Statue of Gassy
Jack in Gasstown |
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Vancouver Regional Library |
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| Cordova Street, looking east from Cambie Street (189?). |
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Vancouver is a city in British Columbia, Canada. With its location near the mouth
of the Fraser River and on the waterways of the Strait of Georgia, Howe Sound, Burrard Inlet, and
their tributaries, Vancouver has, for thousands of years, been a place of meeting, trade and
settlement.
First settlements
An Aboriginal settlement called Xwméthkwyiem, ("Musqueam"—from masqui "an
edible grass that grows in the sea"), near the mouth of the Fraser River dates back to at
least 3,000 years ago. Vancouver's ecosystem, with its abundant plant and animal life, provides a
wealth of food and materials that have likely supported people for over 10,000 years. At the time
of first European contact, the Musqueam and Squamish peoples had villages in the areas around
present-day Vancouver. There is also evidence that a third group, the Tsleil'wau-tuth, also known
today as the Burrard Band in North Vancouver, were settled on Burrard Inlet at the time of
Vancouver's arrival. These are all Coast Salish First Nations sharing cultural traits with people
in the Fraser Valley and Northern Washington. Hun'qumi'num', the downriver dialect of the
Halkomelem language was the common language of the native community at Musqueam on the Fraser
River on the south side of today's city, and also of the Tsleil-wau-tuth. The Squamish spoke a
different, though related language, Skwxwúmesh snichim, which is similar to the Sechelt
(Shishalh) and Nooksack languages and also spoken at the Squamish Nation's other main population
centre, the town of Squamish. The most famous members of Vancouver's native communities was the
late Chief Dan George of the Burrard Band.
The Native peoples of the Northwest Coast had achieved a very high level of cultural complexity
for a food gathering base. As Bruce Macdonald notes in Vancouver: a visual history: "Their
economic system encouraged hard work, the accumulation of wealth and status and the redistribution
of wealth..." Winter villages, in what is now known as Vancouver, were comprised of large
plankhouses made of Western Red Cedar wood. Gatherings called potlatches were common in the summer
and winter months when the spirit powers were active. These ceremonies were an important part of
the social and spiritual life of the people. The largest villages were at Homulchesan, near the
mouth of the Capilano River and roughly beneath where the north foot of the present Lions Gate
Bridge is today, and at Musqueam. Qwhy-qwhy was a village in Stanley Park (in the Lumberman's Arch
area), but this function was auxiliary to its role as the ceremonial grounds for the Homulchesan
Squamish across the inlet. The foundation of a Catholic mission at Mosquito Creek engendered the
creation of another large community of Squamish there. Snauq, approximately at the south foot of
the Burrard Bridge, was a smaller village, more of a single residence with extra buildings, but it
was the residence of August Jack Kahtsahlano, forger of the joint chieftaincy of the Squamish and
Musqueam and namesake of the Kitsilano neighbourhood.
European exploration and settlement
Spanish Captain Jose Maria Narvaez was the first European to explore the Strait of Georgia in
1791. In the following year, 1792, the British naval Captain George Vancouver (1757-1798) met the
Spanish expedition based at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island's west coast and further explored the
Strait of Georgia, as well as the Puget Sound in the present day Seattle area. Simon Fraser was
the first European to reach the area overland, descending the river which bears his name in 1808.
Despite the influx of the Fraser Gold Rush in 1858-59, settlement on Burrard Inlet and English Bay
was unknown prior to the early 1860s due to the power of the Squamish chiefs over the area; in
later years prospectors' bodies were found occasionally on isolated beaches, apparently from
failed attempts to land or settle. The first non-native settlement in the city limits of Vancouver
was at McCleery's Farm, in the area of what is now the Southlands area, in about 1862.
Early Growth
Lumbering was the early industry along Burrard Inlet, now the site of Vancouver's seaport. The
first sawmill began operating in 1863 at Moodyville, a planned settlement built by American lumber
entrepreneur Sewell "Sue" Moody. In 1915, expanded as a municipality and renamed
"North Vancouver"; the name Moodyville still applies to the Lower Lonsdale district,
though more as a marketing term than in common usage (Moodyville proper was a few blocks to the
east). The first export of lumber took place in 1865; this lumber was shipped to Australia. In
1865, the first sawmill on the south shore of Burrard Inlet, Stamp's Mill, began operations in
what would later become Vancouver; this mill was originally located at Brockton Point in Stanley
Park but was moved to its longtime location because of the currents and shoals at Brockton Point,
which made docking difficult. The largest trees in the world grew along the south shores of False
Creek and English Bay and provided (amongst other things) masts for the world's windjammer fleets
and the increasingly-large vessels of the Royal Navy. One famous sale of trees cut from the
Jericho neighbourhood (west of Kitsilano), was a special order for the Celestial Emperor of China
consisting of dozens of immense beams for the construction of the The Gate of Heavenly Peace in
the Forbidden City, Beijing. Millworkers and lumberers were from a wide variety of backgrounds -
mostly Scandinavians and Nootkas - who were also brought to the inlet to help with the local
whaling industry. At first, Squamish typically did not work in the mills.
A former river pilot, John (Jack) Deighton, set up a small (24' x 12') saloon on the beach about a
mile west of the sawmill in 1867 where mill property and its "dry" policies ended. His
place was popular and a well-worn trail between the mill and saloon was soon established - this is
today's Alexander Street. Deighton's nickname, Gassy Jack, came about because he was known as
quite the talker, or "gassy". A number of men began living near the saloon and the
"settlement" quickly became known as Gassy's Town, which was quickly shortened to
"Gastown". In 1870, the colonial government of British Columbia took notice of the
growing settlement and sent a surveyor to lay out an official townsite named Granville, in honour
of the then British Secretary of State for the Colonies, Granville Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl
Granville, though it was still popularly known as Gastown (and which is the name still current for
that part of the city).
The new townsite was situated on a natural harbour and for this reason it was selected by the
Canadian Pacific Railway as their terminus. The transcontinental railway was commissioned by the
government of Canada under the leadership of Prime Minister Sir John A. MacDonald and was a
condition of British Columbia joining confederation in 1871. The CPR president, William Van Horne,
decided that Granville wasn't such a great name for the new terminus because of the seedy
associations with Gastown, and strongly suggested "Vancouver" would be a better name in
part because people in Toronto and Montreal knew where Vancouver Island was but had no idea of
where Granville was. Under its new name the city was incorporated on April 6, 1886. Three months
later, on June 13, a spectacular blaze destroyed most of the city along the swampy shores of
Burrard Inlet in twenty-five minutes.
Things recovered quickly after the fire, although celebratory Dominion Day festivities to launch
the opening of the CPR were postponed a year as a result. The first regular transcontinental train
from Montreal arrived at a temporary terminus at Port Moody in July 1886, and service to Vancouver
itself began in May 1887. That year Vancouver's population was 5,000, by 1892 it reached 15,000
and by 1900 it was 100,000.
The fire which destroyed the city was eventually considered to be beneficial, as the city was
rebuilt with modern water, electricity and streetcar systems.
1900 to 1940
Economy
With the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, Vancouver’s seaport was able to compete with
the major international ports for global trade because it was positioned as an alternative route
to Europe. During the 1920s, the provincial government successfully fought to have freight rates
that discriminated against goods transported by rail through the mountains eliminated, giving the
young lawyer of the case, Gerry McGeer, a reputation as “the man who flattened the
Rockies.” Consequently, prairie wheat came west through Vancouver rather than being shipped
out through eastern ports. The federal government established the Vancouver Harbour Commission in
1913 to oversee port development. With its completion in 1923, Ballantyne Pier was the most
technologically advanced port in the British Empire. The CPR, lumber exporters, terminal
operators, and other companies based on the waterfront banded together after the Great War to
establish the Shipping Federation of British Columbia as an employers’ association to manage
industrial relations on the increasingly busy waterfront. The Federation fought vociferously
against unionization, defeating a series of strikes and breaking unions until the determined
longshoremen established the current ILWU local after the Second World War. By the 1930s,
commercial traffic through the port had become the largest sector in Vancouver’s economy.
White Man’s Province?
Although the provincial resource-based economy allowed Vancouver to flourish, it was nonetheless a
volatile economy. Two general strikes were launched in the postwar years, including Canada’s
first following the killing of trade unionist, Ginger Goodwin. Major recessions and depressions
hit the city hard in the late 1890s, 1919, 1923, and 1929, which, aside from creating hardship,
fuelled social tensions generally. In particular, the significant Chinese population was
frequently targeted in Vancouver and was subjected to systematic discrimination and periodic
upsurges of white racism. The most overt expression of this was perhaps the 1907 riots by the
Asiatic Exclusion League, an organization formed under the auspices of organized labour and
inspired from its counterpart in San Francisco. But anti-Asian racism was more continuous than
such dramatic events suggest and also included Japanese and South Asians. Politicians and
publicists promoted and disseminated racialized ideologies through widely read books such as H.
Glynn-Ward’s 1921 The Writing on the Wall and Tom MacInnes’s 1929 The Oriental
Occupation of British Columbia. Newspapermen such as L. D. Taylor of the Vancouver World and
General Victor Odlum of the Star generated a glut of racist editorials analyzing and warning about
the “Oriental Menace,” as did Danger: The Anti-Asiatic Weekly. This determination of
whites to secure BC as a “White Man’s Province” influenced federal politicians to
pass exclusionary immigration laws such as the head tax and the Chinese Exclusion Act. It also
created a climate of fear and hysteria in the 1920s, culminating in the 'Janet Smith case', in
which a Chinese houseboy was accused of killing his young, white, female co-worker. The evidence
for his guilt was based more on racial stereotyping than facts. A growing Sikh population was also
the recipient of white racism and subjected to attempts at exclusion, which was more complicated
because Indians were subjects of the British Empire. This was dramatically expressed during the
1914 Komagata Maru incident, in which a ship load of 376 British subjects from the Punjab in India
were not permitted to dock because, ostensibly, they had not come via a “continuous
passage” from their homeland. Indo-Canadians in Vancouver rallied a great deal of support for
the migrants, but the government remained intransigent. Following an incident in which, according
to the Vancouver Sun, “howling masses of Hindus” repelled an attempt by the police to
board the ship. Subsequently, the federal government sent in the armed forces and the ship
returned to India, where twenty of them were shot by police for refusing to return to the Punjab.
Vice and Politics
Vancouver’s longest serving and most often elected mayor, L. D. Taylor, followed an
“open town” policy prior to his final defeat in 1934 to Gerry McGeer. Essentially, the
policy was that vice crimes such as prostitution, gambling, and bootlegging would be managed,
rather than eliminated, so that police resources could be directed towards major crime. A
consequence of this, in addition to assumptions that Taylor was colluding with the criminal
underworld, was the maintenance of red light districts in racialized neighbourhoods, such as
Chinatown, Japantown, and Hogan's Alley, which perpetuated the association of non-whites with
immorality and vice crime. Taylor suffered the biggest electoral defeat the city had seen in 1934,
largely on this issue. McGeer ran on a law and order platform, resulting in a crackdown on vice
crimes, which, after years of Taylor’s “open town,” targeted non-white communities
disproportionately for harassment. Even the East End (today’s Strathcona) had by WWI been
largely vacated by English, Scottish, and Irish residents who moved to the wealthier (and whiter)
new developments of the West End and Shaughnessy. The East End, the original residential district
that grew up around Hasting’s Mill, was left to successive waves of new immigrants, and
became associated with poverty and vice, (as the Downtown Eastside remains today).
Property/Neighbourhood Development
The first act of City Council at its first meeting in 1886 was to request that the 1,000 acre
military reserve be handed over for use as a park. Historians have pointed out that this may seem
a strange priority for the nascent city as there was an abundance of green space at the time. The
West End, however, was designated to be an upscale neighbourhood by speculators with connections
to the CPR., They did not want the scattered settlements on this property to grow into another
industrial, working class neighbourhood. This act also signaled the beginning of the process that
would see the remaining Chinese, Portuguese, Native, white and other inhabitants evicted as
squatters in the 1920s for the creation of a seemingly pristine park. Ironically, the new Stanley
Park would over time be purged of any trace of native occupation only to be refilled with Native
artifacts more palatable to white park visitors.
By the interwar years, other neighbourhoods had grown that were working class, but not especially
impoverished or racially exclusive, such as Mount Pleasant, the suburb of South Vancouver, and
Grandview-Woodland. Even the West End was becoming less exclusive. CPR developers once again
established a new enclave for the city’s white and wealthy elite that would pull them from
the West End and be the destination for the “coming smart set.” Point Grey was
incorporated in 1908 for this purpose, and Shaughnessy Heights would be developed exclusively for
the “richest and most prominent citizens,” who were required to spend a minimum of $6,
000 on the construction of new homes, which were to conform to specific style requirements. These
patterns of economic segregation were apparently secured by 1929 when Point Grey and South
Vancouver were amalgamated with Vancouver. Point Grey included the current neighbourhoods of
Arbutus Ridge, Dunbar-Southlands, Kerrisdale and Marpole, Oakridge, Shaughnessy and South Cambie,
and South Vancouver included the current neighbourhoods of Cedar Cottage, Collingwood, Killarney,
Riley Park-Little Mountain, Sunset, and Victoria-Fraserview. William Harold Malkin was the first
mayor of the new city, having defeated incumbent Louis Denison Taylor, the champion of
amalgamation, in the 1928 civic election.
The Depression
BC was perhaps the hardest Canadian province hit by the depression. Although Vancouver managed to
stave off bankruptcy, other cities in the Lower Mainland were not so lucky, such as North
Vancouver and Burnaby. Vancouver also happened to be the target destination for thousands of
transients – unemployed young men – who traveled across Canada looking for work, often
by hopping on boxcars. This was the end of the line and had for years been a “Mecca of the
Unemployed” because, as some cynically joked, it was the only city in Canada where you could
starve to death before freezing to death. “Hobo jungles” sprouted up in the earliest
days of the depression, where men built make-shift shanty towns out of whatever they could find
(or steal). The largest of these was shut down allegedly for being unsanitary. Vancouver was also
the launching pad for the Communist-led unemployed protests that frequented the city throughout
the decade, culminating in the relief camp strike and the On-to-Ottawa Trek in 1935. Communist
agitators and their supporters also led strikes in other industries, most notably the 1935
waterfront strike, and organized a large proportion of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion from
Vancouver to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War as Canada’s (unofficial) contribution to
the International Brigades.
Civic Celebrations
Vancouver was the site of major celebrations in 1936, in part to bolster civic spirit in the midst
of the depression, as well as to celebrate Vancouver’s Jubilee. Mayor McGeer provoked
considerable controversy by organizing expensive celebrations at a time when the city was
teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and civic employees were working at a significantly reduced
pay rate. Nevertheless, he did find a great deal of support from those that agreed a celebration
would ultimately be good for the city’s prosperity. While some large expenditures were
roundly criticized – for example, the “ugly” fountain erected in Stanley
Park’s Lost Lagoon – others drew significant financial and public support, such as the
construction of a new (and the current) city hall on Cambie Street. The next major civic
celebration was the 1939 visit of the King to mark the end of the depression and the onset of
another world war.
World War II
The outbreak of the Second World War resulted in an economic boost. Local shipyards built
minesweepers and corvettes for the Royal Canadian Navy while the Boeing aircraft factory in nearby
Richmond produced parts for B-29 bomber aircrafts. In 1942, a few months after the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor, Japanese Canadians were considered security threats. They were herded into
holding areas at Hastings Park and then interned in camps in the interior by the federal
government by evoking the War Measures Act.
1950 - Present
Park Royal Shopping Centre, officially Canada's first covered shopping mall, opened in 1950. CBUT,
the oldest television station in Western Canada, first went on the air in December 1953. The Oak
Street Bridge opened in 1957 and since then connects Vancouver to Richmond across the Fraser
River. While the Second Narrows Bridge and the Lions' Gate Bridge had provided a connection to the
North Shore since 1925 and 1938 respectively, the Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing
followed in 1960. The last vestiges of British Columbia Electric Railway's streetcar and
interurban rail system were dismantled in 1958.
Another major bridge across the Fraser River, the Port Mann Bridge to Surrey, opened in 1964. Two
new universities were established, the British Columbia Institute of Technology in 1960 and the
Simon Fraser University in 1965; both have satellite campuses in Vancouver. Residents of
Strathcona - most of them Chinese - formed a protest movement lead by civic activist Mary Lee Chan
and prevented the construction of a freeway which would have resulted in the bulldozing of the
neighbourhood. In 1967, the Greater Vancouver Regional District was incorporated. Greenpeace, one
of the leading international environmental organisations, was founded in Vancouver in 1971. The
continuing growth of the airport on Sea Island resulted in the construction of another bridge
across the Fraser River, the Arthur Laing Bridge which opened in 1976.
As the Pacific Central Station replaced the Waterfront Station as the main railway station in
1979, the latter was transformed into the terminal of SeaBus and the future SkyTrain (which opened
six years later). Canada's first domed stadium, the BC Place Stadium opened in 1983. The SkyTrain
and the BC Place Stadium, as well as Science World, Canada Place and the Plaza of Nations, were
constructed for the Expo 86. This significant international event was the last World's Fair held
in North America and was considered a success, receiving 22,111,578 visits.
Source: Wikipedia under GNU Free Documentation License |
