For the past ninety years the PNE site, including the racetrack, has grown to occupy 114 acres of the 160 acres that constitutes Hastings Park. In 1910, the park, some miles from the population center of Vancouver, surrounded by bush, seemed an ideal location. Since then a stable, mainly residential community has grown up around the park.

Within that community, the impact of the annual fair and it's attendant hordes of visitors has been tolerated by local residents. However, in the mid nineties there arose a groundswell of support for a plan that would see the PNE lease discontinued and the park reclaimed as greenspace for the benefit of the surrounding community.

By 1996 a move seemed inevitable. The PNE corporation had begun it's search in earnest for a new home, and landscape architects had begun to draw up plans to redevelop the park for the people. It was this sense of imminent change, a venerable Vancouver institution about to dissolve and reinvent itself, which attracted my attention.