Five Corners, the Heart of Old Chilliwack BC

After the usual Christmas Day rain, Boxing Day was sunny and a balmy 10 Celsius. Annette and I took advantage of the good weather and drove to Chilliwack BC to visit the old section of the town. Five Corners is so named as three roads intersect here. One of the roads was originally known as Landing Road, which was the road leading to the original settlement named Chilliwack Landing located on the banks of the Fraser River. At some point Landing Road is renamed Wellington and appears as such at the junction. The second is Old Yale Road, which was is the original road created to join New Westminster BC to Yale BC, which is located in the Fraser River Canyon. The remaining street name is Young Road, all of these are major thorough fares in the north part of the city.

For many years this important crossroads area has been neglected and was showing its age as evidenced by the rundown state of the buildings and the closed businesses. Visiting the area today it is obvious the city has spent time and money on revitalization and as part of that process has allowed a new residential-shopping area named District 1881 to be built. The project re-creates narrow pedestrian only streets, with numerous shops on the bottom and one and two story condos above.

The buildings are lovely, and they are doing a great job of re-creating an old style shopping environment with what will be popular stores, restaurants, and pubs on the mall, right in the centre of the small downtown area. Within a two block radius in any direction are all the larger stores, services, and grocery stores you need.

We also spent some time and walked around the blocks adjacent to the 5 Corner intersection and were pleased to see the progress in re-vamping the older buildings on the streets. Some of the stores had historic newspaper articles detailing the history of the street itself which made for interesting reading.

After spending a couple of hours wandering the neighbourhood, we headed with the setting sun and were rewarded with a full moon rising over the local mountains.

Pictures of that wonderful moon and the rest of the day's pictures can be found here on my Flickr web site.

. .