By Brian Mason

Defined by its margins, James Bay lacks an inspiring centre. Inside a well-defined border comprising Beacon Hill Park, the grounds of St. Ann’s Academy, the Empress Hotel, the Inner and Outer Harbours, and Dallas Road, James Bay comes down to what? The history and development of the peninsula in modern times have been haphazard. Thrown about by its proximity to the provincial seat of government and the municipal centre, the community has waxed and waned like the tides undercutting its southern boundary.

James Bay, over the years, has been a catch-all for trends on the rise or in decline: a home for civil servants working in the precinct, convenient shores on which to situate marine light-industry, shelter for the bell-bottomed, tie-dyed seekers of the sixties, a place for poor, single-parent families, and today, increasingly, a central address for the affluent. Expensive real-estate now elbows the neighbours in a bid to see how big a structure can be placed on small duplex lots, Shoal Point emerging as the ultimate shrine of opulence, bad design and blocked sunsets. A letter writer to the Beacon once commented on the random scattering of high-rises throughout James Bay. It was as if someone had thrown pebbles out a passing airplane and then built a high-rise wherever one had landed. This form of urban planning continues more or less unchecked.

Within walking or cycling distance of nearly everything one could want in a city, James Bay is ruled, ironically, by the automobile. The narrow streets – except for the odd surprise like wide Rithet – are given over to the safety and convenience of cars. Pedestrians and the disabled on electric scooters or in wheelchairs are left to make do on cramped sidewalks dotted with obstacles of wondrous variety: old, wooden telephone poles, bus benches, bus shelters, bus stops, traffic signs, guy wires, garbage bins, secured bicycles, electrical boxes, fire hydrants and more. Cyclists, meanwhile, are set up as targets for car drivers in a rush, as they always are. In the middle of the peninsula, five streets converge at the parking lot of a shopping mall – at once the de facto and symbolic centre of James Bay. There, the noise and exhaust of vehicles slowing and accelerating at the five stop signs is a constant reminder of the mechanical object on which we have bestowed the highest social value. Pedestrians and cars traversing “the corners” are placed in complicated opposition, always wary of whose turn it is to make the next move. Nearby, a newly built, beautiful cob bench is crumbling, the bas-relief salmon design disappearing at the same rate as its namesake ocean species. A banner honouring Emily Carr, which once hung from a light standard above traffic at “the corners” – almost so Emily could keep an observant, disapproving eye on the changes in her community – has been moved indoors to overwinter in a place of safety in a seniors’ centre.

Inappropriate development is one thing, but it is not the chief problem of James Bay: it is cars. They have come to define both the heart and veins of the neighbourhood. Jim Diers, a community planner from Washington State and the first director of Seattle’s department of neighbourhoods, spoke last March at Victoria city hall on creating vibrant communities. He talked of ways to reclaim the space stolen from people by the monopoly of the automobile: just take it back, was the answer. Use the streets as artistic and play space. His ideas echo those of Australia-based community consultant David Engwicht, whose book Street Reclaiming included many delightful ideas for taking back the streets. Do chalk art on the road, play street hockey, set up a circle of lawn chairs in a parking spot and have a chat with friends, roll out grass on a piece of pavement and sunbathe. There are numerous possibilities. As Engwicht pointed out, streets used to be used for much more than car traffic. Traditionally, they were places where children played or set up lemonade stands, street vendors sold their wares, milk- and breadmen made deliveries, pedestrians criss-crossed freely, and where the elderly and disabled did not feel intimidated or unwanted. Streets were part of a person’s home territory and perceived in benign terms. Today, with car crashes the leading cause of death for people under age 30 and killing nearly 3,000 Canadians every year, that feeling has been run over.

Another way to slow or discourage car traffic is to continually change the scene at the side of a busy street. Leave an empty baby stroller or a child’s tricycle near the curb, place a large, potted plant or a sofa beside the road, paint a telephone pole, set up a lemonade stand, leave out a street-hockey net and hockey sticks, anything to change the landscape. And keep changing it. Drivers are awakened by change and will slow down, unsure of what to expect, their rote behaviour interrupted: the street scene will have begun to shift in favour of the people. Drivers will begin to understand they are intruding on someone’s home territory, that the street is something other than a speed route or shortcut put there for cars alone.

In James Bay, of course, there is more than King Car. There are roaring, belching tour buses, plodding horse-drawn carriages, and speeding taxis, growing in number every year, and all in servitude to the increasing number of cruise ships berthing at Ogden Point. The black, unhealthy smoke from their bunker-fuelled engines spews around the clock. The residents have been assured it is safe. Regardless, it results in a few low-wage jobs, also considered good.

A letter writer to the Beacon a few months ago called for the closing of one of the streets at “the corners”. That would be a promising first step. Real progress would arrive on the day when people were invited to stand on the five converging streets for the unveiling of a new James Bay square, completely and forever closed to cars. Fernwood got itself the Cornerstone Cafe. James Bay would do well to aim for the Cornerless Bistro.