This letter was sent to the editor in response to the Norgate/Lower Capilano neighbourhood story, part of a 12-part neighbourhood series of the North Shore News.
As our nation continues to reflect upon Canada’s 148th birthday, and what it means to be a Canadian in a multicultural society, British Columbia’s North Shore News has begun a 12-part series of its North Shore neighbourhoods to shine a spotlight on a different profile every week.
The real challenge of such a series is to go beyond reporting a few mere facts and superficialities about each community, and instead arose within the memories and passions of newcomers and old timers something of the rich, diverse, tumultuous history that makes up the essence of the North Shore’s communities and the North Shore as one of Canada’s most unique regions in which to live.
In the end, it’s imperative that, as a people, we remember who we once were in the past, who we are today and who we’re fast becoming in the future. To then pose within every reader’s mind the big question, “What is the living essence or spirit of every community on the North Shore, and indeed Canada, and how is its identity intimately bound up with its name, the history of its people and seminal moments of its past and present?”
To accomplish such a momentous undertaking takes time, patience, a lot of leg work and a great deal of talking over back fences with the principles in each community who can fill in the empty blanks and spaces of that big question. No quick GPS scans or Wikipedia searches will ever do.
The series got off to a bit of a rocky start when the spotlight was shone upon the “Norgate/Lower Capilano neighbourhood” (“Norgate/Lower Capilano,” North Shore News, Sunday, June 21, 2015) as if they were somehow a “mishmash” of a single neighbourhood, rather than two entirely different communities, deserving of two separate and distinct spotlights in the series.
The spotlight that did focus solely on the Norgate community only briefly mentioned in passing a few businesses that exist along the distant industrial periphery of its residential borders that are hardly symbolic of Norgate’s essence and not even necessarily the most interesting or noteworthy.
For instance, there’s The Corner Cafe and its camp 1950’s decor on the Pemberton business corridor that has been used innumerable times as a setting for Canadian and international movies or TV sets; where once young student actors carrying guns were even accosted by unwitting local police who thought they were the real deal. Also left out was the world famous Tomahawk Barbecue restaurant with its rustic pioneer-Squamish Nation history decor and wealth of North Shore history.
This area of the North Shore has a pantheon of historical characters who once made Norgate and Lower Capilano communities the unique places that they are; like Chick Chamberlain who opened up the Tomahawk in 1926, some 89 years ago, as one of Canada’s first drive-in restaurants, frequented over the years by famous movie stars, international dignitaries, Squamish Nation elders and First Nation artists who once upon a time traded their art for meals, still proudly displayed ’round the Tomahawk’s galleried walls and ceiling.
Or Chick’s son Chuck who continues to run the restaurant that offers on its menu a host of delicious organic hamburgers, (named in honour of famous Squamish Nation leaders like old Chief Joe Capilano) or true-blue Canadian Lumberjack “Yukon” breakfasts and paper feathered Indian headdresses for young and old alike to wear during their meal and take away with them as a souvenir, that has made it a veritable Mecca pilgrimage place for tourists, locals and their guests to visit and experience a rare one-of-its-kind “Tomahawk Dine.”
Chick Chamberlain’s Tomahawk Restaurant, originally located on the corner of today’s Marine Drive and Philip Avenue, was a place where, long before the Lions Gate Bridge was ever built, was an isolated meeting place on a dirt track where lovers once came to meet and court under its huge Weeping Willow tree.
The day the Tomahawk was forced to move to its present-day location to make way for commercial development, that Willow Tree had such spiritual, what one might even call “sacred,” meaning to all the locals that when the developers sought to cut it down to make way for several additional parking spaces in the current parking lot where it once stood near today’s Norgate Centre-Tim Horton’s sign, a huge hue and cry arose to spare it.
Yet typical of developers, politicians and outsiders who seldom have any real emotional feel, spiritual connection or personal attachment to the life of whatever community they intend to invade and develop, that grand old Willow Tree, under which Chick Chamberlain had once buried his dog Cherokee, much beloved by all who ever visited the Tomahawk, was surreptitiously cut down, while everyone was asleep, at 5 a.m. one sleepy Sunday morning. Much like, in more recent years, when another much-beloved massive mature “elder” cedar tree, that once stood in front of the now long-gone Moustache Café on Marine Drive, also was similarly cut down despite another similar fruitless hue and cry.
Developers, politicians and other outsiders also seldom can grasp that this is where the spirit of a community dwells, and the deep psychic impact that such losses can have on a community’s sense of self identity and intimate essence that makes local people’s blood boil and their spirit’s rage. This writer has written a similar extensive community account (“When A Community or Nation’s Name Falls Victim To Identity Theft” linked at [email protected]) that documents how Lower Capilano’s own spirit name and rich history, in recent years, also has similarly become co-opted and fallen victim to potential identity theft by high-rise/high-density developers and politicians.
Yet so many other important anecdotes deserve the focus of this first spotlight on the North Shore’s communities, like: how pedestrian-friendly are Norgate’s neighbourhood streets that make them welcoming places for families to lazily perambulate on a sunny day; its Norgate Park used for years as an important field for holding major cricket matches, or where the surrounding Welch Park, Harbourside Shoreline, McKay Creek, Bowser Trail and Spirit Trail areas all are heavily used for bike riding, jogging, dog walking, meditative exercises and outings; Norgate once also widely known as a welcoming community in Western Canada for so many returning veterans from the Second World War to pick up their civilian lives where they left off and start life anew, or where a unique community school on the North Shore was first created for European, newcomer’s and First Nations students to study, play and socialize together, where 50 per cent of First Nation Squamish youth still attend; or even how it once was a place of such simple intangible pleasures as daily listening for the beckoning bell and whistle of the Royal Hudson as it entered and left the Norgate/Lower Capilano area each day, while friends and family rushed to line the tracks all along the way just to witness a rare piece of Canadiana history as its mighty steam engine huffed and puffed and chugged passed them.
So many one-time eccentric characters once gave such colour and distinction to this region of the North Shore like old man Wilkins and his “Green Snake Tea Garden” who had a long-standing feud with Lower Capilano community’s resident mystic Napoleon St. Pierre, who lived across from Wilkins on the other side of the old Marine Drive Road, and had his own “Dew Drop Inn Tea Garden” near present-day MacGowan Avenue and Marine Drive. Their world famous topiaries of giant twisting snake hedges: take-offs on the Squamish Nation’s folktale of The Great Serpent of Creation Times, while further down the Drive, towards Capilano Road, a Canadian Beaver-Globe of the World-Christian Cross topiary made up a significant part of the “gateway” to the North Shore and legend of “The Great Mystery of Capilano.”
Many newcomers to these shores come with a keen awareness of the importance of keeping fresh within memory the historical personalities, characters and events that once played an integral part in their ancient heritage as a people, but they too often lack any real awareness or knowledge of what all has come before them in this place.
With the ever-constant massive influx of new peoples to the North Shore, completely unaware of its First Nation and pioneering past, on this 148th birthday of Canada, the North Shore, no matter how recent its new waves of pioneering people may be, must set the same local example for those yet to come to ensure that the historical awareness of how all our unique communities first came to be, and the remembrance of who we are as a people, is duly preserved. For the truth is that the ghosts, spirits and phantoms of all those who’ve come before, still roam amongst us.
If not hallowed and preserved, the awareness of them all — now becoming ever more tenuous with each passing year, surge in population and massive, out-of-control growth and development — will continue to forever fade from memory, as quickly as if they all were delicate drops of morning mist, vapourizing in the face of a blazing hot sun.
Otherwise, where else will the rich interplay of multiculturalism ultimately ever meet and flourish upon Canada’s home turf?
Jerome Irwin
North Vancouver (community of Lower Capilano)
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