Queen Elizabeth Park Overlook, Vancouver BC, c. 1960s

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Queen Elizabeth Park Overlook, Vancouver BC, c. 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Queen Elizabeth Park Overlook, Vancouver BC, c. 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1958–1968

AA-2026-4F1FA0

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From the summit of Little Mountain — the old quarry Vancouver turned into Queen Elizabeth Park — a tourist or resident stood in the early 1960s and looked north across a city that was still mostly two-storey and optimistic, the North Shore mountains doing exactly what they always do behind a low ceiling of cloud. The spread of residential Vancouver below, broken only by the wide corridor of a park road and a small ornamental pond, was the city before glass towers made the view recursive. A small group of women walks a path in the middle distance with the unhurried tempo of people who believe a Sunday stroll is a complete activity in itself, which in 1962 it still was. Children crouch on the grass to the right, apparently examining something in the turf with the intensity their generation applied before screens provided a more efficient way to fill an afternoon. The whole scene is a document of a civic bargain Vancouver made with itself — that a worked-out basalt quarry in the middle of the city would become public lawn — and, looking at that unbroken residential carpet stretching to the mountains, it is clear nobody standing here yet imagined what the skyline directly behind the camera would eventually become.

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