Granville Island, Vancouver, will be familiar to many TravelGumbo readers, through a series of great blogs by DrFumblefinger, covering its big public market, so I won’t be spending much time on that.
But there’s no way I can pass up some of these colors (and we didn’t pass up the opportunity to buy and enjoy, either.)
The pyramids of cherries, by the way, seem to be a real Granville thing. Every vendor we saw was piling them up.
And the rhubarb: never seen a deeper richer color.
Yes, the long black ones are grapes, too! They’re called Moon Drops.
As it turns out, Granville Island isn’t really an island, it’s a peninsula, connected to South Vancouver by a bridge. But from downtown Vancouver, it takes a ferry ride across False Creek to get there, with two companies stopping there and elsewhere on the inlet.
Before it wasn’t an island, it wasn’t a peninsula, either. It started life as a tidal sandbar in the creek, and was used by original native peoples as a fishing site. When the original Granville Street bridge across the creek was built in 1889, some enterprising characters tried to use rubble from the construction as fill to get some free land.
Although they were forced to stop, during World War I, the government filled the land and created Industrial Island, a name that never stuck. It was a busy place, with shipbuilding, ropemaking and other industries until well after World War II, but by the 1950s and early 1960s, that era was over.
By 1972, the time had come for a new life, and a government corporation was charged with recycling, replacing and attracting businesses. The Granville market was one of the first creations of the project; it was followed by plenty of places to eat, both inside the market and nearby, boat rentals, and more. And some cheeky gulls.
If you’re in Vancouver, you could do what we did: Catch a ferry to the market for breakfast, enjoy the sun a while, and then take another ferry to the excellent Museum of Vancouver and Vancouver Maritime Museum.
