Grandview
by Bruce Macdonald
The earliest known mention of the Grandview area appears in Pauline Johnson’s Legends of Vancouver. Johnson relays a story from Chief Joe Capilano about the first Chief Capilano, who in about 1820 wounded a giant seal in False Creek with a special elk-bone spear and pursued it into the area. In the late 1850s during the gold rush Chief Joe Capilano himself shot 13 elk in the future Grandview--perhaps the last herd of elk in Vancouver--and canoed the meat to market in Victoria.
Native people identified the region near the north foot of today’s Victoria Drive by its enormous cedar trees, calling it Khupkhahpay’ay, the Squamish word for cedar tree. Cedar trees were an extremely important element in the lives of native people, providing materials for the making of homes, canoes, tools, mats, cordage, baskets and clothing. Here a small creek emptied into a bay of Burrard Inlet that later became known as Cedar Cove, In the 1890s the first industry established on the bay was the Cedar Cove Brewery, followed by the Cedar Cove Saw and Planing Mills.
A few years after the gold rush, all the land along Grandview’s uninhabited coastline became the property of three land speculators: Victoria’s Henry Crease, the first attorney general of the colony of British Columbia and later a supreme court justice; Henry Holbrook, the mayor of New Westminster; and John Graham, B.C.’s secretary of the treasury. Holbrook sold out to Israel Powell (Powell Street is named after him), and Powell, Crease and Graham all made fortunes after the Canadian Pacific Railway was built through their property in the 1880s. In 1871 the remainder of Grandview was acquired by the Hastings Sawmill company, which immediately cut down all the valuable fir and hemlock trees, and built a flume through Grandview to carry water from Trout Lake to its sawmill near Gastown.
One of the prominent early developers was E.J. Clark (hence Clark Drive) who donated a city block in 1899 for Clark’s Park, the second park in Vancouver after Stanley Park. Grandview remained completely unsettled until the construction of the interurban line to New Westminster in 1891 made its hectares of stumps accessible to Vancouver workers. One of the earliest residents, proud of the prospect of the city from his yard, nailed up a sign “Grand View” at the interurban stop (near today’s intersection of Commercial Drive and 1st Avenue) in about 1892. The first road built along the rail line was named Park Drive (renamed Commercial Drive in 1911) because it headed straight to Clark’s park at 14th Avenue. Few homes had been built before 1906, when local landowner and promoter Professor Edward Odlum (Odlum Drive bears his name) built a large house with an octagonal corner tower at 1774 Grant Avenue at the beginning of a tremendous growth spurt. By 1912 the centre of Grandview was completely covered in new homes within walking distance of the shops on Commercial Drive, forming a distinct village kilometres from the rest of Vancouver. This separateness was a factor in the area’s ongoing sense of uniqueness. Residents were predominantly of British ancestry, as indicated in such local names as Britannia High School, Queen Victoria Elementary and Victoria Drive.
On the waterfront new industrial plants and port facilities soon jammed Grandview’s shoreline. A few years later Grandview lost all of its western shoreline on False Creek when the earth removed for the Grandview railway cut was used to fill in False Creek all the way from Clark Drive to Main Street. Over the following decades the commercial strip along Hastings Street gradually grew eastwards from downtown and westwards from beyond Nanaimo Street to converge on Commercial Drive, while industrial buildings spread from the waterfront south to Hastings and along Clark Drive from the False Creek railyards. Since the war almost all the houses west of Commercial Drive and north of Hastings have been torn down and replaced with apartment buildings.
Grandview’s uniqueness lies in the tremendous diversity of its people, housing and land use. The community is focused on the Drive (Commercial Drive), a fascinating collection of ethnic restaurants and food stores, funky coffee bars and hangouts, unusual clothing stores and street activity. Just off the Drive are small parks, the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, and the fully equipped Britannia Community Centre. The Britannia Centre boasts an ice rink, large swimming pool, sauna, weight room, gymnasiums, library, meeting rooms and a daycare facility.
To the west are new apartment buildings, to the east houses from the pre-World War I building boom, to the north manufacturers and wholesalers, and to the south, Trout Lake, the Skytrain and Broadway corridor. Nearby on the edge of Grandviav are the Italian Cultural Centre, the Croatian Cultural Centre and Chinatown--all contributing to a robust mix unique in Vancouver.
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