Jimmy Cunningham and the Stanley Park Seawall is an excerpt from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the city’s hidden history
The James Cunningham Seawall Race started in 1971–the year the last stone was laid on the seawall It takes place every October and attracts more than 1,200 people.
Jimmy Cunningham spent 32 years of his life heaving granite blocks weighing hundreds of pounds and built over half of the 9.5 kilometre wall. The little Scotsman (he stood five foot four – 1.6 metres) tall immigrated to Vancouver in 1910 and became master stonemason for the Parks Board in 1931. From 1921 until he retired in 1955, Cunningham, his wife Elizabeth and their three daughters lived at 4446 Quebec Street, in Vancouver, a tree-lined street near Nat Bailey Stadium. Surprisingly (or maybe not considering his occupation) instead of a stone fence, there’s a well-kept hedge.
Cunningham’s granddaughter Julia says her grandfather would talk to her in Gaelic. She remembers a big potbellied stove in the kitchen and having to boil water for the upstairs bath. During her nursing training, she would meet Jimmy at the seawall and remembers his gnarled, swollen hands. “His right hand was really quite swollen and almost deformed because of all the cutting,” she says. “He never stopped working on the wall. They lowered him down on the rope at low tide. He chose the rock to be cut and then cut the rock down on the beach. He did all the work himself. And he was still doing that into his 80’s.”
Stuart Lefeaux, a civil engineer who retired n 1978, masterminded much of the layout of the wall. He says most of the granite blocks came from the beach, the city streets, and a stone quarry on Nelson Island, but a few of them are the abandoned bases of headstones from Mountain View Cemetery.
“Wherever we could get stone, especially granite, we would send out our trucks and machinery and pick them up,” he says.
Long after Cunningham hung up his trowel, he’d head down to supervise the crew building the seawall. He died in 1963 at 85 and never saw it completed. Story has it that Jimmy and Elizabeth have their ashes buried near the rock at Siwash Rock.
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