It wasn’t unusual for John Charles Olmsted to walk 16 kilometres a day while designing the streetscape that would ultimately become the Uplands, traipsing along cow paths and through Garry oak meadows where animals grazed, enjoying the land and the spectacular view of Mount Baker across Haro Strait.
The renowned American landscape architect came to know the 465-acre area — then known as Uplands Farm — in meticulous detail. He loved its natural beauty from the moment he first saw it in 1907, and was determined to make the most of it by designing a park-like subdivision. It would become the proudest achievement of his 44-year career.
Olmsted’s story and that of Uplands is engagingly told and beautifully illustrated in Larry McCann’s book Imagining Uplands: John Olmsted’s Masterpiece of Residential Design. The book, designed by Lara Minja of Lime Design in Victoria, won first prize in the prose non-fiction category in the Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada. It also collected a writing award from the Hallmark Heritage Society of Victoria.
McCann, who taught for years in UVic’s geography department, is an urban historical geographer whose research earned him the Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s Massey Medal for outstanding achievement in the field of Canadian geography. His Heartland and Hinterland: A Geography of Canada has sold more than 80,000 copies.
McCann takes his experience to the Uplands, a landscape he has long admired. He began researching Uplands while on a sabbatical at Harvard. Boston’s park system as well as Central Park in Manhattan and many other major American city parks were designed by the Olmsted Brothers, for many years North America’s leading landscape and city-planning firm. Yet John Olmsted was barely known or given credit for his work, which was overshadowed by that of others in the family.
“There just seemed to be so much that was unknown about him, and yet he had done work, such as Uplands, that had a great impact on planning and zoning and on how people lived and suburbs developed. It was fascinating to me,” McCann said.
The result is a 350-page hardback book that will appeal to history buffs, with its meticulous research and extensive footnotes and bibliography, but also to readers (like me) who enjoy more of a narrative and story. You learn about the people involved — what motivated them, how they viewed the world — not just what they did and when they did it. It’s also a clear look into the world of land development, with its machinations, human dynamics, finances and politics.
“John Olmsted’s Uplands is an amalgam of decisions cast onto the landscape over the course of a century of changing circumstances,” McCann said.
It’s also a story of sustainability. “If a subdivision is done properly, it will give a lot of people enjoyment, whether they live in the area or are just passersby,” McCann said. “If care is taken, good design can be sustained over time, like Uplands.”
Now, modern developments tend to focus on smaller lots, increased densification and access to walking-distance amenities in hopes of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. But Uplands reflected a much different time and place in Victoria’s development.
It was the first subdivision in Canada to break away entirely from the typical checkerboard pattern of straight roads and right-angled lots that went hand in hand with the industrial city, McCann writes. Designing with nature — not against it — became the all-important planning strategy for developing a high-quality residential area.
That it came to be was a bit of serendipity. The Hudson’s Bay Company had controlled Uplands Farm since the mid-1800s. In 1907, it sold a 465-acre section to a trio of Winnipeg men who wanted to subdivide and develop the land.
William Hicks Gardner led the company and had a vision of a naturalistic subdivision with large lots taking advantage of the fine views. It would be more expensive than the usual grid-like development, but suited the land and was a potential moneymaker.
Gardner wanted to “create beauty through artistry by designing in harmony with the natural landscape and doing so in a practical way,” wrote McCann.
Through letters, Gardner convinced Olmsted, whom he knew by reputation, to come to the West Coast and see the property Gardner called “the most beautiful in Victoria.”
Although Olmsted was 22 years older than Gardner, the two shared a vision and were natural colleagues, walking the Uplands land for hours in all types of weather, checking sightlines and topography. Olmsted would return to it again and again, often just for pleasure.
From April 1907 until his last visit to Victoria in October 1911, Olmsted created a streetscape where roads curve and dip with the land to take advantage of the views. The feeling was one of looking out over a vast parkland from each site. Some lots had high rocks, others more a feeling of being nestled close to the ground.
Olmsted drew on the image of a peacock feather to illustrate his vision for the development. If you look closely, the dark eye of each tail feather — its “beauty spot” — is different from the next.
“Often, the eye is off-centre. The lots were never the same shape, and the beauty spot of each lot is never perfectly centred when you respect the land the way John Olmsted did,” McCann said.
Olmsted recommended that houses be located to enhance the beauty spot — that is, to be built in harmony with the land and make the most of the sunlight, the view or the Garry oaks.
Olmsted wrote a 55-page document outlining the development, including offering tips on how to build to take best advantage of the unique properties.
The first lots, one to three acres in size, were sold in 1912, for anywhere from $3,000 to $55,000.
But it took decades for the Uplands to be fully built out to its 600 homes, with architecture ranging from the grand Riffington Manor on Beach Drive to arts and crafts bungalows and modern West Coast-style homes.
All were of a minimum value of $5,000, as stipulated in the Uplands deed restrictions. This created a wealthy enclave, which was positive for the municipality’s tax base, but not so much for its social makeup. In 1935, developers suggested a provision “prohibiting Orientals and negroes from residing within the property.” There was a precedent for such a restriction, McCann noted in the book, as the provincial government had sanctioned racial restrictions for the University Hill neighbourhood on UBC’s Endowment Lands, a subdivision it controlled.
The suggestion was firmly rejected by Oak Bay’s council, however.
The book provides a sociological snapshot of the time, and shows how a community’s character can be shaped by housing.
“While racial segregation was not tolerated, social-class differentiation was quite acceptable,” McCann wrote.
Exclusionary zoning policies from the mid-1930s have guided Oak Bay’s social topography, McCann said, by minimizing the percentage share and geographical extent of low-value housing within the municipality.
“The disposable income and socio-economic status of individuals correlates strongly with the cost and size of a house.”
It was something not lost on Olmsted. Providing public access to the natural beauty of the area was important to him. There’s always been a very open roadway through the area. Olmsted wanted to see the whole of the waterfront drive connected for people’s pleasure.
“Uplands has always been a type of public area. People go there to experience greenery and pleasant surroundings,” McCann said.
In 1946, Gardner struck a public-private agreement with the municipality to create Uplands Park, still kept in its relatively wild state today.
Uplands has undergone changes over the years. Before the 1960s, many large acreage lots were divided. Since the 1970s, about 20 per cent of the original Uplands homes have been redeveloped, McCann said. Over time, elements of Olmsted’s vision for Uplands as a residential park have been eroded.
“Across Uplands, various compromises accommodate the impulses of modern life, contributing to the loss of open grounds and view corridors,” McCann writes.
For example, street-fronting fences have become more prominent and higher. To achieve Olmsted’s park-like effect, an early deed restriction banned front-yard fences. Another ruled that a side-lot hedge or fence must be set at least 60 feet away from the street allowance and be no more than three feet high. But fences and hedges grew until the height restriction for hedges was done away with by the end of the 1940s.
What of the future of Uplands? McCann believes that, if managed wisely, “Olmsted’s vision of Uplands as a residential park will prevail well into the future, preserving a unique residential landscape surely worthy of heritage recognition.”