Century-old photos go back to the roots of Vancouver
In 1889, Montreal photographer William McFarlane Notman went to the top of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s new Hotel Vancouver and took a photo of downtown, looking north.
Vancouver was only three years old, and had a population of about 10,000. Today’s central business district was virtually all houses or empty lots.
The Hotel Vancouver Notman set up in was the first of three to bear that name. It opened at the southwest corner of Granville and Georgia in 1888, and was only five storeys tall. But it towered over the fledgling city, which makes Notman’s photo utterly amazing to a modern-day Vancouverite.
On the northeast corner of Georgia and Howe is a lawn tennis court. Going north on Howe is an empty lot filled with scrub brush, which is next to a Victorian house with gingerbread roof ridges on top.
Across the street was the Manor House, a four-storey hotel at Dunsmuir and Howe with turrets and elaborate balconies. The street looks to be made of dirt, or gravel, and the sidewalks are wood.
A couple of mansions are perched on the shoreline above Burrard Inlet.
This was the eastern end of Blueblood Alley, Vancouver’s first elite residential area. Across the inlet on the north shore, a First Nations village emerges out of the forest.
Original copies of 128-year-old photos like this are incredibly rare. But Eric Waschke of the Wayfarer’s Bookshop found one in England a few years ago, and this weekend, he’s selling it at the Vancouver Rare Book, Photograph and Paper Show at Heritage Hall, 3102 Main St.
The price: $975.
“It’s just after the (1886) fire,” he said. “You can actually see that, because these buildings are popping up very haphazardly, and there are a lot of areas that aren’t built. It’s almost like Phoenix rising out of the ashes.”
The Notman photo is one of 50 vintage British Columbia prints Waschke is bringing to the rare book show, which will feature everything from $5 postcards to books costing tens of thousands of dollars.
Twenty-three dealers will be on hand, including antiquarian book, photo and map vendors from Winnipeg, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and London, Ont. Doors are open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $10.
Waschke usually sells online, often dealing with collectors around the world. But he relishes the opportunity to meet the public at book fairs.
“In this virtual world, I just like to show my face every once in a while so that people understand that I actually exist, (that) I’m not computer generated,” he said with a laugh.
The prints he’s bringing to the show feature a who’s who of early photographers from Vancouver and British Columbia. Some are well known, like Charles Bailey, Thomas Neelands, Richard Henry Trueman, Norman Caple and Richard and Hannah Maynard.
But there are also lots of arresting images from less-heralded photographers, such as a wonderful view of Yale circa 1900 by Archibald Murchie, the brother of John Murchie of Murchie’s Tea fame.
Waschke is partial to an 1890s photograph by Stephen Thompson of covered wagons being pulled by a team of horses near a bridge in Ashcroft.
“To me, that showcases the early settler spirit,” he said.
Like many photographers of his day, Thompson often photographed the B.C. landscape along the Canadian Pacific rail line. Waschke is selling a lovely 1890s Thompson photo of the Cisco Bridge near Lytton. Trueman and Caple have a gorgeous shot of the same bridge, taken from another angle.
Some photos Waschke was planning on bringing to the show have already sold because collectors snapped them up when he put out his online catalogue. This includes a dozen stereo views of Barkerville, circa 1865, that he found in a book fair in California, where a lot of early B.C. stuff turns up.
“A lot of people don’t realize what a strong connection (B.C. had to California), especially San Francisco, in the early days,” he said.
“The California gold rush was winding down and the next big thing was B.C., so a lot of Americans came up for the gold rush. After a couple of years, people went back and they took stuff with them.”
The Barkerville photos weren’t labelled, but Waschke had a “gut feeling” they were B.C.’s top gold rush town, and were taken by Carlo Gentile, whose photos are the premier visual record of the province’s gold rush.
Back in Vancouver, he was excited to discover another dealer, Stephen Lunsford, had sold a nearly identical image to one of his stereo views. (Stereo views feature two identical images that become three dimensional when viewed through a binocular-esque device called a stereoscope.)
“All the people are almost in the same position,” he said. “But in one photograph, the dog ran away.”
Waschke sold the Barkerville photos for US$12,500.
A lot of people don’t realize what a strong connection (B.C. had to California), especially San Francisco, in the early days.