at 6th and Alberta. Now boarded up, they seem headed at last for demolition.

But the very old and beautiful apple tree in the front yard is defiantly offering up an abundant and perhaps final harvest. Is there a rescue organization for heritage trees?

The ever-popular statistical report on building permit activity from Vancouver’s Chief Building Official shows residential construction was down 60 percent in the first six months of 2009 compared to the same period in 2008.

Commercial activity was about the same and industrial construction actually increased somewhat.

Month-over-month numbers at the city’s building permits counter are slowly recovering from the deep declines of six months ago.

Of more significance, according to the CBO’s summary, is the shift in construction away from buildings to minor construction and renovation. This is reflected in the growing number of small project inquiries, including questions prompted by changes in bylaws covering basement renovations and laneway housing.

There was an excellent turnout of runners, pedestrians and cyclists from both sides of the Fraser today for Translink’s opening of the Canada Line Fraser River bike crossing.

Cyclists head south from Vancouver over the new Canada Line North Arm crossing for cyclists and pedestrians., which hangs below the rails on the north side of the new suspension bridge.

It’s a separated, dedicated bike and pedestrian bridge making a regional connection that will dramatically help pedestrians and cyclists get back and forth across the North Arm of the Fraser.

A happy participant at the launch: Vision councillor Raymond Louie, who worked with Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie in 2003, when both were Translink directors, to ensure inclusion of the bike link proposed by the Vancouver Area Cycling Coalition.