Hastings Sunrise:
At just shy of three acres, Burrard View is not a big park. It runs between North Slocan, North Penticton, Yale and Wall Street. The park slopes down to the water and is shaped like half a house.
The building on the west side of the park has been the Cottage Hospice since 1999. Built in 1924 as the “Babies Cottage” for kids under six, the site was likely chosen because of the nearby Wall Street Orphanage. That building came to live in the park in 1906.
Orphanage:
If you wander through the middle of the park, you’ll find yourself on a grassed-over brick terrace where you can sit and stare at Burrard Inlet and the North Shore mountains. You might even hear the ghosts. This was the foundation of the notorious Juvenile Detention Hall built in 1930 on the site of the Wall Street Orphanage.
According to Vancouver Heritage Foundation, Wall Street Orphanage had about 200 kids crammed in together and was closed after it was condemned as a fire risk in a 1927 child welfare report.
Juvie:
After the kids were shipped off to foster homes, the building was torn down. The city hired architect Arthur Julius Bird to design the new Vancouver Juvenile Detention Home for “incorrigible” teens. Incorrigibility included drunkenness, runaways and just bad behaviour.
The Last Gang:
Aaron Chapman writes in The Last Gang in Town that by the 1940s, Juvie Hall was notorious for its overcrowded cells. As late as the mid-1970s children were still being sent there and “Juvie would be where many future gang members first met,” says Aaron.
Vancouver’s first family court was also in Burrard View Park, between Juvie Hall and what is now Cottage Hospice. Justice Thomas Gove told Aaron that as a young lawyer he spent a lot of time there and that youth facing charges would be taken through a tunnel that connected the cells of the JDH to the courthouse.
Gove told Aaron: “One day I was there for a case, and a kid ran, just bolted for the front door, and one of the guards chased and tackled him outside in the parking lot. The kid had got a little bloodied up getting tackled and wanted to go to the hospital, but the guards just dusted him off, told him he was fine, and marched him back into the courthouse” from The Last Gang in Town.
The building incarcerated those under 18 behind a high industrial wire fence. It was demolished in 1976.
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11 comments on “Burrard View Park”
Hello Eve, thanks for the mention of The Last Gang in Town in your blog post here on the old Juvenile Detention Hall.
Hi Aaron! L0L I keep running into you online! I was looking on Street View at that pool that used to be on Burrard Inlet, and I thought I would check out Juvie too, bc I was in there circa 1968ish. I went thru that tunnel to Family Court from Juvie, where I was ‘assigned’ to Children’s Aid Society. Mr. Mills was a Newfie guard at Juvie and a real character! He was a funny guy! I was happy to get out of an abusive home situation with my drunken father back then! I went to Alma House, and stayed there a few weeks(maybe longer) IIRC, then was assigned to a Group Home at 54th/Nanaimo st. area where I lived for 3 years until I was 18.
Interesting piece Eve.
Thank you once again for an entertaining Saturday morning.
Correction regarding the remaining foundation is needed. The foundation that still remains was the orphanage and never was part of Juvie. We lived across the street at 680 N. Slocan. We played on and around the foundation from 1955 and would climb the trees surrounding Juvie looking over the fence. Our house and the 2 to the south on Slocan we were told, had been the school rooms of the orphanage, moved over after the orphanage was closed. We lived there until the 70s. One of the houses remains to this day as it was back then.
Contact me if you like. I do have a photo of our house to share
Thanks so much for all this additional information. I’ve sent you an email.
In your photo of the orphanage, which is if high quality by the way, on the right edge of the photo, in behind the trees you can see the Babies’ Cottage. On the left, at the very edge and at ground level you can see another building with windows. I think that is one of the school rooms that were moved across the street to the location of 680 N. Slocan, the house I grew up in. The house is still there along with one other that was identical to ours, right next door. Last time I was there, it was still the way it looked back in the 50s
Eve, thank you so much for this. I have been racking my brains and google trying to find any info on the old Vancouver (Provincial) Family Court (Yale Street, we called it) and when did it close and move to Robson Square. Like Judge Gove, I certainly made appearances there from 1991 onward but well before 1997 (when I left Vancouver), Yale Street had closed and Family Court was in Robson Square. I am pretty certain the building called the Babies Cottage in the 1934 image above is what became the Family Court – a pic from the Vancouver Archives is here: https://searcharchives.vancouver.ca/2625-yale-street-3
So I guess it’s now the Cottage Hospice?
Are you able to enlighten me as to when Family Court left Yale Street? and I assume the building became the hospice not long after?
Thank you for your wonderful blog!
i was in there in 68 spent time in solitary confinement for two weeks at the age of 15 if you can imagine they still do it to kids even after all these years. I turned to drugs to help deal with the treatment and the trauma i that was associated with it. So you think after almost 50 years things haven’t changed. I think the powers at be should spend a few days in what they now call a chill out room instead of solitary confinement.
Hello Eve, Do you know if there are any records of the children who lived at the Wall Street Orphanage and/or Baby Cottage. My great aunt’s children were left there (not sure which one or exact dates) after she died in childbirth. Her husband (father of the children) left them there–not sure of the circumstances. These children were never mentioned by my family. I learned about them much later in life after being contacted by one of their relatives. I would love to find some records. Thanks for your wonderful work.
Hi Adrienne: This is a sad story! I haven’t done any research where I’ve needed to look at records so I can’t help you. But my first stop would be Vancouver Archives and if they don’t have them give BC Archives a try.