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Nicholson Road is an ongoing photo project aimed at sharing and celebrating the different communities in Metro Vancouver. Each week Vancouver Is Awesome will be featuring an image from the previous week, shot in one of the many 'hoods around town in order to draw your attention a little bit outside of the hyper-focus that we usually have on the City of Vancouver. |
Can you believe it? Labour Day weekend, without the annual Labour Day Weekend rainstorm? Holy wow, Summer is Awesome!
I hope you're out enjoying yourselves somewhere fantastic. But if, for some reason, you're stuck at home or at the office, here's a sunny look at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Central Burnaby. The grounds were founded in 1936, and the Forest Lawn Funeral Home came along in 1965.
I find cemeteries make great destinations to spend some time alone and reflect: There's no traffic, no sports teams running around, no children screaming from nearby playgrounds, and the grounds are always well-maintained and full of history and hidden surprises. Of course a visit might mean a little more if you have someone specific to remember, but even if not, they're great places to explore.
Forest Lawn in particular is sort of neat, as it sits on the hill between Deer Lake and the TransCanada (near Burnaby Lake), so you get wonderful views looking up the slope towards Metrotown to the south, and to the north, a full view over Canada Way and out towards Brentwood. Those towers around Brentwood and along Lougheed Highway add plenty of interest, especially when viewed alongside headstones and memorials; it creates a neat, architectural illusion of scale, where it's hard to tell if a headstone is really a headstone, or if it's another tower in the background, and vice versa. I like it when I stumble across those little surprise moments, and I also like to share them. So if you're ever in Burnaby with a bit of time on your hands... :)
(You might have noticed the new map style at the top of this post. I'll be adding it to each post from now on to help you become familiar with the location and boundaries of each municipality, and the neighbourhoods within them!)
Archives of the Nicholson Road project can be found HERE.
