The Vancouver Heritage Foundation is marking a major milestone.
The non-profit organization is celebrating 15 years of its Places That Matter program with not one, but two plaque presentations on Tuesday.
It’s a major achievement for a program built on the belief that local stories deserve to be remembered and celebrated.
Plaque #100 will go up in Robson Park to honour the Mount Pleasant Family Centre Society.
“This was a nomination from the public, as all our sites are, and they’re celebrating 50 years this year to recognize the family centre,” said Jessica Quan, community engagement manager at the Vancouver Heritage Foundation.
Related:
“We felt that was such a good synergy with the site that’s not very well known. It started off, of course, as a park right now. It started off as a public space, then it became a lawn bowling club, and the building was repurposed with the support and advocacy of the neighbourhood to have a family centre at that site, and it’s been in use now for 50 years and going strong.”
She adds that Plaque #101 will go up on Tuesday as well, in front of the former site of the Cellar Jazz Club, which opened back in 1956.
“It happened to be 70 years this year that when the Cellar opened in 1956, so we thought, gosh, we gotta do it,” Quan explained.
“It was on Watson Street, Broadway and Watson, which is just one block east of Main in a lane-like street that had a bunch of factories and businesses, and then a basement that was then used as a site for music. And the cellar opened up there for about a decade in the ’50s to ’60s.”
Places That Matter was started in 2011 to mark the City of Vancouver’s 125th birthday.
“I really never envisioned that it would take this long to do 100, but it’s really satisfying to see that this project is still as relevant as ever, 15 years later, and that we’re continuing to celebrate 100 plaques, and we hopefully will continue to do more,” Quan said.