STANLEY PARK NOTEBOOK
/THE STANLEY PARK POLAR BEAR PIT
Past, Present, and Future
By Nate Lewis
(click images to enlarge)
Dormant for nearly three decades, the abandoned polar bear pit in Stanley Park sits a stone’s throw to the south of the Vancouver Aquarium. Centrally located amidst the park’s numerous attractions, the area is a strange post-apocalyptic backwater that looks more likely to appear in a scene from The Last of Us than an area befitting the “crown jewel” of Vancouver parks.
The crowds that used to line these railings left the scene long ago (Tony Osborn photo)
The pit, with a central concrete plinth featuring a diving platform and pool, would become the main attraction of the old Stanley Park Zoo in the 1960s. But the zoo had been operating for some 75 years before polar bears were introduced to the balmy west coast.
The park’s first superintendent, Henry Avison, is credited with starting the zoo in 1888, the same year the peninsula was declared a park. As the story goes, Avison captured a baby bear in the woods and chained it to a stump. The zoo grew as more animals were trapped or rescued and it became an attraction for locals and tourists.
The animals generally lived in meagre, cramped enclosures, and by the mid-1940s “a growing constituency of animal advocates and park-goers became increasingly vocal about the conditions of the animals in the Stanley Park zoo,” according to historian Sean Kheraj.
“The general public opinion was that either the zoo had to be abolished or it had to be improved,” Kheraj writes.
Expansions and renovations did take place in the 1950s and the polar bear pit that now stands abandoned was completed between 1961 and 1962.
The pit was populated by four polar bears from Nunavut, taken from an island in northern Hudson’s Bay. A plaque, which remains at the site, tells visitors that the polar bears were gifted to the Stanley Park Zoo by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1962. They were called Nootka, Jubille II, Princess Rupert, and Prince Rupert, allegedly named by Vancouver children. Another polar bear, Tuk, was also added to the exhibit.
Thousands of visitors flocked to the new polar bear exhibit in the 1960s. (George Weinhaupl photo, 1965)
By the 1990s, Kheraj writes, the sorry condition of the zoo’s animals once again attracted negative public attention. The park board of the day proposed to modernize the zoo facilities again but several Vancouverites voiced their opposition to the plan at a public meeting.
“Joe Arnaud, a West End resident, suggested that the board should ‘leave the park in its natural state. Stanley Park is not an appropriate place for a zoo.’ Arnaud’s remarks captured the spirit of a new public attitude toward the management of animals in the park and the interrelationship between the ‘natural’ conditions of the peninsula and its animal population,” Kheraj argues.
While the park board voted to proceed with the plan, the public opposition led city council to call a referendum in late 1993. Just over 54 per cent of Vancouver voters rejected the proposal to upgrade the zoo and called on newly elected park board commissioners to eliminate it altogether.
The zoo was closed in 1996. Animals were moved to other facilities, like to the Stanley Park petting zoo on the other side of X̱wáýx̱way, the former village site. When the last remaining polar bear died in 1997 the exhibit was permanently shut down after 35 years.
Over the past three decades there have been numerous attempts to repurpose the grotto-like structure.
Since the early 2000s one of the windowless buildings behind the pit has been used as a salmon hatchery, managed by the aquarium as part of the BC Hydro Salmon Stream project. However, it’s unclear how active the hatchery is. One visitor in 2017 described the inside as a temporary set up with a few tanks and some equipment and suggested it doesn’t operate on an annual basis.
The Stanley Park Environmental Art project – a park board program launched in the wake of the 2006 wind storm that devastated much of Stanley Park’s tree canopy – sought to reenvision humans’ relationship with nature through place-based art.
Artist Shirley Wiebe decided to use the pit as the setting for an ephemeral piece entitled “Hibernators.”
“Situated in the middle of the park, the pit now appears utterly dilapidated and in sharp contrast to the meticulously landscaped surroundings. Nature is already reclaiming the area – vines claw their way up from the moat below while a massive yew tree extends its branches overhead, and various root systems determinedly penetrate the barricading concrete wall,” Wiebe observed in 2008.
Due to the natural materials Wiebe used (coconut and jute sacks stuffed with woodchips from the park), the artwork has now almost entirely decomposed.
Five years later, Vancouver based theatre company Boca Del Lupo consulted on a study to transform the pit into a performance space. However, to this author’s knowledge no caged performances have yet to take place there.
Rendering of the “Polar Bear Sauna” proposed by TOAD. (Tony Osborn photo)
More recently in 2023, Tony Osborn Architecture + Design (TOAD) released renderings and building plans to turn the enclosure and surrounding buildings into a Nordic style spa called Polar Bear Sauna.
In the summer of 2023, as part of their “Think Big” revenue strategy, the park board created a pilot program to receive and evaluate unsolicited proposals for revenue generating opportunities in public parks.
Stanley Park is a unique case, with the Stanley Park Intergovernmental Committee and Working Group engaging in big picture direction setting and hands on implementation for many projects and activities in Stanley Park.
The committee and group are made up of representatives from the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, and the park board.
“We've been working hard in the last few months to connect with [Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh] Nations, and get their feedback, but also, ideally, invite them into partnerships so that we can develop a design proposal that is really co-owned by them and feels like a space that they have some agency over as well,” Tony Osborn told The West End Journal.
While TOAD has expressed their intention to formally put this idea forward through the park board’s new unsolicited proposal program, nothing has been submitted for park board consideration yet.
“We really want the First Nations partnerships before we enter officially into that stream,” Osborn said.
The goal is for it to be a public facility that’s financially accessible to everybody. Osborn’s architecture firm would also be looking to bring on a third-party building operator.
“It would be something like the Cactus Club building on English Bay beach. So [the operator] would provide the capital to build the project, in return for a long term lease from the parks board to operate in that space,” Osborn explained.
Right now it’s unclear how long the process may take, given the multiple layers of government it needs to go through. At this point the project is “really just a few pretty pictures,” as Osborn put it. Even with the most optimistic of outlooks, the sauna couldn’t be a reality until 2028.
It’s the latest of many efforts to revitalize and reuse the area in some way. But for now it remains an eerie, dystopian ruin, huddled in an otherwise busy area of the park.
RELATED LINKS:
Demonstration Wildlife: Negotiating the Animal Landscape of Vancouver’s Sanley Park, 1888-1996 by Sean Kheraj, 2012.
The Zoo in Stanley Park, a National Film Board documentary by Bernard Devlin, 1953.
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