Live in Hastings-Sunrise

This was the Hastings Townsite, a provincial government reserve set aside in 1863 and surveyed separately from the city to the west. It voted to amalgamate with Vancouver on 21 December 1910 — one voter of about 1,200 against — and joined in 1911, adding roughly 4,000 people. The legacy is physical: the east–west streets north of First Avenue still jog at Nanaimo Street where the two surveys meet, and the housing that filled in afterwards followed a different rhythm from the pre-1911 city. The first settlement on Burrard Inlet was here too, at New Brighton, where the Brighton Hotel opened in 1865 at the end of the Douglas Road stagecoach from New Westminster.

The boundaries. The official local area runs from Burrard Inlet in the north to East Broadway in the south, and from Nanaimo Street to Boundary Road — about 8.3 km², one of the largest of the city's 22 local areas, with 34,575 residents at the 2016 census. It is a genuinely mixed place: East Asian residents were about 40% of the population at that census, and Italian was still the first language of 7.3% of residents in 2001 — the reason the restored Hastings Park has a formal Italian Garden, opened in 2000.

The main street. East Hastings from Nanaimo to Boundary is the commercial and transport spine — independent grocers, bakeries and restaurants rather than chains, with the R5 RapidBus (which replaced the 95 B-Line on 6 January 2020) running straight downtown. There is no SkyTrain station inside the area; Rupert and Renfrew sit off the southern edge, which makes the bus, not the train, the default commute.

The defining edge. Hastings Park — 62 hectares of PNE fairground, Playland, the Pacific Coliseum (1968) and the restored Sanctuary wetland — sits at the centre, and the land north of it drops to the port, the rail yards and New Brighton Park with the city's only waterfront outdoor pool. In 1942 that same park was used as a detention and processing site for roughly 8,000 Japanese Canadians removed from the coast, most of them women and children housed in the livestock buildings; the Momiji Garden, opened 17 April 1993, marks it. Racing ended at Hastings Racecourse on 5 December 2025 after 136 seasons, so what the park's southeast corner becomes is now an open question.

Worth knowing before you commit

A fairground, a port and a racetrack in transition

Cheaper and quieter than the inner east side, with two weeks a year when it is neither

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• The PNE Fair runs from the third Saturday of August to Labour Day and Fright Nights runs most of October — on blocks near Hastings Park that means traffic, parking pressure and evening noise for weeks
• There is no SkyTrain station inside the local area; Rupert and Renfrew are on the southern flank, so most commutes start with the R5 or the 16 bus
• Thoroughbred racing ended at Hastings Racecourse on 5 December 2025 after 136 seasons — the casino continues, but the future of that corner of the park is undecided
• The port, the rail yards and the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge define the northern edge; container and train noise carries, especially on still nights
• New Brighton Park sits within the 1960s combined sewer system, which can discharge during heavy rain — check advisories before swimming at the beach
• Much of the housing dates from the 1910s–1950s build-out of the old townsite, so budget for envelope, wiring and drainage diligence on anything unrenovated

How Hastings-Sunrise got here

• 1863The province sets aside the Hastings Townsite as a government reserve running from Nanaimo Street to Boundary Road and from Burrard Inlet to 29th Avenue — surveyed separately from the land to the west, which is why the east–west streets still jog at Nanaimo today.
• 1865The Brighton Hotel opens at New Brighton, on the beach where New Brighton Park now sits — the first settlement on Burrard Inlet, reached by stagecoach along Douglas Road from New Westminster and by rowboat to the Moodyville and Stamp's mills. A 1968 city plaque on the site records that everything began at Hastings: the first road, hotel and post office.
• 1889Thoroughbred racing begins at what was then East Park, the parkland the province had granted the city for public recreation the year before; the British Columbia Jockey Club leases 16 acres in 1890. The track ran for 136 seasons.
• 1910The Vancouver Exhibition Association holds its first fair at Hastings Park in August, opened by Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier — the beginning of the PNE. On 21 December, Hastings Townsite votes to amalgamate with Vancouver, with only one voter of about 1,200 against; the merger takes effect in 1911 and adds roughly 4,000 people to the city.
• 1942After Canada's declaration of war on Japan, Hastings Park is used as a detention and processing site for Japanese Canadians removed from the coast. Roughly 8,000 people — largely women and children, housed in the park's livestock buildings — passed through before being sent to internment camps in the BC Interior or to sugar-beet farms; the Momiji Garden, opened on the East Hastings side of the Garden Auditorium on 17 April 1993, commemorates them.
• 1954Empire Stadium opens at Hastings Park for the British Empire and Commonwealth Games and hosts the Miracle Mile, in which Roger Bannister and John Landy both run the mile in under four minutes. The stadium went on to house the BC Lions from 1954 to 1982 before demolition in the early 1990s.
• 1968The Pacific Coliseum — the Rink on Renfrew — opens on 8 January at a cost of $6 million; it is the Vancouver Canucks' home from 1970 to 1995, and hosts figure skating and short-track speed skating at the 2010 Winter Olympics.
• 1999The Hastings Park restoration, won after years of lobbying by the Hastings-Sunrise community, converts 10.7 hectares of blacktop back to park: the Sanctuary wetland (1999), the Italian Garden (2000), and Empire Fields with a skatepark (2001).

The resident's angle: the park is superb for about ten months and an event site for the other two. The Sanctuary and the Momiji Garden are quiet at almost any hour; the fair fortnight in late August and Fright Nights in October are not. New Brighton is the better everyday green space if you want water and a view rather than programming — but the pool is seasonal, and the beach is subject to sewer-overflow advisories after heavy rain.

Civic passes are the cheap route, but drop-in capacity fills fast in winter and commercial gyms are thin on the ground east of Nanaimo — check current schedules, hours and membership terms before you plan a routine around any single facility.