The Push For A Park on PNE Site
     by Elizabeth Godley

When Helen Godwin was a young girl, she played golf on greens near Hastings and Renfrew, where the Pacific National Exhibition is now.

"It wasn't a long course, only nine holes, but they has a few of the holes that were quite long," remembers Godwin, 81, who's lived in Vancouver Heights, the neighborhood just west of the PNE, most of her life. She also recalls Sunday strolls in Hastings Park, to visit the aquarium and a small zoo and enjoy the flower beds.

"We can't recover the old days," Godwin says, "but it will be nice if they'd make it a little less commercial."

Others living near the PNE ground echo her words. At two public meetings last month, about 300 residents objected to a plan to turn the PNE site into a "festival park" with either a five-furlong six-furlong or mile-long race track.

The provincial government wants to expand the racetrack at its present site, although Mayer Gordon Campbell is opposed. Solicitor-General Angus Ree has said the city's concerns about park space for the surrounding neighborhood could be met by allowing public access to the track's infield and by building recreation facilities there.

In a recent telephone interview, Campbell said he knows many in the neighborhood don't want a one-mile track, but argued that those in favor may not have been heard from. So a third public meeting on the issue will be held June 15 at 7 pm at Templeton Secondary School, 272 Templeton.

The public meetings allow him to hear "about a whole series of options" from local residents and PNE workers. Campbell says "We are looking for a concept that the community can embrace and that council agrees to.

Patricia Coutts, an Oxford Street homeowner for 11 years and president of the 450-member hastings Park Restoration Society, formed two years ago, says the PNE is not the problem. "the issue is the racetrack," she says.

Coutts' group would tolerate a smaller, more agriculture-oriented PNED in tens in Hastings Park for 127 days each August, in much the way that west-side Vancouverites allow the Children's Festival and the Folk Festival temporary quarters at Jericho Park, she says.

"We can live with that, if we have the park returned as park-land," says Coutts, who teaches high school in Burnaby. "But if city council is going to force a racetrack on us, they we're going to lose the majority of the land."

"We want out park back," says Marion Olivieri, who has lived for 35 years in the 3000-block East Georgia, and who is president of the Hastings Community Association.

"What happens on the grounds over there has a great impact on the community centre, as well as the community," she says.

Olivieri already is troubled by traffic near her home. Since resident-only permit parking is in force only during the PNE, race-track visitors and others roam up and down nearby residential streets, anxious to find free parking spots.

Coutts and Olivieri believe the city has reneged on a deal made 100 years ago. According to documents unearthed by Guy Faint, another area resident, 160 acres of land were proclaimed park in 1889, "for the recreation and enjoyment of the public." Called Hastings Park, the land was intended as the east side's answer to Stanley Park.

But in 1910, the first exhibition was held in the park, according t Daniel Wood in The Vancouver Book, "By 1946, the success of the fair led to the renaming of the 200-acre park, Exhibition Park," Wood writes.
The PNE's lease expires in 1994. "This is a chance of a life-time to get our park back," Olivieri says.

Residents' proposals for the future park include a rose garden, a public ice rink in a refurbished Agrodome, and one or two of the existing buildings renovated for use by community groups, as well as a children's water park, bike trails and paths for walking.

She questions Ald. George Puil's suggestion that a cite-wide plebiscite should determine the land's fate. "Was there ever a plebiscite on Jericho Park? Was there ever a plebiscite on the University Endowment Lands?"

Picture to be added