During its 125-year history, Stanley Park has inspired poets and painters, essayists and designers, architects and photographers, musicians and even developers who lusted after the irreplaceable real estate for freeways, commercial ventures and even high-end housing.
For writer Malcolm Lowry, who lived on Burrard Inlet after completing his world-famous Mexican novel Under the Volcano, the park served as a literary analog for paradise holding fast against the encroaching and infernal city, a symbolic backdrop to his short story The Bravest Boat in which two lovers stroll by Lost Lagoon and which opens his posthumous Governor General’s Award-winning collection Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place.
For poet Pauline Johnson, it was a constant source of mythic renewal and communion with nature, a regenerative force that infused her verse. An image from her brooding poem of the same name attached itself to her Lost Lagoon and on her death in 1913 she was buried in the landscape she’d fixed forever in Vancouver’s pantheon of self-identifying landmarks.
Painter Emily Carr was attracted by the solitude and richness of the park’s natural palette. She submerged herself in what she called “the drown of undergrowth.” In 1909, while teaching art classes in Vancouver before leaving for France the following year to sharpen her skills, she produced her remarkable Winter Moonlight, an image from Stanley Park surprising in its simultaneous evocation of rainforest fecundity and intimidating austerity. It was an eerie foreshadowing of the later work that would lead her away from the domesticated European traditions she had studied and into the dishevelled landscape of implacable, archetypal forces that would transform her into one of Canada’s least appreciated but eventually most celebrated artists.
For modernist, social realist and later abstract painter Jack Shadbolt, who was born the same year that Emily Carr painted her winter scene in the park and who was strongly influenced — though not always to his delight — by her, it was the boom town bustle of promenading Vancouverites strolling the causeway on a summery day in 1946 and the whimsical bemusement of Bear Cage in 1947 that caught his eye. For E.J. Hughes it was the simplicity of autumnal park benches contrasted with the ornate figurehead of the old Empress of Japan in 1939.
Photographer Leonard Frank, whose magnificent photography documented the brawny, belligerent birth of Vancouver — and the emergence of the muscular province that provided its cradle — took a break from recording the logging industry to capture Lumbermen’s Arch in 1919. In another photo, SS Prince Rupert steams inbound past Prospect Point in 1923 — before there was either a Lions Gate Bridge or a causeway. Yet, like Emily Carr and Pauline Johnson, he returned for a more pensive, reflective portrait of the park wearing a winter mantle of snow and of Siwash Rock being buffeted by a brusque southeaster. Then he turned his lens back on the city itself and from Deadman’s Island preserved the skyline that had sprung up within his own lifetime.
For Burrard band Chief Dan George, it was a source of nostalgia for a lost Eden, the time before the ever-changing skyline that had been saved for posterity by Leonard Frank, a reminder, he said, that “I was born in an age that loved the things of nature and gave them beautiful names like Tes-wall-u-wit instead of dried-up names like Stanley Park,” the same world from before modernity that informed Pauline Johnson, Emily Carr and then Malcolm Lowry.
Whatever we call it, though, the inherent beauty of the place, the visionary acceptance by successive generations that the natural world also has an important role in the manufactured landscapes of industrial society, reminds the rest of us that some things deserve to be simply because they are and that their esthetic, the knowledge that no one lives by bread alone, enriches us in ways we sometimes feel but don’t necessarily understand or can even know and explain.
It’s been said that Stanley Park is a jewel in Vancouver’s crown of creation, a developer’s idea that became a poet’s ideal and an ideal that became a popular icon now embedded both in the city’s perception of itself and in the world’s tourist brochure perception of the city.
Cynics say we love the park in penitence for what the great city claimed in payment for its own creation.
Yet for most of us Stanley Park remains not a temple of regret but a sanctuary, a retreat where anyone, rich or poor, young or old, may seek respite from the hurly-burly of contemporary life in the Information Age.
In Stanley Park, the important language is not digital but elemental. It is the world of our origins speaking to us — the faint iodine taste of spindrift over the seawall on a day when the steel blue sea is flecked with silver; the scent of a sudden rain on the evergreens; the sound of wind in the canopy far overhead or the hiss of a rain squall across Lost Lagoon, sounds that cancel even the city’s pervasive white noise.
It’s the cry of gulls and children laughing; the undisciplined sighs of lovers and the disciplined shouts of cricketers; the rhythmic tread of runners following the ghosts of champions — Percy Williams and Harry Jerome — who trained on the park’s trails and who came to know in muscle and pulse what the painters and writers and First Nations elders knew from their sacred muses and what we all, even the simplest of us, know in our own hearts.
We love Stanley Park because it is us.