Many future great Salmonbellies honed their stick skills with neighbourhood games of pick-up lacrosse on the sleepy side streets of Glenbrooke North.
That's how lifelong Glenbrooke resident Derrick Thornhill remembers it.
"That neighbourhood bore an awful lot of very successful Salmonbellies, and I think part of that was the pick-up games on the street," Thornhill says, listing off a barrage of former and current well-known lacrosse names - Tuura, Goss, Fulton, Crowley and Mydske - who have called Glenbrooke home through the years.
It's only been in the last couple of decades that Glenbrooke has been known as "Glenbrooke" - a fact Thornhill, a local Realtor, says was highlighted recently when he saw an old real estate listing of a house in the area. The listing described it as being in the "Woodward's neighbourhood," a reference to the former department store at Sixth Avenue and Sixth Street.
"That was pretty funny, because it was the neighbourhood associated with being close to Woodward's," Thornhill says.
The Glenbrooke name comes from the actual brook that flows beneath the area.
"It runs ... basically from the high school at 10th Avenue and Sixth Street and meanders down through Terry Hughes
Park, then down through the Pen and the ravine," Thornhill says. "It's all underground. You don't ever see it. It used to be a brook; now it's covered up, so it's not there. The only evidence of it is if you go down into the (Glenbrooke) ravine, there's a little brook in there."
Thornhill said he first heard the Glenbrooke North name through the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver. The name has stuck.
As far as real estate is concerned, a property in Glenbrooke North is usually pretty hot.
As with the rest of the Lower Mainland, real estate prices in the neighbourhood have risen sharply over the last decade, but relatively speaking, Glenbrooke North is still affordable - especially compared to neighbouring Queen's Park.
One of its main attractions is its proximity to local schools.
"There's no school that you need to put your kids in the car (to get to), unless it's raining or you're lazy," Thornhill says.
The real estate boom began after the replacement of Herbert Spencer Elementary and the building of the new Glenbrooke Middle School more than a decade ago, Thornhill says.
With so many families still moving in, it's pretty likely that a new crop of budding Salmonbellies are sharpening their skills on the same Glenbrooke streets that spawned so many greats.
/ Derrick Thornhill resident;
