5 minute read
City Informer
CITY INFORMER
Who Lives in Vancouver’s Fieldhouses?
by Stacey McLachlan illustration by Byron Eggenschwiler
when yoU get into joUrnalism, you expect to face certain challenges in your career: uncooperative interview subjects, tight deadlines, discovering there are almost no opportunities to work “What a scoop!” into an everyday conversation, et cetera. But struggling with all-consuming jealousy while reporting a story was a surprising new hurdle to face. Did you know it’s almost impossible to see the keyboard when you’re seething with real-estate-induced envy? It makes it incredibly difficult to slc$a9&6vr gpa!
But despite the fact that I am frothing at the mouth with a bad, perhaps incurable case of Property Value Fever, it is my sacred duty as a reporter to tell you there are people in this city who live in multi-bedroom heritage homes... in Vancouver’s most beautiful parks... for free.
Now, I know most of the time when you say you’re “jealous of someone getting to live in the park,” you’re baiting your NIMBY-ass Boomer uncle into a fight about Oppenheimer, partially to provoke a candid discussion about the city’s historically terrible treatment of the unhoused, but also to hopefully get kicked out of your cousin’s lame baby shower. (Why is the theme always “the miracle of birth” and never Venom: The Movie, ugh!) In this case, however, I’m referring to the caretakers who live in the parks’ beautiful, beautiful, did-Imention-rent-free fieldhouses.
There are currently 56 fieldhouses sprinkled across Vancouver’s 230-plus parks, many built as early as the 1920s, when the attitude toward zoning could best be described as, “whatever, dude.” At one time, a caretaker lived in each of these little homes, entrusted by the city to keep a watchful eye over the grassy knolls, tend to repairs and refurbishments, and make sure the Canada geese weren’t getting too horned up. In exchange for their duties, this merry band of custodians received full board in the most unique addresses in the city. And in many of the parks, this tradition of live-in stewardship continues.
We’re the only city in Canada to use this barter system for park care (is this a brag? It feels like a brag), but the arrangement won’t last forever. Back in 2006, city council elected to pause the caretaker program, and has not added any new caretakers in the years since. The days of dreaming big about living at the park are slowly being phased out... though 22 lucky caretakers still live in the fieldhouses today, clinging to this insane property loophole with a vice-like grip you can’t help but admire.
Gwen Marriott is one of these legendary park residents. She and her husband put their names on the waitlist in 1990, and in 1998 (at that point, with two kids in tow) they got The Call. Moving to the park allowed Gwen to go down to part-time at her day job, and 23 years later (now retired) she and Mr. Marriott still live at Beaconsfield—in an 850-squarefoot, two-storey, three-bedroom home many would have happily traded their two children for.
The seven-acre park is essentially their backyard. And over the past
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two decades, the Marriotts have kept that backyard squeaky clean, locking up the washrooms (who knows what the geese will do if they get in there!), reporting vandalism and making repairs. They’ve been the eyes and ears of the park, but also the hands: hands forced to hold various tools or garbage bags in exchange for real estate.
One catch: caretakers do need to pay tax on the rental value of the house each year, which, to be clear, has done nothing to stop a covetous rage so strong that I had to stop writing this story multiple times to make sure my ears weren’t bleeding.
While some of the unoccupied park fieldhouses are now used as stations for park rangers, others have been converted to artist studios, clubhouses for sports teams and community centres through the city’s Fieldhouse Activation Program. These community groups act as noble tattletales when trouble is afoot, and mobile janitorial crews take care of the dirty work.
So if you too are harbouring a fantasy of park life alongside a burning, itching feeling that you were born decades too late, there’s a solution: team up with a gaggle of geese to steal the janitors’ keys and overthrow the Hastings Little League to take control of the finest Vancouver property money can’t buy. Sure, the catch is that once you barricade yourself inside with your goose brethren, you likely won’t be able to leave again... but with a sweet residence like this, who would want to?
Got a question for City Informer? stacey.mclachlan@vanmag.com
