‘The City of Vancouver will never see this fall to ruin,’ a former park board chair said. But will it?
Jen St. Denis The Tyee
Jen St. Denis is a reporter with The Tyee covering civic issues. Find her on X @JenStDen.
On Aug. 16, 1931 — sandwiched between an article about the Soviets ending food rations and the British prime minister’s difficulties with “the financial crisis” — a story in the Vancouver Sunday Province described the triumphant opening of Kitsilano Pool, “America’s largest swimming pool.”
According to the report, 5,000 people showed up. The Kitsilano Junior High School Band played the national anthem (“God Save the King,” in those days). The Union Jack was unfurled. And swimmers swam, racing against each other in water drawn in from the ocean that was — the newspaper promised — as much as 10 degrees warmer than the chilly waters of the Pacific.
For 93 years, Kitsilano Pool has been a beloved summer refuge for people all over Vancouver. Costing just under $8 to get in, the pool, with its 137-metre lanes and shallow area for leisurely soaks, provides stunning vistas of English Bay, the city skyline and the North Shore mountains.
But now its future is in jeopardy. Climate change has led to more intense winter storms, and the huge pool is cracked. The city has spent $3 million to do short-term fixes and has another $2 million worth of repair work planned, which will include a feasibility study on replacing the pool.
With this beloved piece of Vancouver summer in peril, we’re taking a look back at the pool with an eye to what its future holds.
‘Smelts could be raked up Kitsilano Beach with a stick’
We’re going to start our story not with the pool, but with Kitsilano Beach, because the pool and the beach are closely connected.
Kitsilano Pool sits on the west side of Kitsilano Beach. According to the Squamish Atlas, the Squamish name for the beach is Sḵw’áyus. Another name given for the same place, X̱epx̱páy̓em, means “having red cedar.”
The book Conversations with Khahtsahlano, first published in 1955, records two decades of conversations between Sḵwx̱uwú7mesh Chief X̱ats’alanexw, also known as Chief August Jack Khahtsahlano, and Vancouver’s first archivist, Maj. J.S. Matthews. Matthews included a 1932 interview with a Squamish man named Chil-lah-minst, or Jim Franks, who told him about his grandfather making canoes at a place Matthews records as Skwayoos.
Chil-lah-minst tells Matthews that loggers cut down fir trees but left the red cedar, and the logging trails made it easier to get cedar logs down to the beach to make canoes.
The beach is also pictured in an 1861 painting by an English navy lieutenant; this, Matthews believed, was the “earliest known portrayal” of Vancouver.
Sḵw’áyus is part of the Squamish Nation’s traditional territory, which spans from Point Grey to the west, Point Roberts to the south and the Elaho River headwaters in the north. Some of this territory overlaps with Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam lands.
In the 1870s, the federal government created Reserve No. 6, which included the Squamish village Sen̓áḵw, located where Vanier Park and the foot of the Burrard Bridge are today. Sḵw’áyus was located just outside the border of the reserve.
False Creek, English Bay and the shoreline were all important sites for hunting and fishing for the Squamish. People who lived in Vancouver at the turn of the 20th century recalled how plentiful wildlife was in False Creek before industrial uses like sawmills, slaughterhouses and factories took over the area.
“In the early years of the 20th century salmon still swam up the creek as far as Cedar and Third Ave., trout were caught where Henry Hudson’s school now stands, muskrats were in the swamp around Laburnum Street, and smelts could be raked up Kitsilano Beach with a stick,” Matthews writes.
Greer’s Beach
The area now known as Kitsilano Beach initially had a different colonial name. It was first known as Greer’s Beach after Sam Greer, a man who claimed he’d bought land near the beach from four Indigenous men in 1884 for $200.
But the Canadian Pacific Railway had been given the land the Greer farm occupied as part of a 6,000-acre land grant that ensured the terminus of the railway would be located at Vancouver, not Port Moody.
Greer’s claim ended dramatically: in 1891, he was jailed for shooting a sheriff who attempted to evict him.
Canadian Pacific considered putting a hotel near the beach, but instead sold off the land around the area for new houses for the growing city of Vancouver. For both the beach and the neighbourhood, CP chose the name Kitsilano, after the well-known chief from Sen̓áḵw.
At the same time CP was selling real estate next to the beach, the City of Vancouver was attempting to take Reserve No. 6 from the Squamish to make room for the growing city.
By 1911, villagers had been forcibly removed by the provincial government. Over the following years, the reserve land was carved up bit by bit.
After a decades-long court case that started in the 1970s, the Squamish Nation got back just 10.48 acres out of the total original 80 acres of reserve land. Today, the nation is building a new housing development called Sen̓áḵw on the returned land near the Burrard Bridge.
This beach needs a pool
By the beginning of the 20th century, with a new streetcar line out to the growing neighbourhood of Kitsilano, the beach had become a popular spot in the summer. Plans were floated to build a vaudeville theatre, a bandstand, a baseball diamond and a playground for children. But in 1927, newspapers started to talk about an ambitious idea: building a 700-foot-long enclosed pool at one end of the beach.
In a full-page spread in the Aug. 28, 1927, edition of the Vancouver Sunday Province, the paper laid out the rationale for the plan: the western edge of the beach was “useless” for swimming and sunbathing, an enclosed pool would be safer for children and weaker swimmers, the temperature of the water would be warmer, and swimming events could go ahead in any tide condition.
The pool was finally completed in 1931 at a cost of $50,000, or just under $1 million in today’s dollars. “Relief labour” was used — that is, men unemployed because of the Depression who were given work building government projects. Outdoor pools were also constructed at New Brighton and Second Beach around the same time.
The outer wall of the pool was made of seven-foot-thick concrete walls able to withstand “pressure of the trapped water and the tide flow,” according to a 1931 Vancouver Sun story. The water that filled the pool was drawn straight from the ocean, and the water would be switched out a few times a week. Admission to the pool was free.
In 2017, Glenn Schultz, then the director of parks and beaches for the Vancouver Park Board, told CBC that filling the pool directly from the ocean led to the occasional mud shark or octopus getting into the pool, along with a lot of seaweed.
The original pool also had a sandy bottom, he said, although a ledge was built to make a portion of the pool shallow enough for young children.
In the 1960s, the sandy bottom — which made the water quite murky — was replaced by a concrete floor.
Throughout the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, Kitsilano Pool provided summer fun with the occasional over-the-top event. In 1936, Hawaiian divers showed off their skills at an event in the pool, according to a column published in the Vancouver Sun in 1978. In 1950, a “60-foot tubular ski jump” was constructed at the pool as part of an event for tourism promotion.
“Exhibition ski jumping took place in the evening and was concluded by flaming torches being carried by skiers as they leapt over the jump. Flaming straw was placed at the top of the landing hill and jumpers leaped through the flames,” reads an article in the Province.
Don’t worry — no one was hurt. “Canadian Ski Patrol was on hand at all times to control the crowd and attend to the safety of the jumpers,” the article concludes.
Unfortunately, the water was gross
But by the mid-1970s, there was a problem. Even though some chlorine was being mixed into the ocean water that filled the pool, the water didn’t meet new health regulations adopted by the province.
The problem was even worse for New Brighton Pool, located on Burrard Inlet, which used the same fill-and-draw design as Kitsilano Pool. In 1971, both pools were denied the health permits they needed to open.
Vancouver city councillors were outraged that new provincial regulations would force them to spend millions to update all three fill-and-draw pools. (A fourth pool, at Lumbermen’s Arch in Stanley Park, ended up being removed and turned into a water park.)
“I think we are getting a snow job,” a 1977 Vancouver Sun article quotes city Coun. Harry Rankin saying. “A set of standards are being imposed on us which is completely unreal.” Rankin argued that the water quality in Kitsilano Pool was better in the 1970s than when it first opened because raw sewage was no longer being dumped into the ocean near the pool.
At a meeting of outraged residents in 1976, the city’s chief medical health officer said the pool water had been found to have coliform counts 12 times higher than what was considered safe.
City councillors tried as much as possible to reduce costs, and there was a proposal to split the pool up into three separate pools to make it easier to maintain.
But residents made it clear that they wanted to keep the same size and shape of the pool.
So, in 1979, Kitsilano Pool reopened to the public as an enclosed pool that was no longer directly connected to the ocean, although the pool was still filled with a mix of potable water and filtered ocean water.
The total cost of the new pool was $1.89 million ($7.9 million in today’s dollars), with $750,000 provided by the federal government. The city’s outdoor pools, previously free, now came with a price tag for entry: 75 cents, or $2.75 in today’s dollars, for an adult to swim at Kitsilano Pool.
In a 1978 column in the Vancouver Sun, former Vancouver resident Dorothy Wardrop lamented that the new pool was heated (an unnecessary luxury, she argued) and shared her memories of swimming in the pool after it opened in 1931.
“We rarely missed a day hiking up and down the eight blocks to swim in the pool from May to September. Sometimes we would go twice a day. Mondays and Thursdays we would swim in the ocean, as they were the days when the pool was emptied and cleaned.
“Sometimes we would go for a swim early in the morning. How delightful that was! Other times we would go for a late evening swim under the moon and stars.”
Wardrop also remembered the natural landscape in place before the pool was built: “bullrushes and salt grass... where the sand met the sea.”
‘The City of Vancouver will never see this fall to ruin’
In 2018, the pool was renovated for $3.3 million to stop water leaking through the joints of the aging concrete base. The refurbishment also allowed for sea water to be drawn into the pool throughout the swimming season, eliminating the need to use tap water.
But Wardrop’s description of the natural landscape the pool replaced highlights a problem the city is going to continue to struggle with: the seawall is beloved by residents and tourists, but it disrupts the natural state of the shoreline. Human-made infrastructure located close to the ocean is going to continue to be vulnerable to climate change as sea levels rise and winter storms become more intense.
Second Beach Pool is also bordered by the seawall, making it vulnerable to the same threat.
In Kitsilano Beach Park, the seawall wraps around the 137-metre-long pool. The ocean, the seawall and the water table are balanced to keep the pool intact. The pool stays filled with water in the winter to ensure pressure from the water table wouldn’t crush it if left empty.
In January 2022, a winter storm caused major damage to the seawall around Stanley Park and to Kitsilano Pool. A high tide and a storm pushed water up against the seawall, moving blocks of stone and concrete around like Lego blocks and tearing out chunks of asphalt.
“The water went right over the seawall and into the pool, and these winds were sustained for about... six hours,” Dave Hutch, then director of parks planning and development with the Vancouver Park Board, previously told The Tyee.
While Second Beach Pool is slightly higher than Kitsilano Pool, it’s also vulnerable to storm damage in the future.
“Things like the pool and the seawall, right along the edge of the water — they really weren’t designed for this kind of extreme weather,” Hutch said. “They were designed at a time when sea levels were lower, and storm surges weren’t as great.”
During the annual spring cleanup of the pool after the January 2022 storm, park board staff discovered cracks in the bottom of the pool, and shifts in the huge concrete slabs that make up the pool floor. While the pool was repaired enough to open in August 2022 and for the full 2023 season, it was still leaking an enormous amount of water — 30,000 litres per hour.
This year, the pool was supposed to be closed all summer. But reopening it was a priority for Mayor Ken Sim. After repair work, Kits Pool was again open to swimmers as of last week.
The broken pool has become a political issue. Some park board commissioners have blamed the city for a pattern of deferred maintenance of park facilities. Sim — who has promised to get rid of the elected park board — has been keen to take credit for opening the pool, crediting advice from a mining company CEO who provided pro bono engineering expertise. Meanwhile, the long-term future of the pool is up in the air: park board staff have said the pool is now at the end of its life.
In 2018, former park board chair Stuart Mackinnon said the pool was “an icon and a gem, and the City of Vancouver will never see this fall to ruin.
“It’s something that has to be maintained, like Stanley Park,” he added. “Kits Pool is one of the images people think about when they think about Vancouver.”
For the original article with photographs, go here
