Vancouver, more than most places, should understand the importance of a name in shaping a community’s identity. We forever live in the shadow of that much bigger, more cosmopolitan Vancouver to the north. And people sometimes confuse our state’s name with our nation’s capital city.
It makes sense, then, to give some thought to what we will call our new neighborhood that will soon start to take shape on the Columbia shore on the old Boise-Cascade site and the Port of Vancouver’s Terminal 1 next door. So far, we’ve considered those two projects separately as Vancouver waterfront and Terminal 1, even though in the end they should meld together as a single new urban community of almost 50 acres. There’s no name that encompasses both.
I’ve always assumed that the Vancouver waterfront name attached to the old Boise-Cascade site was a placeholder in the absence of something new that might help define the city’s first-ever consciously urban neighborhood. Surely, I assumed, a more consciously creative moniker would emerge along with the buildings that will change Vancouver’s image in Clark County and the Portland metro region.
I was wrong. Barry Cain, president of Gramor Development, the Oregon company that’s building out the 35-acre mill site, said his company brainstormed names. Cain liked the Couv, a name that is disparaging to some and delightfully playful to others. Another idea that surfaced was “Watertown,” a takeoff on our Uptown. But Boston has a Watertown, Cain said, and Vancouver hardly needs another copycat name.
