Editorially speaking...
Personal tastes, I shouldn’t have to explain, vary. What’s fine with some, even most people, might be anathemic to another.
I’m reminded of this and my as-usual-minority viewpoint, by an article in this week’s Times Colonist to the effect that Saanich Council “backs vision for Uptown-Douglas area”.
I was born in Saanich, spent my childhood in the Swan Lake area, my early adulthood in the adjoining Lakehill district. In the 1950s I and my friends had all of the south shore of the lake and what was called, in winter, the Overflow, and the CNR tracks as a playground. (Today, it’s a nature reserve—so far so good.)
It was, I’ve come to believe, an ideal playground in that halcyonic age when parents turned you out on a Saturday and Sunday morning and you weren’t expected home until dinner. (And you were safe unless you got into some self-destructive mischief.)
Some Sundays, we scrounged for beer and (mostly) pop bottles (no cans in those days) discarded in the open ditches that bordered most Saanich roads as far as the Gorge, a long walk for youngsters, but we were physically fit from these activities and sports.
What, today, is called Uptown is your typically massive shopping centre with multi-storey buildings, it’s brightly illuminated 24/7, and the traffic and noise never cease. All this, just north of the Saanich/Boleskine Roads/Douglas Street intersection.
It’s nothing—nothing—like it was when this quiet neighbourhood was known as Parkdale.
We walked to school, in my case from Brett Avenue to Tolmie School, just across the railway tracks (the same ones that passed my home, one house removed), immediately west of Douglas. Older homes, one of them my grandfather’s converted shoe repair shop, mature maples, a gas station, two stores and a commercial greenhouse where Suburban Motors is today, that was it.
Compare that to the ‘concrete jungle’ of today’s Uptown.
From cow pasture to this. — https://shopuptown.ca/development/
The core of Uptown was a cow pasture; where the field met the CNR right-of-way were the Saanich Municipal and Fire halls, with the old Interurban Railway grade for a driveway linking Saanich Road, but no more than that. Directly across the tracks from them was another Chinese-owned commercial green house.
The only vestige of any of them is the CNR grade, no longer a railway but the phenomenally popular Galloping Goose Trail.
All this began to change when Douglas Street, the northern entrance to Victoria, was upgraded to highway status and scores of homes were expropriated then demolished, along with their established gardens, landscaping, orchards and mature trees. Even as a kid, long before I developed an environmental conscience, I found this somewhat depressing.
At the time, however, it offered great opportunities for poking through these doomed houses and outbuildings, looking for left-behind treasures. One in particular sticks in my mind. Although it didn’t really register at the time, I belatedly drew the conclusion that the occupant had been a landscape engineer. All his plans, rolls and rolls and rolls of them, were left in what had been his detached office or studio.
They must have been obsolete and of no value as he’d abandoned them, but, even as we had fun unravelling them and throwing them around like giant rolls of toilet paper, I had the gnawing suspicion that these blueprints represented an incredible amount of work and talent for the unknown landscaper.
I’ve wished from time to time that I had been mature enough to really look at them; who knows what possible historical value they may have had?
So it was in the good old days. Now it’s wall-to-wall development with only red-bricked Tolmie Elementary, ca 1914, surviving as an iconic school board office. I imagine its adjoining sports fields have been “in-filled” by now.
Which reminds me that Ellison’s Grainery, immediately behind the school and beside the CNR tracks, the classical grainery elevator that you see on the Prairies, is long gone, too. I remember it well, with its smells and gunny sacks and bins of wheat, oats, chicken scratch and the like. (I had chickens which explains my fascination with that part of the grainery rather than the livestock feeds.)
I could go on about the wonderful steam engines of that time (the CNR was late to dieselize). But this is supposed to be about 383-acre (!) Uptown’s latest upgrade to become, upon completion, the geographic centre of the Capital Region District (in the words of Saanich Mayor Fred Haynes) with 4400 residents and 10,000 workers. More high-rises, more lights, more noise, more traffic.
If my questioning how we measure ‘progress’ makes me a dinosaur, so be it, guilty as charged.
Who was it who said, you can’t go home again? Because of my memories, wonderful memories to me, of how it used to be, I only go to Victoria if absolutely necessary. As early as 1972, ‘my’ Saanich was under assault by the builders of subdivisions. Then came the Town & Country Shopping Centre, forerunner to Uptown, and it was all downhill (pun intended) from that time on.
I and my parents bought a rural acreage in Cobble Hill in 1972 and moved to God’s Country two years later. I’ve never regretted it.
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I’m sorry to report that Steve Fonyo died this week, aged 56. Many will choose to remember the one-legged runner who ‘completed’ Terry Fox’s aborted marathon run across Canada and raised $14 for cancer research for his subsequent struggles with booze, drugs and the law that cost him his Order of Canada.
I choose to remember the young man who limped 7924 kilometres over 14 months to help fellow cancer victims as a hero of the first order. How many of those who judge him by his human frailties could—or would—do what he did, even in their dreams? Could any of us live up to the legacy of Terry Fox?
I think the government should restore the Order of Canada that Steve Fonyo earned.
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