Image of a blueprint-style map of the Lower Mainland labelled "Campus site for Simon Fraser University" with pins on Burnaby, Coquitlam, North Delta, Langley City and Surrey

How did SFU end up on top of Burnaby Mountain?

As one of the last great forests of the Lower Mainland, Burnaby Mountain is a little slice of nature in the city and a beloved outdoor destination for hikers, runners and mountain bikers alike. 

However, it’s an odd spot for a major research university: inconvenient to get to, far from off-campus housing, and closed down by snowfall multiple times a year. So how did Simon Fraser University end up on its peak?

The surprising answer involves a new highway, an abandoned graveyard and a land swap that transformed Vancouver’s waterfront.

The quest for a new university

Since 1908, the University of British Columbia had been the only university in the whole province. UBC’s location was initially a matter of fraught debate, with cities as far away as Victoria, Revelstoke and Prince Rupert putting in bids to host the campus. A royal commission was appointed to settle the debate which considered sites in Ambleside, Mary Hill and Burnaby Central Park. Ultimately, it settled on the Point Grey lands that are familiar to us today.

Point Grey was ripe for development and had excellent soil for the all-important faculty of agriculture. However, its location at the western tip of Vancouver also proved to be challenging to access as the region grew. With the completion of Highway 1 and the post-war baby boom, Vancouver’s suburban trickle became a veritable exodus: new homes cropped up on the hillsides of North Vancouver and in the fields of the Fraser Valley—ever further from UBC’s campus.

With growing commute pains and surging enrollment, UBC President John B. Macdonald realized that a single university was no longer fit for purpose. So, in 1962, he commissioned a report which recommended the establishment of new universities for Victoria and the Lower Mainland.

But where to site the Lower Mainland’s second university? To answer this question, Macdonald enlisted the help of geography professor Walter Hardwick. Hardwick, who would later serve on Vancouver council, conducted a travel time analysis to find the most central location to the fast-growing suburbs of Surrey, Langley and North Vancouver. The ideal location, he concluded, was near the Stormont Avenue (now Gaglardi Way) exit of Highway 1. A 30 minute drive from each of the emerging town centres, it would be convenient to reach by car. This being the 1960s, transit was an afterthought.

Map comparing travel times by automobile to UBC and to Stormont interchange. The latter covers much of Burnaby, Surrey, Langley, the Tri-Cities and North Vancouver.
Professor Hardwick’s analysis of travel times to UBC and to the proposed location of the SFU campus at Burnaby Lake

Hardwick identified four open sites nearby with sufficient space to accommodate the needs of the new Simon Fraser University. Three of the sites—one by the George Derby Centre, another on the Oakalla Prison site (now the Oakmount housing subdivision), and a third on the shores of Burnaby Lake—were quickly ruled out as infeasible because of issues with soil quality, existing uses and lack of sunlight.

The site is chosen

With these options deemed impractical, Hardwick turned his attention to a little-remembered plot of land owned by the City of Vancouver. Its location on Burnaby Mountain, he reasoned, was a short drive from Highway 1, faced towards the sunny south and had all the land a growing university could ever need.

By this point, SFU had gone from a desktop concept to a concrete project: Dr. Gordon Shrum was appointed as the university’s first chancellor and tasked with getting the campus built. The first step was finding a suitable site.

He considered a number of bids from other towns that were keen to host the new university. Langley City offered up a big chunk of its small land base, while Delta envisioned a vast campus in Sunshine Hills. Meanwhile, Surrey offered him the entirety of the Green Timbers Forest and Coquitlam asked him to take a bulldozer to Mundy Park. Ultimately however, Shrum too was drawn to the allure of a shining campus upon a hill.

While he accepted Hardwick’s recommendation, he was not keen on the professor’s site. Instead, Shrum found another site right at the mountain’s summit and soon persuaded the owners to donate or sell their lands to the university’s cause. With 1,000 acres from Burnaby, 150 acres from the province and 18 acres from other sources, the land assembly for the future campus was complete.

Premier W.A.C. Bennett and the province were also fully onboard with the Burnaby Mountain scheme—no challenge proved too great to overcome. When SFU came asking for a road to access the campus from Highway 1, Transport Minister Phil Gaglardi ordered one built in Spring 1965 without asking a penny from the university. It was completed by December and now bears his name.

Despite being little more than an idea in Dr. Macdonald’s report in 1962, the university opened in September 1965—a pace of development that seems unfathomable today.

The abandoned graveyard

While SFU made do with its campus site for the first few years, its rapid growth quickly meant that the original 1,168 acres were no longer enough. The university was soon on the hunt for more land. The province turned its attention to Hardwick’s original site, offering to buy the empty lot from the City of Vancouver.

There was only one problem: it wasn’t empty.

The reason Vancouver owned land in Burnaby in the first place was because Mountain View Cemetery was running out of space. The heritage graveyard, located at the corner of 41st and Fraser, had been open since 1886. It grew increasingly full thanks to rapid population growth and the occasional bout of plague. In 1913, city leaders took out bonds to purchase 220 acres on Burnaby Mountain and create a second home for Vancouver’s dead.

Soon after the purchase however, the land was quickly forgotten about. In the aftermath of the Spanish Flu, the city opted to instead expand Mountain View by taking over nearby farms. All the while, the Burnaby Mountain site remained untouched, except for a five-year stint where it was briefly leased to a farmer Seymour.

Only in 1932 did the City of Vancouver remember its second graveyard, when it buried the bodies of ten paupers on the mountaintop. This was both the first and last time anyone had conducted a burial on Burnaby Mountain. Unclaimed by family and undisturbed by development, the ten bodies were promptly forgotten and remained on Burnaby Mountain for decades.

By this point, Burnaby was a growing city in its own right. Its leaders were more interested in attracting Vancouver’s living than its dead. In 1948, Burnaby council passed a by-law banning the construction of a cemetery on the site. Though Vancouver sued, the courts sided with Burnaby in 1962. This put an end to the vision of a mountaintop graveyard: Vancouver was now left with hundreds of acres of pristine forest outside its borders that it had no use for.

The land swap that changed Vancouver

Back across the city line in Vancouver, change was afoot. False Creek, which had grown into a vast manufacturing hub during the past decades, was now emptying out as Canadian heavy industry began its terminal decline.

After a series of deals with the Canadian Pacific Railway, the province owned all the land on the south side of False Creek between the Granville and Cambie Bridges—except for Granville Island. This land consisted mostly of old industrial sites that were described in a 1968 Vancouver Sun article as “an industrial eyesore on a dirty waterway”.

With the province hoping to expand SFU and the city interested in revitalizing False Creek, the two governments came to an inspired solution: what if they just swapped their land?

So in 1969, the City of Vancouver obtained 86 acres of prime waterfront real estate on False Creek and the province obtained 200 acres of Burnaby Mountain, with little more than $400,000 changing hands—a real bargain for both sides. For SFU, this meant a big campus expansion towards the south.

Map of the approximate extent of the lands acquired by the City of Vancouver in the 1969 land swap, which are bounded approximately by False Creek to the north, the Granville Bridge to the west, the abandoned rail tracks next to Lamey's Mill Road to the south, and Heather Street to the east.
Map of the area that Vancouver obtained in 1969 from the province

For Vancouver, the results were equally drastic. The city quickly evicted the remaining industries on its new land and built the residential community of False Creek South. Today, the neighbourhood includes over 550 units of co-ops, 300 units of social housing and 150 units of supportive housing—the largest injection of non-market housing in the city’s history.

Nowadays, False Creek South is widely seen as an urban planning success story. The community is often studied for its non-market housing mix, though the unique circumstances by which the city acquired such vast lands make it a hard model to replicate. With many of the original leases expiring, the future of False Creek South also remains uncertain.

Unfortunately for SFU’s aspiring ghost hunters, the existence of the graves did not escape the developers’ notice when the campus expanded. When SFU took ownership of the site, the City of Vancouver spent $2,500 to exhume the bodies and reinter them at Mountain View, leaving the land vacant and curse-free for the university’s uses.

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