Each year we have tried in this column to include some local anniversary dates as reminders of how the community has changed since the city's beginning.
In looking back to the spring seasons of past decades, we find a few instances that are both interesting and pertinent to some recent events. Going back just 50 years, we find one related to the history of The Royal Westminster Regiment. It was in the third week of May 1963, that the Westminster Regiment, not yet with the term "Royal," was given the Freedom of the City of New Westminster.
During this past week, New Westminster welcomed a visiting delegation from Moriguchi, Japan, who have enjoyed exploring their sister city and actively participating on May 25 in the Hyack Festival parade. Fifty years ago, in early 1963, a ceremony took place in Moriguchi which formalized the sister-city relationship between the two cities.
Then mayor Beth Wood travelled to Japan for the ceremony, and later that year the mayor of Moriguchi, Masataka Kizaki, came to the Royal City to formalize the event. The most recent delegation continues this ongoing relationship, 50 years and counting, the first of its kind in Canada after the Second World War.
Another 50-year anniversary related to our first sister city, concerns the favourite and very popular park area now known as Friendship Gardens, then the Japanese Gardens. The forested area, greatly damaged by typhoon Freda in 1962, was to be redeveloped into a Japanese garden in recognition of the sister city arrangement and in late May, 1963, an expenditure of not more than $33,500 was authorized by the city for construction of the new park space.
Those are three 50-year anniversaries, but the next will take us back 150 years to April of 1863 and yet another park area, a large piece of land to be "reserved in the Suburbs." In 1863, the plans for the city were being laid down on the forested and heavily bush-covered landscape. It was a piece of that rough and rugged landscape that city council determined to set aside.
From council minutes we read: "In consequence of the judicious selection of the town site of New Westminster for the Capital of British Columbia by Colonel Moody, Royal Engineers, this council consider it desirable that a space of not less than '20 acres' should be reserved in the suburbs now being surveyed to be called 'Moody Square' in commemoration of the founder of the city."
This is, of course, today's Moody Park, that continues to be a vital and extremely active open area in the city - set aside and named 150 years ago. It would be many years before the park area was developed, but the action of reserving the land made it available. Many other reserves and squares from the early plans were sold and subdivided.
