In December, City Council will receive a report from the Civic Assets Naming Committee recommending that the lane between Harwood and Burnaby streets be named Maxine Lane to honour Maxine MacGilvray an enterprising Vancouver business women.

Maxine’s name was chosen because of her strong connection to the West End with her beauty school and salon on Bidwell, and to help reclaim her name from the column inches of silliness written about her and her business. I wrote a blog post in 2014 on Maxine to disprove the nonsense written about her and the Bidwell building.

Why are the lanes in the West End getting names?

Because of the nature of the original survey of the West End in 1882 as New Liverpool, the lanes ended up being 30 feet wide which in Vancouver is technically a street. The recently passed West End Community Plan permits townhouse construction in the lanes, and to build you need an address and to get an address you need a street name.

To find out more about names and the proposed names for the West End check out the Reserve List which is maintained by the Civic Assets Naming Committee. Interested in contributing suggestions to be added to the list, submit them here.