Of course, the history of Vancouver's construction industry goes back a lot farther than the 1920s. The first construction was that of First Nations people who built communal log houses in settlements along Burrard Inlet.

Among the first organized construction efforts in the Greater Vancouver area were those of the Royal Engineers based in Sapperton and Fort Langley. Generally associated with the Fraser Canyon Highway, the corps of engineers, architects and tradesmen also surveyed townsites and built schools, churches (New Westminster's first church and school was designed and built by Colonel Moody.) and barracks in the mid-1800s.

Bedlam is probably an apt description of construction methods in early Vancouver going by old photographs. Everything from native timber to canvas seemed to have been employed as construction materials, with some brick and stone thrown in. The fire of 1886 swept away much of the early efforts and incidentally prompted a call for more stone buildings.

As the 1800s rolled on things began to get more organized; realtor W. Horne was selling Vancouver building lots from an outdoor operation at Georgia and Granville in 1886. By 1900 the industry was showing real signs of civilization when Leslie Wright formed an insurance agency which, as Leslie Wright and Rolfe went on to write the first contract bond in British Columbia.

In 1879 the original Mechanics' (Builders) Lien Act was passed and in spite of various amendments has successfully defied any effort to fully understand it since. By 1908 Vancouver had passed the first bylaw that made a building permit necessary, although there had been electrical and plumbing inspectors employed by the city since 1893.

With all these civilizing influences, the rough and ready construction industry was ready to start building Vancouver proper.

Early examples include Holy Rosary Cathedral at 646 Richards, completed in 1900 of Gabriola sandstone with granite foundations. Contractor Westinghouse, Church, Kerr & Co. built the Canadian Pacific Railway Station at 601 Cordova from 1912 to 1914. Kelly Bros. and Mitchell Contractors were awarded the contract for the federal building and post office at 701 West Hastings in August of 1905. Five years later they finished the fireproofed steel frame building with granite facade at a construction cost of $600,000--substantially less than a large West Side single family home today.

Photographs of this project being built provide graphic evidence of the changes in construction. During the excavation of the basement and sub-basement there was a gang of men with picks and shovels; today there would be one or two tracked excavators (not steam-shovels, thank you) loading dump trucks.

By 1912 John Coughland and Sons of Vancouver had fabricated 1,250 tons of steel for the tallest building in the British Empire--the 82.3-metre tall World Building, better known today as the heritage Sun Tower. (Typically some Torontonian had to build a taller one in 1914.)

More elegance came to Vancouver in 1927 with the construction of the much-loved Orpheum Theatre on Granville Street. Built by Northern Construction Company, it cost a cool million, but some of the irreplaceable interior work is beyond price. That includes the ornamental plasterwork done by E.C. MacDougall and Company and George Rush Plastering Company.

Harbingers of the future of Vancouver's major construction projects were the Dominion Agriculture Building (later the RCMP Building, now Heritage Hall), completed at 3102 Main in 1914 and St. Andrews Wesley church at 1012 Nelson completed in 1931-32. Both have stone finishes, but both are reinforced concrete, the material most used to make Vancouver's modern skyline.

With a generally accepted bankruptcy rate of 85 per cent in the construction industry and the family nature of many of the city's early contracting concerns it's safe--and sad--to say that much of the "hands on" history of building a great city is lost. Take the Marine Building, for instance. The design by McCarter Nairne has made it a landmark and the steel installed by Dominion Bridge in 1929 enjoys a rock solid seismic rating to this day. But what subcontractor installed the toilets? The name is lost. And what difficulties did he have to overcome to position the necessaries out of sight behind the art-deco?

Many standout names do remain, however, and they are bound up with Vancouver's history. Just a sampling includes:

• Smith Bros. & Wilson, founded in Grand Forks in 1897, moved its headquarters to Vancouver in 1921. It built such landmarks as the Seaforth Armories, the main post office and the Board of Trade Tower. • Columbia Bitulithic, founded in 1910 and headquartered in Coquitlam, has built roads throughout the province and is responsible for much of the Vancouver road network (for example, Journal of Commerce records show that on July 30, 1914, the company, then in the Dominion Building, was awarded a $71,815.52 contract to pave Victoria Road from Kingsway to 43rd Avenue). • Dominion Construction, founded in 1911, is truly synonymous with construction and development in Vancouver. Still owned principally by the Bentall family, the company has branch offices from Toronto to California and a host of related companies. Headquartered in its own massive Bentall Centre on Burrard Street in Vancouver, it has the distinctive "boot" headquarters of B.C. Telephone in Burnaby and many industrial parks to its modern credit. • Commonwealth Construction, founded in Winnipeg in 1907, built the Vancouver city hall. • Dominion Bridge, which started out in 1882 to make bridges for the CPR, is still headquartered in the east, but in Vancouver has contributed the Dominion Building, the Hotel Vancouver, the Lions Gate Bridge and the B.C. Electric (Hydro) Building. The latter is now converted to downtown condominiums, reflecting another era in Vancouver construction--quality renovation.

Many of the successful construction companies around today were founded in the 1950s to take advantage of the baby boom. They are too numerous to mention here, but for a general idea of what they've accomplished look at pictures of the Vancouver skyline about 1959 and compare it with today.

Construction is generally divided into ICI (institutional, commercial and industrial) and residential. The grand and famous usually fall into the ICI category. In Vancouver the watchword in residential construction has always been wood. Styles have gone through phases ranging from two- and three-storey structures to house extended families (and illegal suites), to post-war ranchers on slabs, to split levels to the distinctive "Vancouver special," an oblong configuration designed to make the most of the East Side's 10-metre lots. But they were all mostly wood frames, or "stick built," due obviously to British Columbia's enormous (but not inexhaustible) timber resources. Retired housebuilders and custom millworkers will testify that the quality of lumber available even up to the post-World War II boom is no longer to be found. A lot of ordinary family homes built in the late 1940s and 1950s had grain matched wooden siding as a matter of course. No wonder that for many years wooden siding was supreme with its only rival being stucco containing chunks of broken beer bottles.

Wood continues to hold its own as a housebuilding material, but exterior finishes are more likely to be vinyl or metal siding or the new stuccoes, especially on the much debated "monster homes" that are replacing older more modest dwellings throughout Vancouver neighborhoods. Steel (as in studs, extensively used in commercial projects) and concrete are now challenging wood in the residential field. An interesting aside is that the typical West Coast stick-built house is supposed to be the safest structure to be in during an earthquake, and demonstration homes built in Japan to promote B.C. materials performed well in recent upheavals.

No matter what material is being used, there are some constants to Vancouver construction. Rain has always affected choice of building materials and methods, whether in a single family home or a major highway with the accompanying drainage system. To this day architects consider how a structure's exterior will look wet, excavators pray for rain-free days to finish a dig and roofers cram as much work as possible into the summer months. Keeping the rain out of buildings is also a constant problem, as witnessed by the uproar over leaky condominiums in 1995.

Almost anytime anyone digs a hole in Vancouver, they have to contend with glaciation and a lot of hard sandstone. It's no coincidence that Vancouver has become the shotcrete and anchor capital of the world--shotcrete and anchor being a cost-effective, highly reliable method of shoring that is extensively employed locally.

Geography has always been a determining factor as well. An example is the pre-loading expertise developed because of construction in places with high water tables like Richmond and Queensborough. (Preloading is to heap temporary fill material, usually sand, on a building site and let it sit for a number of months, to compress the natural surface material. It is then removed before construction.) Not to mention the art of building houses without underground basements.

About 75 percent of the construction industry is made up of companies--general contractors and subcontractors--doing less than $5 million annually; they are individually owned or by families or a couple of partners. They are fiercely competitive, as would be expected in a business with an average three per cent return.

They do have associations, however, dedicated to setting standards, recognizing achievement, exchanging technology and speaking to government about the ever-growing list of rules, regulations and bureaucracy involved in building anything these days. The senior existing contractor organization in the Vancouver area is the Amalgamated Construction Association (ACA). Founded in 1966 by an amalgamation of the Vancouver General Contractors Association, the Vancouver Construction Association, the Heavy Construction Association of B.C. and the Victoria Builders Exchange, it was originally intended as a province-wide body. That role is filled by the B.C. Construction Association (BCCA).

Predecessor to them all was the Building and Construction Industries Exchange of B.C. founded in 1928, largely to clean up unscrupulous bidding practices in the city. Prior to that there had been a contractor division in the board of trade and an informal construction club that folded in 1915.

Before the 1980s the majority of Vancouver's major construction achievements (residential excluded) were built by unionized workers mostly represented by the B.C. and Yukon Territory Building Trades Council. The union sector's share of construction work has declined steadily and the majority of work today is performed by the open shop sector. The Independent Contractors and Businesses Association of B.C. was formed in the early 1970s to represent the open shop and the BCCA represents both union and non-union membership.

Segments of the industry have always supported good causes, especially the Variety Club and its works. Then there was the conversion of heritage Glen Brae manor in Shaughnessy into Canuck Place hospice for children. For the volunteers who worked on the project upgrading the 1910 vintage building, it was frustrating work, but rewarding. That wasn't the first instance either. There was also the incredible 19-hour "barn-raising" of Unity House in Tsawwassen when the ACA and the trades council undertook to erect the building during the course of the Variety Club Telethon.

The omissions in this article are legion. Construction is a big industry today--$16 billion annually in British Columbia, employing about 120,000 people according to the Workers' Compensation Board.

Not much has been said about the suppliers to construction and the type of business acumen that made Finning the biggest equipment dealer in the world. Or the innovations of individual companies, the type of which that made Jack Cewe Ltd. a world leader in concrete paving that even the U.S. army relies on.

To sum up for the industry as a whole: whatever the Vancouver construction industry has been asked to do, it built.