place names among the ghost trees

Blim gallery offered a history tour of Mount Pleasant this past week. Bruce Macdonald, unofficial regional authority, guided us through his passion - the former beaver pond, swamps, and meandering flow of Brewery Creek as is was before being paved over along the Main Street and Broadway corridor. MacDonald's main beef is that people do not know where they are in our fair city. Sure there are distinct neighbourhoods: Yaletown, Sunrise, Burnaby Heights and so on, but others tend to elongate on larger thoroughfares and get lost without a distinct tag. How do you peg smaller commercial sections of Fraser Street or Victoria Drive, or South Main Street? He has approached city hall with a naming scheme but they are luke warm to his idea of a master map defining each micro neighbourhood in Vancouver with a historically appropriate label.
MacDonald himself started his tour with the fact that only 12,000 years ago there was a kilometer of glacial ice on top of Vancouver. After a rapid warming trend the trees took hold and grew with the same intensity as our rapidly changing urban landscape. Where does the desire to historically name and preserve begin. Does is start with the colonial entrepreneur - the brewery owner, the logging baron, or should it start with the glacial ice? Or indeed the beaver pond. I nominate the beaver, on whose peaty, swampy soil sits this magnificent example of Italo-Canadian Vancouver special sub tropical kitsch. Mount Pleasant was home to some of the largest trees growing in Canada. If only the city planners would allow height restrictions based on former tree heights, then our housing crisis would be solved.