40 years later, the Mount Pleasant clock still marks a neighbourhood in flux

A clock, as we all know, is meant to keep time.

But the Mount Pleasant clock, which sits at the triangular corner of Kingsway and Main St., can’t even quite manage that.

At the time of writing this, it’s one hour ahead. B.C.’s final Daylight Saving Time change has come and gone, yet the clock won’t be adjusted by the City of Vancouver’s engineering team until 9 a.m. on Wednesday, March 11 – three days after the clocks officially jumped forward, and the same day you’re reading this. 

Granted, adjusting the clock isn’t exactly the most pressing item on the engineering department’s list. Other projects take precedence. 

Still, there’s something oddly fitting about this, given the nature of this clock. This is a clock that doesn’t quite give you an accurate reading, if only for a few days. It’s a clock that, now and then, can’t keep time, period.

“A few years ago the motor started wearing out and I was getting calls from people complaining that the clock was wrong and they missed their bus,” says Neil Wyles, executive director for the Mount Pleasant Business Improvement Association (BIA). “I had to file a 311 request.”

Let’s leave aside the idea that anyone is relying on a nearly 40-year-old decorative street clock to get to work on time. This clock, like the neighbourhood itself, never quite meets the expectations of the people who designed it. 

Take, for example, Broadway, which city planners had intended to be a neighbourhood. Originally called 9th Ave., it was renamed Broadway in 1909, specifically to give it a stronger commercial identity.

City planners, all these years later, are trying again. With the Broadway line station coming to Main and Broadway – south of the clock – and the Broadway Plan, 30 years in the making, there’s some kind of push to make the street a happening commercial zone.

The locals, however, are skeptical

“People keep saying Broadway will become a great street, but for a hundred years it hasn’t been,” says Neil Wyles, executive director of the Mount Pleasant BIA.

“Broadway isn’t really a neighbourhood – it’s a connector between neighbourhoods. You can widen sidewalks and redesign it, but you can’t force people to embrace a place. If people haven’t embraced it for a hundred years, I’m not convinced that will suddenly change,” he says.

Mount Pleasant has been shape-shifting for nearly 150 years. Now, the small village area where the clock sits is in a particularly interesting moment as it faces a new round of dramatic change with the Broadway Line construction. 

And the clock…well, it keeps doing its own thing, in a neighbourhood that has always done the same. For better or worse.

The beginning

The clock sits at a peculiar Y-shaped junction in a city otherwise dominated, save for a few rare exceptions, by the rigid grid common across most North American cities. This intersection is what gives the neighbourhood its shape and character. In many ways, Mount Pleasant Village exists because of it.

Kingsway predates Vancouver’s street grid. Long before the city was laid out, it followed an Indigenous and animal trail that ran roughly from what is now New Westminster toward False Creek. When Vancouver’s planners imposed their tidy grid on the landscape, the road was already there, cutting diagonally across the plan.

The result was the triangular pocket where Mount Pleasant Village formed in the late 1880s – the city’s first major development south of False Creek, and Vancouver’s first suburb, despite technically sitting within city limits.

“Initially Mount Pleasant was supposed to be an elite residential area. That’s why you see some of the larger houses along 10th Avenue,” says local historian Christine Hagemoen.

A village formed in and around the triangle, butchers, bakers, banks, and everything else you’d need for a small local village. City planners had planned for the area to be a second downtown core for the city and the community developed around that commercial area and expanded along Broadway and Main St. 

“There was a lot of optimism during the economic boom from about 1908 to 1913, but the boom ended with a crash and then the First World War,” Christine says. “The big ambitions for the neighbourhood never fully materialized.

The Canadian Pacific Railway soon developed Shaughnessy as the city’s premier upscale district, and the focus shifted there instead.

Mount Pleasant had developed strong industrial roots, particularly along the shores of False Creek, becoming a largely working-class neighbourhood for much of the twentieth century. By the late 1960s, the artists began moving in, drawn by relatively affordable spaces and small retail storefronts where independent businesses could survive.

Here comes the clock

By the early 1980s, Vancouver had begun to rediscover its heritage. As the city approached its centennial in 1986, preservation projects gained new attention, including the restoration of Heritage Hall.

The Mount Pleasant clock was built in 1988 to mark the neighbourhood’s 100-year anniversary. Designed by Raymond Saunders, who built Gastown’s famous steam clock, it was designed to look far older than it really is – a deliberate nod to the neighbourhood’s past.

Saunders’ two most famous designs are, in their own way, small fictions. Gastown’s steam clock isn’t actually powered by steam, and the Mount Pleasant clock isn’t actually an antique. But the clock design represents something far more encompassing – the past, present, and future together in a single landmark.

By this point, Mount Pleasant had been defined by a certain amount of grit and, dare we say, grime. The area was notorious for sex workers, drug use and other elements of criminal activity, while remaining a hub of the city’s art scene. 

By the 2000s, it began to gentrify.

“As the west side became more expensive, development pressure moved eastward. Being close to downtown, Mount Pleasant was one of the first areas to feel that shift,” Hagemoen says.

Many of the new developments in the neighbourhood were large commercial units that only big chains could afford. Smaller businesses, meanwhile, need smaller spaces in order to survive.  

Throughout this 20-year gentrification project, the triangle block and its adjacent buildings, which the clock sits in between, have provided those types of affordable spaces, supporting a mix of artists’ spaces, independent shops, and gathering places that give the neighbourhood – and, by extension, the city – its character. 

A future in question

The Broadway Line promises to make the neighbourhood a bigger transit hub, but it also brings concerns about losing independent businesses and smaller retail spaces. Construction is taking its toll on independent businesses, at a time when such businesses are struggling across the city anyway. 

“The neighbourhood has always evolved, but the challenge is preserving some of that uniqueness so it doesn’t become just another generic part of the city,” Hagemoen says.

Last year, Antisocial Skate Shop closed its storefront after 15 years. The Tightrope Theatre has also lost its space in the John Juke’s Building, right across from the clock, and is moving to a new space near Commercial Drive. 

Meanwhile, the village area may be getting a complete facelift, with 2345 Main St. – aka the Goh Ballet building – is under a rezoning application for a 26-storey mixed-use tower. Wyles says that there are “fluid” plans to develop the empty commercial lot that once housed Frenchies Diner and was destroyed in a fire in October 2020. He also says there are “rumours” that the triangle building, which is currently home to Gene Cafe, is for sale.

At this point, it seems like anything could happen and nothing is certain. 

“To me it’s a tale of two stations,” Wyles says. “Are we going to be more like Cambie – where a whole bunch of development grew up around the station? Or more like Commercial, which has a very different vibe.”

He adds, “Right now I can’t walk into a business here and honestly say, ‘Just tough it out, there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,’ because what if there isn’t? What if [the station] is just a bus station underground? You can make it easier to get here, sure, but unless you put Disneyland on the corner of Broadway and Main, everything else stays roughly the same.”

Despite the pain of the Broadway construction, Wyles says the neighbourhood is having a good moment. New businesses are cropping up. There’s a new parklet under construction at 7th Ave. and Main Street, beside Steamworks. The village area still feels vital, even if some of the businesses have struggled.

And through it all, the clock keeps watch – and mostly keeping time – over a city in flux. Soaked in rain, baked in sun, staring at the mountains to the north and a changing urban core to the south, it marks the passage of ambition, evolution, and uncertainty in a neighbourhood that has always done things its own way.”