Lions Gate

by D'Acres, Lilia

• ISBN13: 9780889224162
• ISBN10: 0889224161
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-03-01
• Publisher: Talonbooks Ltd

Summary

Arching over the entrance to Vancouver's harbour is a beautiful web of intricately suspended steel. It is at once a gateway, landmark, symbol and emblem of a Western city, poised at the edge of a continent gazing westward over the wide Pacific Ocean, to the East. Day and night, its taut steel strings sing the original hymn to progress, hope and riches first composed in the hearts and minds of its builders. Celebrated in Douglas Coupland's paean as a "bridge to heaven," the Lions Gate Bridge has become an icon of the city, not only to heritage conservationists, but to citizens of and visitors to Vancouver from around the globe. After decades of debate over a suitable replacement for this "outdated" structure, the bridge itself has triumphed--on the occasion of its 60th anniversary, the government of British Columbia committed itself to renewing this grand and daring gesture in steel, rather than replacing it. Like all great historic landmarks, the Lions Gate Bridge remains a source of powerful, sometimes illuminating, sometimes mysterious stories of the people and times which gave birth to them. In addition to celebrating this bridge and its grand design, Lions Gatesets out to reveal these stories for the first time: the colonial ambitions of the British Empire stretched to its westernmost margin; the unresolved violation of nationhood the building of the bridge on native land entailed; the backroom political power the railroad barons continued to hold in the Canadian government long after their railroad was completed; the origins of the newly private, global empire building of the ‘new' British peerage; and the strange phenomenon and circumstance of such a huge commercial enterprise being mounted in the midst of the "dirty thirties." Most mysterious of all is the figure of the man who both conceived and built this

Author Biography

Lilia D'Acres teaches literature and has a long history of commitment to the development of the literary arts in B.C. She also founded the George Woodcock Centre for the Arts and Intellectual Freedom Fund, currently housed at the new U.B.C. Library, where it was endowed in 1996. Donald Luxton is a founding Director of the Heritage Vancouver Society and the Victoria Heritage Foundation; Director of the Vancouver Heritage Conservation Foundation; and founding and current President of the Canadian Art Deco Society. His heritage consulting firm, Donald Luxton and Associates, has carried out numerous municipal planning projects, heritage inventories and the restoration of public buildings throughout B.C., Alberta and the Yukon.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. 11
First Narrows	p. 14
Taylor's Way	p. 22
The Bridge Game	p. 32
This Web of Steel	p. 64
Symbol of Empire	p. 126
The Royals Shrugged	p. 138
Renewal	p. 150
Acknowledgements	p. 168
References	p. 170
Illustrations	p. 173
Index	p. 174
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