Fraser Street Stories media coverage
This article below was recently published in the Vancouver Sun concerning a local community project I was involved in creating along with several of my neighbours. We also received coverage on CKNW Radio, GlobalTV News and Sing Tao newspaper.
Fraser street gets high-tech nod to history
By Manori Ravindran, Vancouver Sun
What more can you add to a community that already has its fair share of murals, sidewalk mosaics and street banners?
That’s what Mike Klassen and Lilli Wong asked themselves last year when brainstorming ways to further engage residents in their Mountain View neighbourhood. The two neighbours designed a new project that marries Fraser Street’s rich past with social media technology using interactive, smartphone-friendly historical plaques.
The plaques cover everything from the old streetcar lines of Fraser Street to the lost streams and creeks of Vancouver.
There’s even a plaque about the century-old legend of Simon Hirschberg, an overweight Vancouverite who had the misfortune of dying during a blizzard. The hefty corpse was too heavy to carry all the way to the Mountain View cemetery and is said to have been buried on the corner of East 33rd Avenue and Fraser Street.
“We have people here who are proud members of the neighbourhood, but it was a case of how do we get people to share and connect? And what are the applications that people use to connect to each other?” said Klassen of the initiative. “And, of course, it’s things like websites, Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare.”
Klassen, a communications consultant, and Wong, a graphic designer, went to work on Fraser Street Stories, a series of 10 plaques along Fraser Street.
Like the Vancouver Stories plaques around the city’s commercial district, they offer stories about the area’s important historical events.
What sets the Fraser Street plaques apart, however, are the Quick Response, or QR codes. The black and white squares, when scanned or photographed with a smartphone, instantly link to more information about the area as well as a web feedback form where users can leave comments.
Smartphone users who use the popular geolocation tool Foursquare are also able to “check in” at each plaque, and interact with others at the location.
For the Mountain View neighbourhood, located along Fraser between King Edward and East 33rd Avenue, the planning and coordination of the plaques further reinforces strong ties among the community, said Wong.
The Mountain View Neighbourhood Group has been active since the 1990s, winning a BEST BC environmental award in 2002 for a street reclaiming project that worked to bring community members together.
Last September, a new housing and commercial development at Fraser Street and East 29th Avenue opened its doors. The Century development by Ledingham McAllister provides street-level shopping and amenities. Wong points out that a lamppost beside the building bears a historical plaque about one of the developers, George W. Ledingham — one of Vancouver’s founding architects.
“They’ve got this housing complex that’s taking its roots from old, architectural elements of Fraser Street,” says Wong. “And playing off that, we’re bringing Vancouver’s past into the 20th century with some of these really interesting ways of talking to neighbours with our plaques and bringing the history to the people who don’t know about it. The history of Fraser, and now, the future of Fraser.”
The project, whose slogan asks community members to “find the plaques that make history,” was partly funded by a Vancouver125 grant, a 2011 grants program marking the city’s 125th anniversary, as well as a neighbourhood matching fund, a Vancouver park board initiative that matches the contributions made by the community. Wong, who designed the plaques and applied for the grants, says it cost $2,200 to get the plaques fitted and installed along Fraser Street.
The plaques will be officially unveiled to the public on Sunday, May 6, at 11:30 a.m. in front of the Century housing development at 4588 Fraser Street.
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Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Fraser+street+gets+high+tech+history/6570301/story.html
