The Vancouver Park Board is rethinking the layout of Sunset Park. A master plan is in the works to improve and better connect its features and identify short and long-term park improvements to a site once associated with Bing Crosby.
Sunset Park is located at 404 East 51st Ave. It sits between East 51st to the north, East 53rd to the south, Main Street to the west and John Henderson elementary school to the east. It includes Sunset Community Centre, Sunset Ice Rink, Sunset Nursery and Park Board Operations, an off-leash dog area, a sports field and a playground.
Sunset Park was created in 1929 and the first community centre on the site opened in 1950 thanks to fundraising by the Sunset Community Association and help from crooner Crosby who performed in a benefit concert in 1948. The park board built a new community centre in 2006 at a different location on the west side of the park along Main Street.
“So we did that, but we didn’t address the changes that happened as a result. We need to assess how the park features work together,” explained landscape architect Tiina Mack, the Vancouver Park Board’s manager of park development.
The park board held an “ideas” event at the park last Canada Day to gather input and it’s since produced four concepts for the site, which were presented for feedback at an open house late last month attended by about 80 people. An online questionnaire can be filled out until Dec. 15.
Responses collected at the ideas event included an interest in amenities such as a fitness circuit, an improved off-leash dog area, ball courts, a water-play area, better overall play features and event spaces and more shade since it gets very hot on the south side of the park beside the community centre. Others were interested in looking at how the public interacts with the Sunset Nursery and Park Board Operations.
Ideas supported at the open house included community gardens, bike facilities, upgrading the sports field and activity spaces for youth.
“Part of our greenest city action plan aspirations is to plant 150,000 trees by 2020. We have a great opportunity, because it’s a large park, to plan a small forest — to plant trees,” Mack said, adding, “One of the lovely ideas here is there’s a lost stream that used to run through this site. It would be great if we could recognize that on the land in the future so people have some more knowledge, as they’re walking through the neighbourhood, about lost streams of Vancouver.”
Jean Sorensen, who’s lived in the neighbourhood for about 20 years, told the Courier she’d be OK with the existing site plan, but since the park board removed the old community centre, something probably needs to be done with the site. Sorensen attended the open house and was mostly pleased with what she saw.
“My priorities are to keep the Vancouver city gardens there and if possible open them more to the public so we can see things grown, have school children tour them, and provide more insight into how plants and trees help our environment,” she wrote in an email. “Also, I like the [existing] design which has the slopes around the centre as it provides a place for sledding in winter and a place to sit on a bank and watch events such as those staged on Canada Day. The south slope was heavily a garden area at one time with orchards, farms, and dairy farms. We should keep that historical legacy intact.”
Sorensen also likes the idea of a water park for children and planting trees to add shade, but she’s concerned about the location of a skate park if it’s added to the park, and she's heard others would like to see another washroom added so that park users don’t have to go to the community centre to use the facilities.
A budget for improvements to Sunset Park hasn’t been finalized.
“We have to work through all this community engagement to see what people want to have happen there — to determine the priorities and we’ll be reporting back to the park board in the springtime,” Mack said.
Mack noted that the park board has identified Sunset Park as a priority for park renewal and it has $2 million over four years for its park renewal budget.
“Sunset Park will receive some of that funding, but we haven’t confirmed the final amount,” she said. “[The master plan] would be a 10-to-15 year long-term vision, so in the first years, you wouldn’t see the whole build-out and the $2 million budget we have presently shown in the four-year capital plan is meant to address two or three locations. So we have to share. We have to look at each site and look at the priorities for each site to determine what level of funding would happen.”
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