Townsite celebrates heritage week Feb 16 to 22
Main Street Make-over T BY ANN NELSON
AN ELEGANT STROLL: This photo, snapped in the mid-1940s, shows the Mill bus turning onto Ocean View Avenue from Second Street. On the right side of the street, note the low, flat Powell Stores building. Currently, it’s being rehabilitated, but it has served as a grocery store, billiards parlour, bingo hall, and other uses in its history. photo courtesy of the Powell River Historical Museum.
here’s something magical and evocative about the words Main Street, whether it’s a Disney version of the quintessential Main Street, USA, our memories from our childhood of the adventures and delights to be found shopping with our parents downtown, or the idealized visions we’ve absorbed from books and movies. Both are magical and magnetic. How many times have we heard long time Powell River residents tell their own stories about having repeatedly escaped their own backyards and gone downtown to savour the delights of the soda fountain, the cinema, the toy store windows and the candy store? In our town, at least three of the villages and hamlets that became the greater Powell River in 1955 had their own main streets, and every child in Cranberry Lake, Westview and what is now known as the Townsite had their own hangouts and hideouts: bowling alleys and pool halls, sweet shops and barber shops, confectionaries and drugstores, and everything else that makes up the heart of our neighbourhoods. This year, the theme of Heritage Week in British Columbia has been designated the celebration of Main Streets: at the Heart of the Community. Whatever your main street was called, wherever it was located, it was bound to be the living, breathing centre of neighbourhood life. In the Townsite, it has always been Second Street, or Ash Avenue, and the streets branching off: Yew, Walnut and Ocean View, or Marine. When the steamships docked at the Mill wharf, all the passengers were funnelled straight up the hill via our main street, there to seek out a hotel and steam bath, or friends and relatives, or to report for work and be assigned to a crew and a tent or bunkhouse. After settling in, exploring the amazing variety of shops and services would be their first order of business, just as it is today whenever we move into a new place. Our main street was also home to the first elementary
school, all the churches, the cinema, even the playing fields and bandstand: truly the heart of our little frontier community, hanging on the edge of the continent. Even though the Townsite was a company town, there were lots of entrepreneurs offering every convenience in addition to the Company Store which was lodged first in the Central Building (where the Mill Security Offices now stand), then in the Brooklon building when the Company bought Sing Lee’s China Block and renamed it for the founders, and finally in the delightfully anachronistic Powell Stores building commissioned in 1940 from rising young Vancouver architect, Charles Van Norman.
“When the steamships docked at the Mill wharf, all the passangers were funnelled straight up the hill via our main street, there to seek out a hotel or steam bath....” Old-timers used to complain that it looked like a spaceship had just set itself down in the middle of town! This new Powell Stores offered everything an isolated community could ask for: clothing stores, a grocery store, barbershops and beauty shops, a department store with the newest fashions in home furnishings and appliances, and a coffee shop…all under one roof. For a while, it even provided space for the local CIBC branch. The feel of our main street changed forever when the Powell River Company sold the Mill and the Townsite to MacMillan-Bloedel in 1955. Mac-Blo didn’t want to
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