Jayne Clark
USA Today
VANCOUVER, B.C. — As the Olympic countdown clock outside the Vancouver Art Gallery struck 6 p.m. on Feb. 12, exactly one year before the kickoff of the 2010 Winter Games, air horns blasted from the distinctive white-sails rooftop of Canada Place convention center. A squadron of celebratory torch-bearing skiers hurtled down Grouse Mountain above the city. Diners in restaurants laid down their forks and applauded. And a few hundred street protesters torched an Olympic flag.
Naysayers notwithstanding — after all, any civic bash with a price tag in the billions is bound to attract some critics — Canada‘s stunning glass city is ready for its close-up as host of the next Olympics.
The sporting venues already are up and running. An expanded road dubbed the Sea to Sky Highway leading 72 miles to Whistler, the host mountain resort, is nearing completion. So is an expanded waterfront convention center. A rapid-transit extension due in November will whisk visitors from the airport to downtown in 25 minutes. And commemorative T-shirts, hockey pucks and stuffed Migas (the odd-looking 2010 mascot) are flying off the shelves at the city’s landmark Hudson‘s Bay Co.
But while Vancouver may be enjoying the spotlight that inevitably shines on host cities even before the Games begin, this town has long been a perennial on top-destinations and livable-city rosters. Readers of Condé Nast Traveler, for instance, awarded it Best City in the Americas for three years running. And no wonder. With its dense forest of gleaming skyscrapers wedged between the Coast Mountains and the Pacific, it is a spectacular sight. In winter, the heart of downtown is just 30 minutes from the ski slopes. In summer, sun seekers crowd its beaches and seaside promenades. And despite a rain-prone climate, it displays a perpetually sunny disposition.
Consider it the supermodel of North American cities. In fact, given Vancouver‘s already considerable natural assets, can 17 days of Olympic Games really enhance its image?
“Can it ever hurt?” responds Suzanne Walters, spokeswoman for Vancouver‘s Olympic organizing committee. “I think Canada is still somewhat a mystery to many. People know it’s cold and the people are nice. But we can show that it’s cosmopolitan and that it’s diverse.”
Vancouver‘s previous highest-profile event, Expo ’86, changed what up till then had been a somewhat provincial city. After that, an influx of international newcomers flocked here, spawning a multicultural boomtown.
“The world came and saw that Vancouver was beautiful, and it put us on the map,” says John Evans, a real estate developer and hotelier. “For Vancouver, the Olympics are the next big step. There’s no question they are going to be significant. They can’t not be significant.”
Of course, 22 million attended the six-month ’86 World’s Fair and a mere 350,000 spectators are anticipated during the relatively brief Olympics. Still, civic movers and shakers hope the Games will boost winter tourism in years to come.
In reality, however, most visitors, including thousands who embark on Alaska-bound cruises from Vancouver‘s port, visit in summer. What they find is a compact, walkable city of about 600,000 that blends urban sophistication with a freewheeling outdoors sensibility. Even brisk winter days find Vancouverites out in droves strolling and cycling along the seawall in Stanley Park, a forested waterfront oasis at the edge of downtown.
The city’s ethnic diversity is dizzying. A short stroll along Commercial Drive, an area east of downtown once known as Little Italy, now presents a global pastiche of restaurants serving tandoori chicken, Japanese sushi, Greek tapas and so on, along with homegrown coffee shops that hold their own against the ubiquitous corner Starbucks.
“Vancouver is really coming of age now. From all these groups, we’re creating our own identity,” says Mexico native Rossana Ascensio, a chef and tour guide with Edible British Columbia.
She is showing visitors around Granville Island‘s Public Market, where food stalls brimming with poblano chiles, fresh turmeric and Shanghai noodles also reflect the city’s cultural melting pot. The area is a former industrial zone rehabbed in the 1970s. Colorful water taxis ferry visitors on False Creek between downtown and Granville Island (really a sandbar). It retains the corrugated metal buildings of its gritty past, but has been re-imagined as a gathering spot with eateries, live theater and art galleries.
Nearby, the once down-and-out Yaletown neighborhood, Vancouver’s “little Soho,” has more recently undergone a transformation from warehouse district to hipsters’ enclave of trendy shops, restaurants and condos, also thanks, in part, to post-Expo ’86 development.
Even Gastown, the neighborhood where modern Vancouver took root in 1886, is gaining new momentum with one-of-a-kind design shops opening after decades of being primarily relegated to souvenir-seeking tourists posing for photos under its signature steam clock. Gastown gets its name from John “Gassy Jack” Deighton, a talkative Englishman and city father. It had fallen on hard times before preservationists rallied to save it in the 1970s. Similarly, activists have fought to save parts of Chinatown, North America‘s third largest.
“There was a time they were going to put a freeway through, and the people rose up and said, ‘No you won’t,’ ” says local historian Chuck Davis. But then, Vancouver has always had an activist streak, he adds, from the radical labor movements of the 1930s to the founding of environmental group Greenpeace in 1972.
Chinatown, one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, remains a bustling commercial hub, even though much of the huge influx of Chinese immigrants who arrived in the 1990s settled in suburban Richmond. But even this traditional neighborhood is gradually changing. Some condo construction, rehabs of old buildings and non-Chinese businesses are bringing new diversity. They include shops such as Funhauser Decor, where Peter Lisiecki stands amid rumpus-room-chic trappings and reflects on what the Olympics might mean for the city. Like some other Vancouverites, he has mixed feelings.
“We had the World’s Fair and it put Vancouver on the map, and certainly the Olympics are a great commercial,” he says. “But great as it is, there’s a lot of money being spent, and Vancouver has a lot of social problems that need to be fixed.”
Those problems are acutely visible a few blocks away on East Hastings Street, where drug addicts, the mentally ill and other walking wounded populate the sidewalks. Guides warn tourists against venturing there. The day after the one-year Olympics countdown, Canada‘s largest national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, published a front-page story dubbing it “Our Nation’s Slum.”
The Olympics won’t be a panacea for urban ills as grave as those, but it can be a unifying force. Down the street from Lisiecki at the design shop Peking Lounge, owner Michael Bennett has his own take on how the Games might play in Vancouver.
“This is a young city with a bunch of people from somewhere else. There’s been no defining moment, nothing to bring this city together,” he says. “Maybe the Olympics will do that. I mean, you can’t help but be inspired by something like this.”