In the late 1980s, the 58-acre (23-hectare) Village North site was owned by the province and zoning was controlled by the Resort Municipality of Whistler (RMOW). Whereas the original village development had been mainly visitor driven, Village North was envisioned as supporting the community and bringing residents and visitors together.
Community workshops were held through 1988 to determine what residents wanted to see in Village North before any rezoning was planned. According to then-director of planning Mike Vance, one idea was to locate facilities such as the post office, medical centre, municipal hall, library, and museum in this area.
At a speaker event in 2019, landscape architect Eldon Beck described his vision for this plan: “This was intended to gradually involve the community in shopping, recreation, coming down to the town hall, coming to the library. So it’s a sequence of community-interest activities merging then with the tourism population coming the other way, so the Northlands is where these communities all come together.”
The next step was to divide the entire site into parcels and zone each parcel in accordance with a master plan. Together, the RMOW, Beck, and Whistler Land Company Developments (WLC) developed a master plan even more detailed than that created for the first village site, including not just the purpose of each parcel but also the individual elements of each building. According to Vance, this level of detail led to “the largest single deposit in the land registry office’s history,” taking most of a day to sign all of the documents involved.
Council voted to approve the zoning bylaws for Village North on August 14, 1989 and by the end of 1990 WLC began selling development parcels. According to then-mayor Drew Meredith, it took some time for Village North to get going and it remained “a weed patch” until developers such as Nat Bosa decided they wanted to be involved.
Once it got going, however, work progressed quickly; Vance recalled a year when up to 11 cranes were up on the Village North site.
Looking back in 1997, WLC president Jim Switzer said that the development of a master plan and the completed zoning provided stability and certainty for developers who knew exactly what was expected of them, and for the RMOW which could plan for the future based on a clear picture of how development would proceed.
In 1993, Mayor Ted Nebbeling cut the ribbon of the bridge over Village Gate Boulevard, officially connecting the Village Stroll through Village North. By 1997, the last of the development parcels was sold and the entire site was expected to be completed by the end of 1999.
Not everything in Village North went entirely smoothly. Beck’s vision was to have a series of buildings descending with the grade of the Village Stroll, but provincial regulations and the fire department required flat and level platforms, leading to a design with more steps, ramps and raised walkways than Beck wanted and narrowing the pedestrian stroll.
Some developers also didn’t want to stick to the master plan. In 2019, Jim Moodie, then a development consultant for WLC, remembered that the developer of Marketplace tried to convince them that he could “give [them] more money for [their] land” if the developer was allowed to build a one-level strip mall with parking out front and no residential units on top. Not surprisingly, the developer was told to stick to the plan.
In 1997, Switzer said that the primary job of the WLC was to recover the province’s investment in Whistler. According to the calculations of then-Whistler councillor Garry Watson, the province invested about $20 million in Whistler when they formed the WLC in 1983 and made around $50 million on the development of Village North. Or, as Meredith summed it up, “They got all their money back and then some” and Whistler got the extended village we see today.
For Part 1 of this series, “Selling ideas of the village,” Aug 16, 2021, go to piquenewsmagazine.com/museum-musings/museum-musings-selling-ideas-of-the-village-4212668.)
