Keys to the Centre

On 22 June 1956, a contractor handed Reeve Charles MacSorley the keys to a new municipal hall at 4949 Canada Way, near Deer Lake. The site had been chosen two years earlier by a simple rule: put the seat of government where neither half of Burnaby could complain it favoured the other.

A set of keys passed from one hand to another. The building behind them cost about $625,000, and Burnaby voters had approved every dollar. It stood in the Central Valley, near Deer Lake, at an address that did not yet feel like the middle of anything. Around it the ground was quiet. The municipality now had a permanent home, and it had put that home where almost nobody lived.

The choice was the whole point. In 1954 the council had resolved to build at the geographic centre of the municipality, and the resolution settled an argument older than the building. The question was never really where the land was. It was which end of Burnaby would get to keep its government close.

Two halves and a line on the map

Burnaby is a long municipality laid between New Westminster and Burrard Inlet, and for decades it had behaved like two places. North Burnaby looked toward the inlet, toward the water and the smoke of the working shore. South Burnaby grew along Kingsway and around Edmonds, strung out beside the road and the streetcar line. A resident at one end might spend the better part of a day getting to the other and back. Each end resisted the idea of making that trip to do business with its own clerks. Put the hall in the north and the north had won. Put it in the south and the south had won the same argument in reverse.

The centre solved the problem by belonging to neither side. A point near Deer Lake sat roughly equidistant from both ends, close enough to the actual middle of the map that no one could call it a favour. The compromise had to be geographic because the politics could not be settled any other way. So the council drew an X on the centre and built there.

That single decision moved the civic core. Burnaby's earlier business of government had clustered around the Edmonds and Kingsway area in the south, where the people and the traffic already were. The 1956 building pulled the centre of municipal life north and west, away from Edmonds and toward Deer Lake, and there it has stayed.

Where council used to meet

The hall on Canada Way was Burnaby's third. The municipality incorporated in 1892 with no building of its own, and the first councils met in members' homes, the way young districts everywhere conducted their affairs, around kitchen tables and in front parlours, the public business of a place run out of its private rooms. A dedicated municipal hall did not arrive until 1912. After that, a hall on Edmonds Street served the District through the following decades. The 1923 War Memorial Fountain once stood in front of an earlier hall, a stone marker planted at what was then the centre of things, years before 1956 redrew it.

The lineage is well documented in outline, though the texture of the opening day is thinner. The date, the keys, the figure of roughly $625,000 come down through heritage compilations rather than from a scanned 1956 newspaper. Heritage Burnaby records the building in its archive description of Burnaby's third municipal hall on Canada Way, and a Burnaby Now lineage piece traces the succession of halls from the homes of 1892 forward. The sources agree on what happened. They do not preserve the speeches, the crowd, the weather on the day a contractor crossed a threshold and gave a reeve a key.

The centre, once it was built

What the 1954 decision did was unusual. Most civic buildings get sited where a town already gathers, near the rail station, the main street, the offices that are already busy. Burnaby did close to the opposite. It picked a point because it was empty and central, set the government down in the quiet, and let the rest of the city come to it. The Central Valley around Deer Lake was not the lively part of the municipality in 1954. The hall arrived first, and the city followed.

The effect was to make the middle of the map into the middle of the city. A line drawn to keep two halves from quarrelling hardened into an address, then a destination, then the one part of Burnaby that the word "centre" actually describes. The compromise stopped being a compromise. It became, simply, where City Hall is.

What is left

The keys changed hands on a June day in 1956, and the building at 4949 Canada Way has held the seat of Burnaby's government every year since. North and South Burnaby still pull in their old directions, toward the inlet and along Kingsway, by habit and by geography. The office that governs both of them sits between, on purpose, in a valley near a lake, on a spot once chosen for being equidistant from two ends that could agree on nothing else.