The first Isolation Hospital, known then as the pest house, in Vancouver was just a shack on the Inlet near where B.C. Sugar refinery would soon be built. However, when smallpox -- “the loathsome disease” -- struck in 1892, the shack was quickly abandoned, and infectious disease victims were shuffled off to a temporary camp … Continue reading Smallpox! Grandview’s Isolation Hospital
. In 1888, more than a dozen years before Grandview began any proper existence, a prosperous merchant, the Toronto-based E.J. Clark offered to give to the City of Vancouver seven acres of land he owned east of False Creek to be used for “athletic purposes”. This was not the simple philanthropic gesture that it may … Continue reading Grandview’s Parks to 1930
Visitors and locals alike often wonder why Commercial Drive south of First Avenue -- a wide arterial road -- is different than the northern half which is narrower and more intimate. The reason goes back more than 110 years and it all had to do with political intrigue in the Balkans. Like many streets in … Continue reading The Widening of Commercial Drive
It was the spring of 1949 and Commercial Drive -- after two long decades of Depression and War -- was reveling in the first flush of postwar prosperity: the stores were full and people finally had money to spend. No doubt, it was this very prosperity that drew Robert Harrison to the corner of First … Continue reading Shoot Out At First & Commercial
. At the last monthly meeting of the Grandview Heritage Group, Jak presented his research on an early church in Grandview. The following is a version of that presentation (1). This story began with a mystery. In the 1905 Vancouver City Directory, there are just a few listings for Park Drive, the original name of … Continue reading A Church, Lost and Found
The one-and-a-half storey house at 1761 Grant was built under a $2,250 building permit issued to W.H. Creitz at the beginning of January 1910. By May it was on the market, described as having seven rooms “with every up-to-date convenience built in.” It was “not an ordinary house; come and see it; if you see it, … Continue reading Drugs and Booze: The Rowdy History of 1761 Grant Street
I wrote the following for the Vancouver Heritage Foundation in support of their Grandview Heritage Tour (see below). It has been published today in Spacing, along with photographs. * * * * For scores of generations, the wooded hills of Grandview were prime hunting and trapping land for First Nations. Once the Europeans arrived, Grandview … Continue reading A Very Short History of Grandview
An innovation of the 1921 Canada Census was to ask detailed questions regarding those who rented, how much rent they paid, and how many rooms they occupied. According to the 1921 Census counts, in the core district of Grandview, there were: 4,547 people living in rental accommodation, or 44.27% of the Census population; They were … Continue reading The Rental Market in 1921 Grandview
Further to my previous post about the geographic distribution of population in Grandview in 1921, the following map illustrates the same using the 1911 Census returns (For a description of the block system used to map these results, please see here.): The 1911 Census showed a population count of 7,356 compared to the population in … Continue reading Population Growth in Grandview: 1911-1921
At the most recent GHG meeting, I presented some preliminary research on house prices in Grandview from 1918 to 1946. Select graph for a better view. The data is drawn from real estate ads in the "Vancouver Daily World", "Province" and "Sun" newspapers. The data was filtered to include only those ads that (1) related … Continue reading Historical House Prices in Grandview
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