Architecture

This photo gives an early idea of the frontier-town atmosphere that prevailed in Vancouver before it was called Vancouver. A small, wooden St. James Church is fronted by an impossibly muddy road navigable only with the help of duck-boards. The scrappy town's ramshackle structures represented a hard-won foothold in a vast and unforgiving wilderness.

The first step to becoming a great city was to become a city in the first place, and this was accomplished to much fanfare in April 1886 when Vancouver incorporated. Two months later on June 13, almost the entire city burned to the ground; a most inauspicious start. One of the few buildings to survive was the one you see here, the Oppenheimer Building, which was still under construction at the time. It was the only brick building in the city.

Almost immediately after the fire the city became gripped with railway fever as the Canadian Pacific Railway drew near. The city's merchants sought to lure new customers with new and exciting buildings designed in a whole range of architectural styles. By far the most popular was the Renaissance-derived Italianate style seen here in the Byrnes Block. It's the building on the left.

This photo was taken just five weeks after the great fire, in July 1886. If you zoom in on the man in the black coat just right of centre, you may notice he bears a striking similarity to the antagonist in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Admittedly all the buildings are not made of brick yet, but they would soon be replaced with ones of more sturdy construction.

According to the archivist Major J.S. Matthews, the Dunn-Miller Block you see here was "at the time it was built, in 1889, the largest, most pretentious, and important building in Vancouver."¹ An example of the Italianate style, it was just the biggest of a great many commercial blocks that combined ground-level storefronts with upper-floor housing and offices.

This peculiar building was known as the Woods Hotel when it was completed in 1906. It billed itself as the "only modern" hotel in Vancouver, ¹catered to the wealthy.⁸ Hotels at this time were much more common, and they ran the gamut from posh, luxurious suites like the Woods Hotel to squalid, run-down rooming houses for the seasonal workers who needed a place to stay in the off-season. Hoteliers who could afford architectural flourish used it to great effect in standing out from the competition.

William Whiteway next went on to design the Holden Building, which you can see going up behind the Woods Hotel in this picture. As the city grew and developed, buildings like this filled the growing and rather novel need for office space. It bears some reminding that in pioneer-era Vancouver there were few white collar jobs and not much need for space for them to work. As the city grew and industrialized all sorts of new occupations sprang into existence. This particular building housed trade unions headquarters, political parties and for a time, Vancouver's city council while the new city hall was being built.

The Rex Theatre is visible on the left in this view east down Hastings Street. The Theatre is now the Army and Navy Store, but at the time it was but one of a host of glitzy and opulent vaudeville theatres, purpose-built for entertaining the masses. So many were on this it was nicknamed "The Hastings Great White Way," imitating the nickname for Broadway in New York.¹

A crowd has gathered to watch Harry Gardiner, a stunt man called "The Human Fly", climb the World Tower as part of a war bond rally. Completed in 1912, the World Tower (the Sun Tower since 1937) was a triumph of engineering and ambition. It signalled to the world that Vancouver's transition from back-woods logging town to world-class metropolis was well underway.

Here is the Dominion Building under construction. A beautiful building, it was the tallest in the British Empire until the World Tower, which we just saw, topped it. It is difficult to overstate the impact skyscrapers had on people when they first saw them. For millennia buildings had been limited to about ten storeys in height, but a confluence of industrial age technological advancements developed in Chicago after that city burned down suddenly made it possible to build into the third dimension. In those heady days anything seemed possible.

The owners of skyscrapers are uniquely vulnerable to economic swings, and it was unfortunate for the owner of the Dominion Building that the bottom fell out of the economy only four years after the grand building was completed. The Dominion Trust Company collapsed and the vice-president blew his own head off with a shotgun.¹ It was not considered a lucky building—on the building's opening night the architect also allegedly fell down the stairs and died.²

The clock tower on the building ahead is an impressive example of Baroque Revival style, briefly popular around the turn of the last century. It was an expression of imperial optimism and a reflection of the power of the state. The building the clock is mounted on was once Vancouver's post office.

This war bond drive to fund the replacement of HMS Repulse, a British battleship sunk in 1941 by Japanese bombers, was held in front of the new post office. The building was completed in 1910 and it's no coincidence it bears more than a passing resemblance to the War Office in London. This architectural style harkens back to Canada's embrace of the Mother Country and the British Empire, a time when most Canadians saw themselves as much—If not more—subjects of London than of Ottawa.

The clock tower up ahead sits atop the Vancouver Block, a stunningly beautiful building commissioned by the brother of Patrick Burns, the fabulously wealthy meat-packing magnate nicknamed the "Klondike Cattle King". It's tall and unmistakable silhouette continued to dominate the city's skyline for decades after it was completed in 1912. It firmly established Georgia and Granville as the city's commercial centre in the Edwardian era just before World War I.

Shop owners are being evicted to make way for the expansion of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) store. The store itself began as a small red-brick building on the corner of Granville and Georgia. In 1913 the style of building you see today was put at the corner of Granville and Seymour, and then expanded multiple times over the year so now it takes up much of the block. The photo above was taken before one of those expansions.

A parade to mark the opening day of the PNE carnival marches past the Hotel Vancouver and the court house (now art gallery). This iconic Hotel Vancouver was actually the third to bear the name, built by the CPR in a trademark Chateau style and meant to encourage cross-Canada railway tourism. As the railwayman Sir William Van Horne declared, "Since we can't export the scenery, we shall have to import the tourists."¹

Governor General Bessborough, a British businessman and politician, hands out medals at a ceremony in front of the court house. Today this is the art gallery. The court house, designed by legendary British Columbia architect Francis Rattenbury, was another example of official architecture meant to convey the power and wealth of the state.

We can see the court house at right and the second Hotel Vancouver at right. Rattenbury's court house gave the city centre a sober gravitas and stability, but these attributes were not reflected in his scandal-filled life. Today Rattenbury is known less for the fantastic buildings he designed than for the sensational way he died.

After the economic slump in 1913 it was over a decade until the economy began a tepid recovery. By the roaring '20s, some companies were again willing to take the risk of building new skyscrapers. The most famous is the one at left further down Burrard. The Marine Building remains one of North America's most cherished examples of the Art Deco style that briefly flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. Poet laureate Sir John Betjeman called it "the best Art Deco office building in the world."¹

The Marine Building was completed in 1930, right at the outset of the Great Depression. Once again all building ground to a halt as capital dried up and the unemployment rate soared. By the time the economy rebounded after the Second World War modernism, a new school of architecture that recast the architect as an technician and social scientist instead of an artist. The beautiful buildings of Vancouver's early years gave way to simple, utilitarian structures of concrete and glass. Art Deco was the last hurrah of the old style of architecture.