This is a shot my dad took of Victoria's Inner Harbour in 1971, and below it is a shot of the harbour I took a few weeks ago. My, how things have changed.
In the foreground, the most obvious change is the rearrangement of the docks. Seaplanes still come into the harbour, but they don't dock in this part of it anymore. In the background, well, nothing's the same. All the buildings are gone, and the big piers jutting out into the harbour are gone. The MV Coho that dominates my photo docked on the other side of the harbour in 1971. The only building that remains is the old
CPR Steamship Terminal building in the top left corner. In 1971, it was the
Victoria Royal London Wax Museum; after recent renovations and seismic upgrading it's now the
Robert Bateman Centre.
Missing entirely now is the Undersea Garden (seen behind the seaplane in dad's photo). The Undersea Gardens was a long-time tourist attraction in the harbour. It's a 150-foot purpose built vessel where,
according to Wikipedia, visitors "....descended 15 feet (4.6 m) beneath the ocean surface to look through the many viewing windows of the aquariums that surrounded the vessel and see the various marine life of coastal British Columbia, in their natural and protected environment." It was originally opened at the Oak Bay Marina in 1964, then it was towed to the Inner Harbour in 1969, but closed last year. We saw it this past January while
kayaking in the harbour. It was towed to a shipyard where it sat waiting to be scrapped or sold.
This marker designates the Pacific terminus of the 8,000 km long Trans-Canada Highway.
Sometime between then and now, the maker has been replaced. I took a picture of the new marker this past summer:
And if you're dying to know what the backside of the marker looks like...
Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that something has been added directly behind the Mile 0 marker.
