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magazine / ja04
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July/August 2004 issue |
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Monuments and memories
More than 50 memorials dot Vancouver's Stanley Park.
But once you leave the park, will you remember even one?
By Stephen Osborne
When you enter the leafy precincts of Stanley Park, at the edge of downtown Vancouver,
the first thing likely to escape your
attention is the bronze statue of Lord Stanley flinging his arms into the air on the grassy knoll just inside
the park entrance. The second thing
you are likely to forget, only metres away, is the statue of Robert Burns, the Scottish poet,
clutching a sheaf of papers to his chest. Cross over
the lawn, and you come upon the elaborate but somewhat faded memorial to Queen Victoria
("Victoria the Good," reads the plaque. "Erected by the
school children of Vancouver"). In a moment, it, too, will have vanished from your memory.
Monuments which are intended to make us remember tend to make us forget — nowhere more so than in
Stanley Park, where dozens of them sit tucked away and lost
among 400 hectares of forests and pathways, lawns and beaches, playgrounds and tennis courts and lawn-bowling pitches, where they persist in the landscape as in a
dream.
Lord Stanley was Governor General of Canada in 1889, when he dedicated the park in his own name to "people
of all colours, creeds and customs
for all time."
For the rest of this story, visit your local newsstand or go to our store to buy this issue.
Related stories:
• Explorer Online: Stanley Park
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