History of Vancouver

Intersection at Granville and Hastings Streets, early 1900s. HISTORY OF VANCOUVER Vancouver’s history as an urban centre got off to a snappy start in 1867. All that was here on the south shore of Burrard Inlet was the Hastings Sawmill and a couple of tiny native family groupings too small to call settlements. It was so quiet you could shout across the inlet and be heard by someone on the other side. Then, on the last day of September, a ruddy-faced and forever- talking saloon keeper from New Westminster, John Deighton (they called him “Gassy Jack”), came rowing around the heavily forested peninsula that loomed over the entrance to the inlet and aimed his rowboat straight for the mill. With him in the boat was his native wife, her mother and a cousin, a couple of sticks of furniture, an old yellow dog and a barrel of whiskey. The history of this area was about to change forever. The canny Deighton knew that the workers in the mill had nowhere nearby to get a drink. They either had to walk 8 Photo courtesy of City of Vancouver Archives the many miles through the forest (where they might meet a bear) to New Westminster, or row themselves there around the peninsula on a trip that would take the better part of a day. There was a larger mill on the other side of the inlet, with a tiny settlement around it, but it was run by the stern Sewell Moody, and he allowed no liquor of any kind. Deighton beached his tiny craft on the shore near the mill and approached the workmen. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I intend to build a saloon here. If you’ll help me build it, you can have all the whiskey you can drink.” The Globe Saloon went up in 24 hours. Some say Vancouver ABOUT THE CITY began with the mill, others give the credit to the saloon. Perhaps they should share the credit. When you walk through Gastown today—the “old town” Vancouver area named for the garrulous Gassy Jack— and stand by his statue, you’re very close to where the Globe stood. There’s a plaque on the statue’s base (which is shaped like a whiskey barrel) that says the local citizens chose the name ‘Vancouver.’ Don’t you believe it. The name was chosen by the president of the Canadian Pacific Railway, one William Van Horne, a no-nonsense hard-headed man who had pushed the CPR across the country and over the Rockies to reach this point and wanted a name that would indi- cate where the city was. Its formal name was Granville, for the colonial secretary of the time. “No one will know where that is,” Van Horne snorted. “But everyone knows about the Pacific northwest explorations of Captain George Vancouver.” And so Vancouver it became. Vancouver 9 Lions Gate Bridge, ca 1939. Incorporation came April 6, 1886 at a modest ceremony in Jonathan Miller’s house. A civic election followed quickly, and a month later the first piece of business at the first meeting of Vancouver’s first city council, presided over by its first mayor, Malcolm Maclean, was the drafting of a petition to lease from the federal government a 1,000-acre military reserve to be enjoyed by the city as a park. That became Stanley Park. (We still pay a lease of $1 a year for it.) The tiny city, a ramshackle tumble of stumps, brush and crude wooden buildings was little more than two months old on June 13, 1886 when a swift and furious fire—started when a sudden freak squall blew in sparks from clear- ing fires to the west—destroyed it in a time recalled as perhaps 20 to 30 minutes. “Vancouver didn’t burn,” said a contemporary, “It exploded.” At least eight people perished, perhaps as many as 20. It was hard to tell, the destruction was so complete. The Great Fire left a pitiful scattering of buildings. One of them, once a general store for the mill’s workers and their families, is now a little museum in the western part of the city. It was moved there on a barge in 1930. Rebuilding began within hours after the fire. 10 Photo courtesy of City of Vancouver Archives The first Canadian Pacific Railway passenger train to arrive in Vancouver, tugged in by the famous little locomotive #374, arrived in May of 1887, adorned with a large photograph of Queen Victoria. (#374, beautifully restored, is on display these days in its own brick-lined room at the eastern end of Davie Street.) When the CPR announced Vancouver would be the railway’s terminus, the town’s population had been about 400. Four years after the railway arrived, it was 13,000. Many, many more thousands of people would arrive in the city over that same line dur- ing the following decades. The first train was followed a month later by the arrival from Japan of the CPR-chartered S.S. Abyssinia with a cargo of tea, silk and mail bound ABOUT THE CITY for London. The Abyssinia’s arrival marked the beginning of the trans-Pacific, trans-Atlantic trade using the new railway. It left no doubt the little city was going to thrive. A fine sense of the vitality of the city can be seen in a short film made here in 1907 by a man named William Harbeck. He stuck a camera on the front of a city street car and filmed the city’s daily life. It’s black-and-white, of course, and silent, and it’s fascinating. The streets are alive with people hurrying here and there, horse-drawn buggies clatter by, boys on bicycles zip in front of the camera, ladies with street-length gowns sweep (literally!) along the sidewalks . it’s the earliest film we know of that shows the city. The years from 1909 to 1913 were particularly feverish here. One typical newspaper of the day had sixty pages of real estate ads. A tremendous amount of building went on in those years, and many of Vancouver’s most well-known structures—some still standing—went up in those few years: Vancouver 11 • the Vancouver Block, the stocky white building on Granville just south of Georgia Street, topped by a big illuminated clock. • The Rogers Building, a handsome white terra cotta building at Granville and Pender, named for its developer, Jonathan Rogers (who happened to be the first passenger to step down from the first train) • The “Old Sun Tower,” the funky green-towered building on Pender Street that began life as the World Building, named for a now-defunct daily newspaper (magician and escape artist Harry Houdini once hung upside down from this building enclosed in a strait jacket . and, of course, escaped) • The Dominion Building, another funky relic of those years, an oddly shaped red-and-orange skyscraper at the northwest corner of Hastings and Cambie. A walk around downtown is rewarded by seeing these and other famous city buildings. The third and present Hotel Vancouver is a perfect example. Built in the famous chateau style by the CPR the hotel has been a landmark in the city since 1939, two of its first guests being King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. Speaking of notable buildings, Vancouver’s Chinatown is rich with them. The combination of their narrow, multi-colored facades (which, oddly, owe as much to Portuguese architecture as Chinese, a fact too detailed to describe here), ornate balconies and colorful Chinese signage makes a visit to Canada’s largest Chinatown an essential part of a visit to the city. Even the street signs are bilingual. Music from China sounds out from open shop doors—when weather permits. There are lots of 12 Line-up at Granville and Hastings Streets to purchase Shaughnessy lots from the C.P.R., ca 1909. ABOUT THE CITY restaurants here, too, and if you like Dim Sum, you’ll love it here. The Chinese have been a part of the city’s history since the very beginning (thousands of them helped to build the CPR)—but it must be said that relations between the races haven’t always been smooth. Our earlier history is heavily sprinkled with examples of intolerance and discrimination. It’s much calmer these days, and one Van- couver suburb, Richmond, is more than a third Chinese. Other ethnic groups add to the color of the city: there is an important East Indian neighborhood on south Main Street with street signs in English and Punjabi. Big numbers of Vietnamese, German, Greek, Scandinavian and other nationalities make this perhaps the most cosmopolitan city in North America. Vancouver 13 Photo courtesy of City of Vancouver Archives Native people, too, have shared the city’s history. The first road around the Stanley Park peninsula was paved by the European settlers with shells discarded, after their contents were consumed, in vast native middens. In 1929, just before the Great Depression, two municipalities adjacent to Vancouver - South Vancouver and Point Grey - amalgamated with us to create Canada’s third largest metropolitan area. It still is. In 2015, the total population of Greater Vancouver – the city itself and 24 other members of Metro Vancouver–topped 2,504,305 residents. Point Grey, still called that, is home to the University of British Columbia, founded in 1915 and situ- ated on a sprawling 402 hectares. UBC had (in 2015) 42,986 students and 9,735 graduate students. Of the total student body, 12,117 were international students representing 155 different countries.

Load more