MAPS SHOW CITY AS IT WAS, WHAT IT COULD HAVE BEEN
Archive collection features plans for ‘ice palace,’ Zeppelin mast
Wednesday was Vancouver’s 130th birthday and the Vancouver Archives celebrated by putting a significant part of the city’s history online — 2,100 old maps and prints.
Looking through them is fascinating, like time travelling to an earlier era.
A 1923 map of Hastings Park shows the location of its long-gone golf course, as well as the Happyland dance hall by the rollercoaster.
A 1928 plan shows a proposal for an airport at Spanish Banks, complete with a seaplane base, a mooring mast for Zeppelins and a 20,000-seat sports stadium.
A 1964 map shows the neighbourhoods that were served by Cablevision. Oddly, Shaughnessy wasn’t — and neither was much of East Van.
Archivist Heather Gordon is wowed by a 1952 map of False Creek.
“You can drill in and see what was around the creek,” she said.
“That’s really cool. To see what it was like, the mills and businesses that were still there in 1952, I find fascinating.”
It is. False Creek was positively brimming with mills (Marine Lumber, Nalos Lumber, Bay Lumber, Horwood Lumber, Wild Rose Mills, Sauder Lumber, Ruskin Cedar Products, Fletcher Lumber, Alberta Lumber, B.C. Forest Products, B.C. Fir and Cedar, Fairview Sawmills).
The map also shows a “coal pile” at the B.C. Electric gas plant at the foot of Carrall Street. A spur of the creek shot up to Keefer Street in Chinatown, travelling underneath the original Georgia Viaduct.
You can search through the scans on the archives website, but that can be daunting. So the archives has put 44 maps up on its Flickr site, which is very user-friendly.
“It’s a really good mix between (items from) the City of Vancouver and private sources,” said Gordon.
Some of the maps are wonderfully quirky, like a 1948 map of The Vancouver Sun’s circulation, district by district.
Some districts have names you’ve never heard of — much of East Van is Dexter, Kitsilano is Bayview & Cedar, and north Burnaby is Glenburn. But their residents all read The Sun — 71 per cent (8,578) in Dexter, 63 per cent (11,012) in Bayview & Cedar, 65 per cent (4,002) in Glenburn.
“It is this universal appeal to the alert-minded element in every walk of life that makes Vancouver’s HOME Newspaper an essential advertising medium for selling all varieties of goods and services,” boasted a blurb in the corner of the map.
Some maps are mind-blowing, because they depict grand schemes that never came to pass, such as a 1969 plan for an “ice palace,” a pitch and putt golf course and a man-made island at Jericho Beach.
A 1957 urban renewal plan for Strathcona (then called the East End) would have led to every house in Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhood being torn down and replaced by modern highrises, row houses and walk-up apartments.
Funding for scanning the maps came via a grant from UBC’s B.C. History Digitization Project. The project was overseen by Sue Bigelow of the Archives.
“The terms of the grant program are that you’ve got to digitize stuff where you hold the copyright, so you can put it online and share,” said Gordon.
“We were looking for things that were either old enough to be public domain, or where the city was holding the copyright.”
The archives scanned 500 maps a few years ago when it got an earlier grant.
“That was our first map project, and got us a big oversize scanner,” said Gordon.
The scanner came in handy this time around when they scanned a 10-metre-long map of the Port Mann subdivision of the Canadian National Railway. The 1917 map shows 33.7 kilometres of the CN right of way through the Fraser Valley.
The archives has about 8,000 maps in its collection, including a map of the world from 1700.
The oldest Vancouver map is from 1887, and shows the original city.
Today’s Vanier Park is labelled I.R., for Indian Reserve. The reserve went up to Burrard and First, and includes the land where the Molson’s Brewery now stands.