Old pictures reveal how this city looked like Port Townsend
Archival images show architecture when Vancouver was three years old in 1888-89
There are precious few houses left from the pioneer Vancouver of the 1880s. But sometimes you stumble across old images that give you an idea of what they were like, and they blow your mind.
This happened when I recently visited Michael Maslan’s vintage poster and photo shop in Seattle, across from the Seattle Art Museum.
Maslan pulled out a folder, and I was shocked to find several pages of etchings of 1888-89 Vancouver buildings. Almost all of them are long-gone, and long-forgotten — and the city they depict looks more like Port Townsend, Wash., than today’s Vancouver.
The etchings are from the May 1889 edition of West Shore, a magazine published in Portland, Ore., between 1875 and 1891.
The City of Vancouver would have been three years old at this point, so all the buildings in the magazine were virtually new.
Printing technology of the day meant it was hard to print photos, so newspapers and magazines would have artists make etchings of images. There is no information on who took the original photos, but they were probably done by Charles Bailey, one of the top photographers in early Vancouver.
One page features six houses from Vancouver’s first elite residential district, nicknamed Blueblood Alley.
Blueblood Alley was on the bluff overlooking Burrard Inlet. Most of the houses in West Shore were on Georgia between Burrard and Bute streets, but the elaborate Victorian owned by Dr. J.M. Lefevre is listed in the 1890 Henderson’s directory at Granville and Cordova streets.
To confuse matters, the Vancouver Archives has the original photo the etching was done from, and says the house was at the northwest corner of Granville and Hastings streets. In any case, Lefevre’s house was where the Sinclair Centre is today.
The home was huge, probably 6,000 square feet, and featured all the bells and whistles of an 1880s mansion — a turret, gingerbread trim and wrought-iron railing on top of the roof.
There were chimneys for four fireplaces, a second-storey balcony and several lovely bay windows. Lefevre was the Canadian Pacific Railway’s surgeon, and he used a wing at the eastern side of his house as his office.
Still, Lefevre’s home pales next to Charles D. Rand’s house at 1020 West Georgia. It’s got finials and gingerbread, sunburst detailing over the square bay windows and a humungous porch.
The decorations befit one of early Vancouver’s real estate moguls. His brother, Edward, is also listed in the 1890 directory, but his residence was London, England. ( Why a Vancouver directory would list somebody who lived on another continent is anyone’s guess.)
Neither Rand nor Lefevre seem to have lived in their houses long.
In the 1898 directory, Rand’s residence is listed as Spokane, Wash. In the 1901 directory, Lefevre is listed at 1123 Barclay St.
Henry T. Ceperley’s house at 1108 W. Georgia was a bit more restrained, with a French-style mansard roof in the middle topped by the ever-present wrought-iron railing. Ceperley’s wife, Grace, donated the money to create Ceperley Park by Second Beach in Stanley Park; the couple’s Burnaby mansion, Fairacres, is now the Burnaby Art Gallery.
Ceperley sponsored the special Vancouver edition of West Shore with his business partner, Arthur Wellington Ross, an MP from Manitoba who seems to have spent much of his time selling real estate in Vancouver.
Ross was closely allied with the CPR, as were many early business leaders. Another house in West Shore was owned by J.M. Browning, an early alderman who was also the CPR’s land commissioner.
Browning ’s stone home was at the northwest corner of Burrard and Georgia streets, and in 1907 was converted into Glencoe Lodge, which boasted it was “the only first-class family hotel in the city.”
An expansion in 1909 brought it up to 90 rooms, but it closed in 1932 and was torn down for a gas station.
The West Shore cache also includes some wonderful images of long-gone commercial buildings, such as the elegant Sir Donald A. Smith block, which was erected at the southeast corner of Georgia and Granville streets in late 1888/ early 1889. (Smith was the CPR bigwig who drove the last spike at Craigellachie; he is also known as Lord Strathcona.)
According to a story in the Vancouver World, the Smith block was designed by New York architect Bruce Price, and had 90 feet of frontage on Georgia that curved into 50 feet on Granville.
The facade was granite, it had lovely arched windows, and it cost $50,000 to build.
When I took the Smith page out of its plastic folder to scan the page, it looked kind of thick.
So I pulled it apart and was surprised to find the gem of the whole collection, a two-page spread called “The Harbour Vancouver British Columbia.”
It shows the first CPR station at the foot of Granville, when the rails were mounted on piles that stood above the waters of Coal Harbour. (Today ’s shoreline is filled in — the water originally would have gone to Water Street in Gastown.)
It’s a wild shot, with all sorts of sailing ships in the harbour and several horse-drawn carriages making their way up Granville.
The illustration is no doubt enhanced — there are so many ships it looks like the Spanish Armada has invaded.
But it’s one of the coolest Vancouver images you’ll ever see.