Mount Pleasant
by Bruce Macdonald
For untold centuries the site of Mount Pleasant was a dense forest diagonally bisected by an ancient trail traveled by First Nations peoples and wildlife such as deer, bear and elk. On its southern edge was an opening in the forest where a beaver dam had backed up a creek forming a large swamp.
In 1860 Colonel Moody’s Royal Engineers improved the trail for better access to the new naval reserves set aside on English Bay. The purpose was to provide advance notice of any naval attack by Americans on the new capital of the Colony of British Columbia at New Westminster, and to provide access to ice-free Burrard Inlet if the Fraser ever froze over. An open swampy area was a landmark on the trip through the dark forest and soon was named the “Tea Swamp” after its Labrador tea, a small plant used by pioneers to brew tea.
In 1869 the visionary H.V. Edmonds, clerk of the municipal council in New Westminster, acquired all of the land north of today’s Broadway in the future Mount Pleasant, believing that the natural harbor would someday be home to the terminus of a transcontinental railway. During the 1870s a rickety bridge was built across False Creek and the Hastings Sawmill acquired the remaining land in the area and chopped down the heavy timber for use in its mill. In the early 1880s the only substantial building was the Junction Inn (at the intersection of today’s Kingsway and Fraser), one of a series of stagecoach roadhouses on the old trail to New Westminster that was upgraded and renamed the Westminster Road in 1884.
In 1887, as Edmonds had foreseen, the railway created spectacular growth in the newly named boomtown of Vancouver. A year later a new bridge was built south across False Creek and he decided to develop his land holdings on the Westminster Road (today’s Kingsway), naming the new subdivision after his wife’s birthplace in Ireland, Mount Pleasant. At the crest of a hill above False Creek a hub was formed where a supply of fresh water�Brewery Creek�intersected with the first east-west through road, 7th Avenue, Westminster Road and the only road south from Vancouver, today’s Main Street.
Mount pleasant developed into Vancouver’s first suburb while the rest of Vancouver outside the downtown core remained a logged over forest crisscrossed by skid roads. By the end of the 1800s Brewery Creek had been home to the Reifel brother’s San Francisco Brewery, Charles Doering’s Vancouver Breweries, “the largest on the Pacific Coast,” and Thorpe & Company Soda Water Works�producers of Ginger Beer, Kola Champagne, Iron Brew and Sarsaparilla. On either side of the mouth of Brewery Creek were two slaughterhouses and on the creek bank at 12th Avenue was the Vancouver Tannery, where leather was made from the animal skins. The hides were tanned with wagonloads of hemlock bark brought up from forests to the south along the only through street, the dirt road that evolved into Fraser Street. Today the notable survivors of this period are the unique brick and stone Vancouver Breweries building at 6th Avenue and Scotia Street, and the 1888 Thomas Clark House at 243 East 5th Avenue�the oldest house in Mount Pleasant.
In 1891 the arrival of streetcar service was a further spur to growth, and by the turn of the century Mount Pleasant was a well-formed small town with its own stores, fire hall, fruit tree nurseries, greenhouses, Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist churches and hundreds of fine new homes. In the middle of its main intersection was a bandstand where the Mount Pleasant Band played on Sunday afternoons to appreciative townsfolk observing the Sabbath. Children on their way to the school at Kingsway and Broadway would sometimes see beavers at work building a dam or bears feeding on blackberries. The only settlement from the outer edge of town at 16th Avenue to the Fraser River, kilometres away, was one small group of houses at 20th Avenue where a couple of families by the name of Hicks lived. The sophisticated residents of Mount Pleasant got a kick out of referring to the area as “Hicksville.”
By the beginning of World War I the population of Vancouver was five times larger than it had been just 15 years before and the formerly distinct village of Mount Pleasant became embedded in the urban sprawl being made possible by the mobility of the newly introduced automobile. But there was no denying the prosperity of the times. The tall landmark Lee Building at Broadway and Main soared skyward in 1912 followed in 1916 by the grand new post office at 15th and Main (now Heritage Hall, the home of community organizations and a meeting hall for local events). There were many successful new businesses such as Calladine’s Grocery, recalled by local historian Claude Douglas. Douglas was born in Mount Pleasant and grew up at 117 West 10th Avenue. Today this house is one of the Davis Houses, Mount Pleasant’s best-known group of restored homes. Douglas recalls Calladine’s Grocery with memories of “sawdust covered floors, great sacks of meal, potatoes, sugar and beans. The crunching sound of the old fire- engine-red coffee grinder and its permeating aroma. The great rounds of cheeses, so mellow. All shepherded by clerks in chaste white aprons.” This was in the days before customers served themselves in grocery stores, when the Safeway chain in Vancouver went by the name Piggly Wiggly.
Progress also brought the loss of half of Mount Pleasant’s oceanfront land and the elimination of the mouth of Brewery Creek during World War I, when the tidal flats of False Creek were filled in from Main Street eastwards a dozen blocks to Clark Drive. The new area of flat land provided a site for two large, new railway terminals and their railyards right at the tail end of the great era of railway building.
Mount Pleasant was the birthplace of one of the city’s most colorful mayors, Gerry McGeer, who made sure the new city hall constructed during his term in 1936 was built in Mount Pleasant at 12th and Cambie. McGeer, also an MLA, MP and a senator, grew up on the edge of the old Tea Swamp, where he had tended his father’s cows as a barefooted youth. Another nationally known figure was Percy Williams, the sprinter who put Vancouver on the world’s sports map for the first time by winning the gold medals in the 100-metre and 200-metre races at the 1928 Olympics. He lived for many years at the southeast corner of 12th Avenue and Columbia Street.
Mount Pleasant retained its mix of industry near False Creek and its commercial zone on Main Street surrounded by houses and churches until the 1950s. In the 1960s many low-rise apartment buildings were built around the old village core and False Creek industry overran the residential part of the northwest sector. This speeded the shift of Mount Pleasant from a community of long-term homeowners in single family houses well aware of their past, to a district of predominantly short-term tenants in suites and apartments with very little sense of what had gone before. Now a few oldtimers with fond memories of the earlier decades remain amidst a growing number of younger people interested in Mount Pleasant’s heritage, and the restoration and retention of its older structures some of the oldest in the city.
The 1990s have brought Mount Pleasant the groundswell of rebuilding that has already swept around the rest of False Creek, leaving completely transformed neighborhoods in its wake. First was Kitsilano, then Granville Island, Fairview, Yaletown, the end of False Creek, False Creek north and the rim of Chinatown. In Mount Pleasant, the first of Vancouver’s artist live/work studios began to appear in the early 1990s. The upgrading of homes to much higher standards is spreading slowly eastwards from the more prosperous western section.
Mount Pleasant is also a community experiencing a resurgence of community spirit. Residents have banded together to address local concerns, resulting in the creation of Vancouver’s first neighborhood crime prevention office in 1994, a Mount Pleasant Area Network and a new Mount Pleasant Neighborhood House. The presence of numerous artists living in the community is apparent in a number of ways, from the founding and development of Vancouver’s annual Fringe Festival and the funding of a community artist in residence, to the Western Front performance/media facility and the proliferation of artist live/work studios along the former route of Brewery Creek. The western section of Mount Pleasant south of Broadway has recently become revitalized with the restoration of many heritage homes, some from the 1890s, and with historic plaques along the new Mount Pleasant Walkway. The old business core has received heritage revitalization funds and the local business owner’s Commercial Improvement Society has enhanced Main Street with many features to emphasize its heritage. The revitalized Lee Building is still the landmark that marks the centre of Old Mount Pleasant.
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