Brandon’s blessed with a river running through it — a river that, despite fits and starts, we’ve generally managed to take fairly good advantage of, in terms of parks and recreation space. I could go on and on about the missed opportunities and the poor decisions, but by and large, when it comes to the Assiniboine River, Brandon hasn’t done half bad.
Take a look at this map of proposed green space and parkland from 1969 (I found it here, where I was mesmerized for a little while):
Click on the map to get a larger size, and there’s an even larger size available for downloading on the Flickr site here.
Anyway, if you take a look, you get a real sense of recreation priorities for the time. With picnic and open areas to the north and east, development is concentrated in the centre, where the plan calls for everything from tennis courts to a bowling green and a football/baseball field surrounded by a quarter-mile track. There’s even an indoor swimming pool in the plan — but all that infrastructure comes at a cost: fully half of that centre developed area is devoted to parking!
Luckily, there are areas of “dense trees” and five-foot-high “screening hedges” blocking out the roads. (I seem to recall most of the dense bushes in Brandon, around our walking paths, were thinned out radically after a series of sexual assaults about a decade ago.)
Now, see what Google maps has to say about the current state of of the park that’s in the area:
Again, click on the map for a larger version, or head over to Google for full zoomability.
Very little of what was envisioned actually got built — and what we do see is the cheap stuff. So, no indoor pool, and no running track, but on the plus side, many fewer parking spaces.
You’ll also note that there seems to have been a baseball field explosion (do we really need that many?) and the tennis courts, when they got built, were situated further east.
This park is also where the current skating oval is, and that’s used in a completely different way than this plan thought out — I don’t see any provision for winter at all, except for the indoor stuff, plus I suppose the trails could be used for cross-country skiing.
Another difference that I noted is that the original plan called for a series of pedestrian bridges crossing over through the island and heading to Curran Park. When I was a kid, there was actually a ferry that crossed the river (though it was further east) and it did indeed lead to Curran Park (now Turtle Crossing) but never to my knowledge did the island get involved. There’s a small pumping station there now.
I also did up a quick overlay of the two maps, so you can see the differences, but it’s best if you download the .psd here (warning, big file) and adjust the transparency back and forth yourself.
I would love to have the time to go waaaay back in the archives and see the debate and budget processes that turned this park plan into quite a different park reality.
