North Vancouver

North Vancouver was top of CBC radio's national news yesterday evening. Every time I see or hear "North Vancouver" I perk up, probably because I was born there and, for the first 5.5 years of my life, lived beside Edgemont Village, then a year or so in Queensbury before our family moved across the water to Kerrisdale.

The news concerned a number of stabbings at the Lynn Valley Public Library, located in the Lynn Valley Mall, a complex I am familiar with because I spent a couple years working in the area as a residential care day programmer after graduating from university. To my recollection, the mall was never a particularly dangerous place, though Lynn Valley does have a rough history that dates back to its "Shaketown" days, so named for its many shake-sided shacks, when Lynn Valley was still considered part of the wilderness.

Curious about North Vancouver's other neighbourhood names, I searched "North Vancouver neighbourhoods" and most of what came up were realtor sites, like Kim Taylor's, whose neighbourhood map is featured at the top of this post. Edgemont Village did not come up because it is in Capilano Heights. Historic townsites like Moodyville or Maplewood did not come up because, presumably, Moodyville sounds depressing to potential home buyers and Maplewood was populated by a later generation of squatters resistant to concepts like private property, despite the fact that the land these squatters were on was -- and remains -- unceded Coast Salish territory.