Project 2: Nanaimo Parks

[Flugel Horn]

Smokey has asked me to set up the project 2 photo-project.

The theme is "Nanaimo Parks". Scenes from any park(s) within the City of Nanaimo. Parks can be City-parks or RDN-parks.

Please identify the name of the park, when you post your photos.

Photos will hopefully be a mix of standard scenes, abstract views, people activity, wildlife, etc. Hey, I may even get a Friday night view of Dover Bay students drinking and fighting at Pioneer park (would that be "wildlife"? ).

But seriously, our city has a diverse collection of things called "parks" and hopefully this thread's collage can show that diversity and beauty, and maybe even show the ugly impact of some humans (ie. litter, vandalism....). As Ray Stevens sung, "every park is beautiful, in it's own way....". Of course, Ray also sung a song called "The Streak", but that's reserved for photos of Pioneer park's rugby-field on Sunday evenings after a Hornet scores his/her first try of the season..... Oops, I have digressed.

Project ends on September 30th, three weeks from now.

Have fun!

[Flugel Horn]

Here's a start:

Brown grass clearing on Newcastle Island, on right foreground, in late August 09. Photo taken from a ferry. Protection Island is foreground left, of course.


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May Bennett Pioneer Park, on foot-end of Dover Rd. A park used by early morning exercisers, dog-walkers, evening team sports practice, weekend sports events, late-night teen drinking & fighting. Photos from today.

Young kids practicing football, in front of Football Nanaimo's tall-and-narrow equipment and spotting building.



Trees shield a concrete creation used by skateboarders and BMX bikers. Tennis court in background.

[Smokey©]

32 years ago, while fighting one of the largest fires the City of Nanaimo has ever seen, Barney Moriez died on September 7, 1977. It was the middle of the night when Barney answered the fire call. It was the Shell Oil Storage tank farm on Stewart between the foot of Cypress and the foot of Townsite. The siding was melting off the sides of houses across the street and the vapours inside one of the largest tanks in the fuel yard expanded to the point where the top blew off and the entire area burst into flames. A group of firefighters scrambled to move the fuel trucks belonging to Shell and Standard Oil out of the way when a fireball burst out of the back and Barney died immediately.

The blaze was set by a disgruntled former employee who was dismissed days previously. He broke in during the middle of the night, opened valves on the tanks and lit them, seriously injuring himself and he died three days later.

The Park was named after Barney Moriez and re-dedicated earlier this summer.

[Smokey©]

Barney Moriez Memorial Park has two large slides, a playground with many different cool things to do. We enjoyed ourselves. Around the playground and within are mini-roads with signs such as stop signs, crosswalk etc for kids to learn the rules of the road. Over all a fun place for the kids and adults as well. The bottom of the park includes a couple of baseball diamonds or an open soccer field. They even have picnic benches.

[Smokey©]

A couple views of the driving course.

The park is located at the corners of Poplar Street and Princess Royal Avenue and Poplar Street and Belford Ave. The area is behind Terminal Park Mall and uphill from the Petro Canada Fuel Storage.

[Flugel Horn]

Queen Elizabeth Promenade, near the Yacht Club at the foot of Rosehill Street.

The park includes a plaque commemorating the location of an internment camp (ie prisoner camp for innocent people) during the Great War, for Canadians-residents who were thought to be dangerous to society. They were mostly people of Ukrainian heritage.

Perhaps the governments of 1914 were worried that those Ukrainian people would become vendors selling perogies in the park or maybe even people who would do busking on the waterfront. Or perhaps these were peoples who resisted having their bags searched as they walked the waterfront.

Or perhaps it was just old-school paranoia combined with ignorance. That period of history is now being researched, thanks to new grant money being made available by the Federal Government.

The Canwest Daily News recently had a story on this history item and mentioned the location of this marker, and so I wanted to find it.

Here's the location shot:



Here's the plaque close-up, with messages in English, French and Ukrainian. I like the barbed-wire outline.



Here's a close-up of the English text:

[Flugel Horn]

A beautiful late-Autumn day on Dec.5, 2009 gave me opportunity to take a few waterfront park pictures:

View from Georgia Park, down across Swy-a-Lana lagoon:



Something that I hadn't noticed in Georgia Park before:



The old museum at Piper's Park looks a bit like a flying-saucer



I usually stop and look at the plaques on the park benches, in case I might have known the person being remembered.
- This bench is for Barry, who was the pharmacist at the Central Drugs location at Wallace & Campbell Streets. A really nice guy that I miss.




A spot on the harbourfront walkway, in front of the Pacifica tower.
- I didn't realize that Nanaimo had installed urinals for late-night walkers.

[Flugel Horn]

This is Piper Park, which includes the old Nanaimo District Museum building. It is located on a rocky bluff that is across the street from the Port Theatre's front-door.

It is currently in some local news, because of questions about what to do with the vacant building. As you can see from my pictures, the park has beautiful views of the downtown, and the building's exterior is home to a series of Jeff King murals.

I took a bunch of photos on January 1, 2010, and here they are. They will run-over onto the next post in this thread.


You can see the old fire-hall from the park



You get a wide vista of Front Street, the Bastion, the boat-basin, and Cameron Island.



The view up Front Street is great. McGregor Park is right in front of the Port office building. Nice mix of old and new buildings



....and sometimes, all you can see is new buildings.



The octagonal building that used to house the Museum. Built as a 1967 Canada Centennial project. Look for the murals in my next post...


(continued on next post)

[Flugel Horn]

Piper Park. (continued from previous post)

- There are lots of petroglyphs on display along the sidewalk that circles the old museum building. I didn't take any photos of them.
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Here are the Jeff King murals that are done on the outside panels of the old Museum building at Piper Park:










Tougher to get good pictures of these last 2 murals, because of their locations and lack of space to step-back.

[Flugel Horn]

Piper Park (continued):

The outside items in the corner of the park that's closest to the library building:


Rowbottom miner's cottage is on the left. This was a real miner's cottage, originally located on Farquhar Street. The white building (with green trim) houses the old locomotive.


Close-up of Rowbottom cottage:



Engine #19 arrived in Nanaimo in the 1880's. It was in service on the coal railway between Wellington and Departure Bay.



My attempt at a close-up of the Baldwin #19.



And at the end of my visit, I thought I was done. But as I was walking down the wooden stairs to the Port Place parking lot, I saw this gem. Another Jeff King mural.


History of the ship:

The CITY OF NANAIMO was built in 1892 at False Creek, Vancouver, for the Mainland and Nanaimo Steam Navigation Company set up by the Dunsmuir coal mining company of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. Their first coal-fired side-wheel steamship, ROBERT DUNSMUIR, was nicknamed "Dirty Bob" because of the coal dust and livestock on the deck.

The CITY OF NANAIMO was a more spacious vessel that competed directly with the S.S.Cutch, owned by the Union Steamship Company, for the runs from New Westminster to Vancouver, and New Westminster to Nanaimo, with syops at Steveston on the way. The rivalry and racing between these two ships ended in a collision in 1896.

from: http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/pm.php?i...&sl=1875&pos=1

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This park visit was inspired by what I had been reading in Jan Peterson's Nanaimo reference book "A Place in Time".
- and the various facts in this post are also courtesy of my reading of the pages from Jan Peterson's book, which was a book done for the Nanaimo museum.