 |
| Gastown c.1880 - Vancouver Archives Dist P11.1 |
The history of Gastown began in 1867, when John Deighton erected his Globe Saloon on what is now the corner of Water and Carrall streets. The local inhabitants conferred Deighton with the endearment of “Gassy Jack” because “he had the gift of grouping words, which he flung from him with the volubility of a fake doctor.”[1] The handful of buildings that grew up alongside Deighton’s saloon unofficially became known Gastown until 1870 when the colonial government concluded a survey of the Gastown area and renamed it after the Colonial Secretary, the Earl of Granville.
In early April of 1886, the Granville Townsite was incorporated as the City of Vancouver. Two months later, a fire reduced a significant portion of the city to ashes. Alderman W. H. Gallagher exclaimed that, “the city did not burn; it was consumed by flame.”[2] Yet, as if undeterred from a minor setback, Vancouver arose from the detritus of destruction and rebuilding began apace. It was in the immediate years after the fire that Gastown’s trademark physical structure and environment formed.
 |
| Gastown rebuilding after the Great Fire 1886 - Vancouver Archives Str P7.1 |
In order to prevent Vancouver from succumbing to another fire in the future, City Council introduced stricter building standards (i.e. stone instead of timber). Furthermore, the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1887 also encouraged the use of higher quality building materials as it became “a city expressing the vision and spirit of its hopes of becoming a great metropolis.”[3]
Between 1887 and 1914, Gastown developed into its current form consisting of ornate and often opulent brick and stone buildings, however, even by 1900 Gastown’s glory was fading. Vancouver’s core of retail businesses shifted south and westward towards the CPR’s land grant - towards real estate speculation. Concurrently, the old business centre around Water and Cordova streets became a wholesale and warehouse district.[4] Marc Denhez, a heritage specialist, notes that after 1914:
Gastown was now being left alone . . . and thus began Gastown’s fifty-year journey on the slippery slope of economic stagnation and social decline. The warehouses gradually empties, and the hotels often became home for Vancouver’s skid-roaders.[5]
In the first decades of the twentieth century, Gastown and other Canadian inner-cities became synonymous with poor housing and living conditions, squalor and disease and deviant behaviour. Heather Frost and David Ley state that the “combination of working-class households, environmental degradation, and poverty converged on the inner city to create the popular stereotype of the slum behind the industrial waterfront and around the rail yards” and the “presence of ‘exotic’ populations added to the strange and menacing image of the inner-city slum.”[6] This perception of Gastown among other factors such as a real-estate speculation and larger events like the Great Depression are reasons that, as journalist Gary Bannerman notes, “while Vancouver progressed to a splendour its earliest pioneers couldn’t have imagined, its place of origin sunk to the depth of despair.”[7]
 |
| Bird's eye view of Water, Cordova and Richards Streets, Ca.1912 - Vancouver Archives CVA 7-193 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Eric Nicol, Vancouver (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1970), 32.
[2] Quoted in Nicol, 64.
[3] “Walking Tour Supplement” in Gary Bannerman, Gastown: The 107 Years, (North Vancouver: The Times of North and West Vancouver, 1974), 11.
[4] Norbert MacDonald, “‘C.P.R. Town’: The City-Building Process in Vancouver, 1860-1914,” in G.A. Stetler and Alan F.J. Artibise, eds., Shaping the Urban Landscape: Aspects of the Canadian City-building Process (Toronto: Carleton Library Series, 1982), 405.
[5] Marc Denhez, Heritage Fights Back: Legal, Financial and Promotional Aspects of Canada’s Efforts to Save its Architectural and Historic Sites, (Vancouver: Heritage Canada and Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1978), 189.
[6]David Ley and Heather Frost, “The Inner City,” in Canadian Cities in Transition: Local Through Global Perspectives, ed. Trudi Bunting and Pierre Filion, 3rd ed. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2006), 193.
[7] Gary Bannerman, Gastown: The 107 Years, (North Vancouver: The Times of North and West Vancouver, 1974), 18.
