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Q: Why is Broadway not a numbered avenue like its neighbours?
A: Vancouverites must not care for the number nine. How else to explain why city planners apparently skipped the digit when deciding the only logical name to give the street between 8th Avenue and 10th Avenue was, obviously, 'Broadway?'
Actually, Broadway used to be known as the more logical 9th Avenue up until a century ago.
But the street lost its nines, as it happens, in the year 1909.
That's when a group of businessmen successfully petitioned the city to change the name of the grand street to Broadway.
"It had to do with local businesspeople wanting to steal a page from New York and make Broadway a major street," says local historian and author Chuck Davis.
According to city archivist Major J.S. Matthews, says Davis, it was thought that the change would "help promote some mysterious advantage."
One hundred years later, the jury's still out on the strategy.
Davis's tome, The History of Metropolitan Vancouver, is expected to be published later this year.