When it comes to urban parks, Vancouver's got some heavy hitters.

There's Queen Elizabeth Park, this majestic sprawling oasis on top of a small mountain.

There's Pacific Spirit Regional Park, which has these enormous ancient evergreens.

There's Stanley Park, a thousand-acre rainforest that was at one point literally named

the top park in the world. So by comparison, Guelph Park, this postage stamp-sized park,

in a working-class neighborhood, it never even really registered for most people.

But in 1991, an art installation changed that. It galvanized a small community.

It pitted residents against the city government, and ultimately, it renamed the park itself.

You know, that evolution of the park was something that was far beyond just a community happening.

It's something that took on a life of its own.

I'm Dylan Thoris, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange,

incredible, and wondrous places. Today, we're visiting Vancouver, Canada to learn

how Guelph Park transformed itself into what it is now. Dude, chilling, park. That's next.

In the 1990s, Vancouver's Mount Pleasant Neighborhood was more than anything just pleasant.

It was a non-descript working-class neighborhood.

That's Christopher Richardson, a former city park's commissioner. He knows Vancouver parks,

like the back of his hand, and he's a bit of a local historian. Anyway, Mount Pleasant had

breweries, artist studios, and three-story apartment buildings on tree-lined streets.

But it wasn't a destination.

This unassuming little artsy neighborhood had an equally unassuming little park in it,

called the Guelph Park, which is named after an old British royal family or something along those

lines. It was just a typical ordinary, uh, run-of-the-mill community park, like, and of the 215

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