The Normal School Red Oak

The city's heritage register carries one line about this tree: Northern Red Oak, 501 West 12th Avenue. No age, no girth, no account of who put it there, and nothing else written about it anywhere we have looked, which is unusual for a tree on a register at all. So take what follows as the address talking rather than the tree. That address is the Provincial Normal School, built in 1908 and 1909, a normal school being a teacher training college; British Columbia sent its future schoolteachers here. The building was given municipal heritage protection in 1986, and in 1989 Paul Merrick Architects put a shopping centre around it rather than over it, which is why the school's brick front still faces West 12th from inside a mall called City Square. The oak stands out on the grounds, a minute from the Broadway-City Hall SkyTrain entrance and a short walk along the same street from City Hall's own listed oak, which makes the two of them one easy stop. Quercus rubra is an eastern North American tree and did not reach this coast on its own, so somebody planted it on purpose. When, nobody appears to have recorded, and the school's dates are not an answer for the tree. If you know, tell us.