Sun Hop Park (formerly called Mid Main Park)
Vancouver BC
An overlooked, in-between space along Main Street was transformed into a community gathering spot in one of Vancouver’s most culturally diverse and wildly eclectic neighbourhoods. Through a strategic relationship between Vancouver’s planning, parks, and transportation departments, Sun Hop Park transforms an underused slip lane and parking area into a lovable open space and neighbourhood conversation piece.
Based on community response, a preferred hybrid concept was generated, with refuge, gathering, connections and site history as its main principles. The site, former Palm Dairy and Milk Bar (1952 to 1989), is paid tribute with an iconic bendy straw trellis. North of the trellis, matching barstools whimsically recall the interior of a mid-20th-century dairy bar – complete with spinning seats – all cast in the fiery red used in Palm Dairy’s logo, bottle tops, and even hubcaps.
The concrete paving is patterned to the grid of the adjacent city sidewalk, but is overlaid with large, random “milk bubbles” rendered in a stained concrete that blur the edge between street, development site and park. Pathways curve through the park, offering the option to depart from the city sidewalk. Plaza and planting are separated by a series of curving cast concrete seatwalls with continuous LED lighting for night.
The composition of paving, curvaceous seating walls, mounded earth, layered planting and lighting diminishes the awkward long and triangular site and encourages a slower circuitous passage with places to linger adjacent to the action of the street.
The seatwalls along Main Street include long, continuous yellow cedar bench backs. Bands of permeable cast concrete paving convey stormwater to a detention gallery buried in the central mound behind the main seatwall, reducing runoff rate and quantity into the city’s storm sewer. Rich grasses and perennials buffer the interior of the park from the busy street. In addition to the Chinese elms and littleleaf linden trees retained along Main Street, snowbell trees are planted for spring colour and eventual succession.
The large trellis – adored by children and adults alike – shares space with the iconic Main Street Poodle sculpture (Gisele Amantea, 2013) both of which generate substantial attention, making the park instantly memorable.
