History of Vancouver

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.

Indigenous peoples

. Historically the area of where Vancouver is now was all resource gathering places for food or materials.

The Xwméthkwyiem village at the mouth of the Fraser River dates back around 3,000 years. Vancouver's ecosystem, with its abundant plant and animal life, provides a wealth of food and materials that supported these peoples for over 10,000 years. At the time of first European contact, Sḵwxwú7mesh had villages in the areas around present-day Vancouver in places like Stanley Park, Kitsilano and False Creek area, as well as Burrard Inlet. Tsleil-Waututh were said to also be settled on Burrard Inlet at the time of George Vancouver's arrival in 1792. The largest villages were at Xwemelch'stn (sometimes rendered 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. X̱wáýx̱way was a village in Stanley Park (in the Lumberman's Arch area). The foundation of a Catholic mission at the village, called Eslha7an, near Mosquito Creek engendered the creation of another large community of Squamish there. Along False Creek, at the south foot of Burrard Bridge, another village called Senakw, existed at one time a large community, and during colonization was the residence of Sḵwxwú7mesh historian August Jack Khatsahlano.

The Indigenous 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 composed 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.

European exploration and settlement

Spanish Captain José María Narváez was the first European to explore the Strait of Georgia in 1791. He landed at Point Grey and entered Burrard Inlet. In the following year, 1792, the British naval Captain George Vancouver (1757-1798) met the Spanish expedition of Dionisio Alcalá Galiano and Cayetano Valdés y Flores off Point Grey, and together further explored the Strait of Georgia. Vancouver also explored Puget Sound in the present day Seattle area. Vancouver, surveying in small boats with his officer Peter Puget, arrived at the present city of Vancouver before the Spanish. They first landed at what Vancouver later named Point Grey. Puget informally called the place Noon Breakfast Point. Puget's name was officially given to the southwest tip of Point Grey in 1981. [cite book |last= Roberts |first= John E. |title= A Discovery Journal: George Vancouver's First Survey Season - 1792 |year= 2005 |publisher= Trafford Publishing |isbn= 978-1412070973 |pages= p. 103] [BCGNIS|17001|Noon Breakfast Point]

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, [citeweb|url=http://www.discovervancouver.com/gvb/marpole.asp|title=Marpole|first=Michael|last=Kluckner|publisher=myZone Media Inc.|accessdate=2007-01-24] 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 1867, the first sawmill on the south shore of Burrard Inlet, Stamp's Mill, began producing lumber at what is now the foot of Dunlevy Avenue in Vancouver. [McDonald, R. A. (1996). Making Vancouver: Class, status and social boundaries, 1863-1913. Vancouver, BC, Canada: UBC Press, p 7.] A site for the mill was originally planned at Brockton Point in what is now Stanley Park, but the Brockton Point site proved infeasible due to nearby currents and shoals which made docking difficult.Fact|date=April 2008 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 was not 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.” [Eric Nicol, "Vancouver". Toronto: Doubleday, 1970.] 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. [ [http://www.pacificgatewayportal.com/video/yesterday.htm] “Port of Vancouver – Yesterday,” [video] Port of Vancouver [website] .] 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. [Andrew Yarmie, “The Right to Manage: Vancouver Employers’ Associations, 1900-1923,” "BC Studies", no. 90 (1991): 40-74.] 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. [Paul A. Phillips, "No Power Greater: A Century of Labour in British Columbia". Vancouver: BC Federation of Labour/Boag Foundation, 1967.] By the 1930s, commercial traffic through the port had become the largest sector in Vancouver’s economy. [Leah Stevens, “Rise of the Port of Vancouver,” "Economic Geography" 12, no. 1 (January 1936): 61-70, and R. C. McCandless, “Vancouver’s ‘Red Menace’ of 1935: The Waterfront Situation,” BC Studies 22 (1974): 56-70.]

ocial Controversies

Although the provincial resource-based economy allowed Vancouver to flourish, it was nonetheless not immune to the vagaries of organized labour. Two general strikes were launched by labour groups during the years following the First World War, including Canada’s first general strike following the death of a 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 also may have likely fuelled social tensions. In particular, members of the new and growing Asian population were reportedly subjected to so-called "systematic discrimination" as well as periodic upsurges of more physical objections to their arrival. The most overt expression of this may have been the 1907 riots thought to have been organized by the Asiatic Exclusion League, a group formed under organized labour and inspired by its counterpart in San Francisco. [W. Peter Ward, "White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy Towards Orientals in British Columbia", 3rd ed. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2002.] But discrimination was perhaps less overt than such events suggest. It could be argued that some politicians and publicists may have promoted and disseminated controversial ideologies through popular 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 editorials analyzing and warning about the “Oriental Menace,” as did "Danger: The Anti-Asiatic Weekly". [Patricia Roy, “The Oriental ‘Menace’ in British Columbia,” J. Friesen and H. K. Ralston, eds., "Historical Essays on British Columbia", Toronto: Gage, 1980: 243-255, and Ian Macdonald and Betty O’Keefe, "Canadian Holy War: A Story of Clans, Tongs, Murder, and Bigotry". Vancouver: Heritage House, 2000.] This determination of British Colombians to secure BC's borders [Patricia E. Roy, "A White Man's Province: British Columbia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants, 1858-1914". Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1989.] influenced federal politicians to pass exclusionary immigration laws such as the head tax and the Chinese Exclusion Act. What may be called a "climate of fear and hysteria" in the 1920s, culminated in the 'Janet Smith case', in which a Chinese national was accused of killing his young, white, female co-worker. The evidence for his guilt was perhaps based more on stereotyping than facts. [Ian Macdonald and Betty O’Keefe, "Canadian Holy War: A Story of Clans, Tongs, Murder, and Bigotry." Vancouver: Heritage House, 2000.] A growing population of Indians of the Sikh religion may have also been the recipients of discrimination and subjected to attempts at exclusion, which was legally further complicated because they were subjects of the British Empire. This culmintated in the 1914 Komagata Maru incident, in which a shipload of some 376 hopefull immigrants from the Punjab in India were not permitted to dock because they had invalidated immigration policy by not coming via a continuous passage from their home country. A group of residents of Indian origin rallied in support of the passengers. As reported by the "Vancouver Sun", the incident involved “howling masses of Hindus” repelling an attempt by the Vancouver Police to board the ship. Subsequently the federal government sent in the armed forces and the ship was expelled from the port. After returning to India, twenty of the passengers were shot by police for refusing to return to the Punjab. [Johnston, Hugh J.M., "The Voyage of the Komagata Maru: the Sikh Challenge to Canada's Colour Bar". Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1979. The quote was taken from Komagata Maru.]

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. [Greg Marquis, “Vancouver Vice: The Police and the Negotiation of Morality, 1904-1935,” "Essays in the History of Canadian Law: Volume VI British Columbia and the Yukon". Hamar Foster and John McLaren, eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995: 242-273.] 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. [ [http://www.vancourier.com/issues04/035204/news/035204nn1.html Excerpt from Daniel Francis's L. D. in the Vancouver Courier] ] Taylor suffered the biggest electoral defeat the city had seen in 1934, largely on this issue. [Daniel Francis, "L. D.: Mayor Louis Taylor and the Rise of Vancouver", Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004.] McGeer ran on a law and order platform, resulting in a crackdown on vice crimes, which, after years of Taylor’s “open town,” sought to clean up crime. Unfortunately, policing non-white communities was key to successfully executing the plan. [Kay J. Anderson, "Vancouver’s Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875-1980." Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1991.] 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). [Daphne Marlatt and Carole Itter eds., "Opening Doors: Vancouver’s East End." Sound Heritage Series, vol. VIII, nos. 1-2. Victoria, BC: Aural History Project, 1979.]

Property/Neighbourhood Development

The first act of City Council at its first meeting in 1886 was to request that the convert|1000|acre|km2|sing=on 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. [Eric Nicol, "Vancouver". Toronto: Doubleday, 1970. On page 50 Nicol writes that "in addition to the substantial grant of land from Smithe's [provincial] government, the company secured appreciable holding from a private syndicate, including original residents Morton, Brighouse and Hailstone. Some of these owners of small losts made what they thought was a killing, till the rapid increase of land values proved the corpus delicti to be their own." On the setting aside of Stanley Park as part of real estate development in the West End, including the role of CPR Land Commissioner, L. A. Hamilton, see Robert A. J. McDonald, "'Holy Retreat' or 'Practical Breathing Spot'? Class Perceptions of Vancouver's Stanley Park, 1910-1913," "Canadian Historical Review" LXV, no. 2 (1984): 139-140.] , They did not want the scattered settlements on this property to grow into another industrial, working class neighbourhood. [Mike Steele, "The Stanley Park Explorer", Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 1985, and Eric Nicol, "Vancouver". Toronto: Doubleday, 1970.] This act also signaled the beginning of the process that would see the remaining inhabitants of various origins evicted as squatters in the 1920s for the creation of a seemingly pristine park. [Jean Barman, "Stanley Park’s Secret: The Forgotten Families of Whoi Whoi, Kanaka Ranch, and Brockton Point," Vancouver: Harbour Publishing, 2005.] It has been suggested that perhaps the new Stanley Park would over time be purged of any trace of native occupation. However over time the Parks Board has begun to refill it with Native artifacts. [Mike Steele, "The Stanley Park Explorer", Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 1985.]

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. [Jean Barman, “Neighbourhood and Community in Interwar Vancouver,” Robert A. J. McDonald and Jean Barman, eds., "Vancouver’s Past: Essays in Social History." Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986: 97-141.] 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. [Jean Barman, “Neighbourhood and Community in Interwar Vancouver,” Robert A. J. McDonald and Jean Barman, eds., "Vancouver’s Past: Essays in Social History". Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986: 97-141.] 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. [Patricia Roy, “Vancouver: Mecca of the Unemployed, 1907-1929,” Alan F. J. Artibise, ed., "Town and City: Aspects of Western Canadian Urban Development", Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1981: 393-413, and Tom McEwan, "The Forge Glows Red: From Blacksmith to Revolutionary". Toronto: Progress Books, 1974.] “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). [Todd McCallum, “The Great Depression’s First History? The Vancouver Archives of Major J. S. Mathews and the Writing of Hobo History,” "Canadian Historical Review" 87, no. 1 (March 2006): 79-107.] 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 [Mike Steele, "The Stanley Park Explorer", Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 1985.] – 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. [David Ricardo Williams, "Mayor Gerry: The Remarkable Gerald Gratten McGeer." Douglas and MacIntyre, 1986.]

World War II

:"See the related article Japanese Canadian internment"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 aircraft. 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 to traffic in 1975.

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. [cite web| title = Expo '86 | work = The Canadian Encyclopedia| publisher = Historica| url = http://www.canadianencyclopedia.ca/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&ArticleId=A0002692| accessdate=2007-01-17]

References

*Matthews, J. 1937. "Early Vancouver". Vancouver Archives.
*Macdonald, B. 1992. "Vancouver: A Visual History", Talonbooks
* [http://www.city.vancouver.bc.ca/ctyclerk/archives/webpubhtml/w_pg.htm City of Vancouver archives - Point Grey]
* [http://www.city.vancouver.bc.ca/ctyclerk/archives/webpubhtml/w_sv.htm City of Vancouver archives - South Vancouver]

Notes