West End
by Ed Starkins
For at least three thousand years and probably much longer First Nations people from the ancient Musqueam and Squamish cultures occupied the area that would eventually become the West End of Vancouver. Vestiges of the native millennia remained long after the European colonization of the British Columbia coast. In the 1930s Chief August Jack Khatsalanough could point out the location of villages and settlements that he had known as a child, among them Staytook near the Beach Avenue entrance to Stanley Park. In 1932 road crews working on the Burrard Street bridge paved over the ruins of Chip-kaay-am, Chief George’s potlatch house .
In 1862 three Englishmen, John Morton, Samuel Brighouse and William Hailstone paid $550.75 for District Lot 185, a 218 hectare parcel of land with boundaries nearly identical to those of the modern West End. Morton became the first European to live in the neighborhood when he built a cabin on a cliff overlooking Coal Harbour, half a block south of modern Burrard Street, within the shadows of what is now the Guinness Tower at 1055 West Hastings. Morton, who had been a potter in Yorkshire, England, began making bricks from the local clay but found that he was too far away from potential customers in New Westminster and Victoria to earn a profit. His attempt to start a small farm proved equally unsuccessful. After two years he left to start a business in Abbotsford.
Morton, Brighouse and Hailstone began to speak enthusiastically about a “City of Liverpool” that would one day stretch from English Bay to Coal Harbour but their vision of a future metropolis did little more than earn them the nickname of"the three greenhorns.” Morton and his partners had, in fact, arrived a generation too soon for District Lot 185 to be of much value as real estate. By the 1880s, although they had sold several acres to land speculators, “New Liverpool” existed only on a surveyor’s map.
In 1885 when the Canadian Pacific Railway announced that it was extending its transcontinental line to GranviIle at Coal Harbour the “greenhorns” surrendered nearly a third of their holdings to the company in return for a promise from the CPR to shift part of its operations into District Lot 185. This extraordinary agreement did little to promote land sales but the partners gamely forged ahead. According to one story, perhaps apocryphal, an American cavalry raid on an Apache village in Arizona discovered a stack of pamphlets advertising lots in the Brighouse Estates. It was the CPR, however, which set itself up as the first real estate developer in the West End when, in 1888, the company began to sell high-priced homes to company officials and other affluent citizens along a section of Georgia Street that became known as “Blueblood Alley.” While the CPR enclave grew steadily the slopes west of Nelson and south of Burrard remained empty. By the turn of the century summertime crowds travelled to the bathing beach at English Bay on the newly opened Robson and Denman streetcar line. A few blocks west of Granville the streetcar entered a forlorn landscape of brush and tree stumps before turning left on Denman Street where there were several houses, a grocery and a confectioners’ shop.
In June 1900 James S. Matthews, who became Vancouver’s first city archivist went blackberry picking with his wife near what would later be the intersection of Thurlow and Davie Streets. “After the evening meal, we went too far, or sat too long, for with darkness coming on, we could not find our way back. No lights were visible; all was darkness when night fell. All the area of the southern slope west of Burrard Street was wilderness; the stumps stood where they have been cut off when the trees were felled; the underbrush and debris had all been cleared away and it was possible to walk, or rather scramble over, the West End.”
By 1901 the long-awaited West End construction boom was under way, reaching its peak between 1907 and 1910 when row after row of two-storey frame houses appeared west of Burrard Street. Near English Bay wealthy citizens built luxurious mansions making the West End the chief venue for the city’s rich until property went on sale in Shaughnessy Heights in 1909. By World War I many grand homes from the Edwardian era had been subdivided into smaller units. Architectural survivors of the West End’s brief gilded age include the B.T. Rogers mansion (1902), Lord Roberts School (1906) and the Manhattan Apartments (1908), the West End’s first apartment block.
Over the next half century the West End enjoyed a reputation as a congenial, relaxed and affordable neighborhood. During the 1930s David Savage, a Vancouver News Herald reporter, lived in the Buchan Hotel at 1906 Haro, paying $40 a month for a large room with maid service and three meals a day. Savage recalled: “The West End was a gracious place of beautiful old houses and mellow gardens. It was a place for the very young, starting out at very low wages, and the very old, surviving on often very small pensions. Both wanted something cheap, and the West End was cheap.”
Savage and his friend Noel Robinson, a Province reporter, were among the genteel Bohemians who frequented parties and afternoon teas at the Haro Street homes of Lilavati, an Indian dancer, and her husband Jack Jacquillard, a Princeton graduate. The young left-wing writers of the New Frontier Club, including the poet Dorothy Livesay, met at the English Bay Bath House, now a community centre.
Until the mid-1950s the tallest building in the West End was the eight-storey Sylvia Hotel. Post-war construction projects were mainly limited to squat three-storey walkups which often had a small penthouse straddling the rooftop. In 1956 city council, attentive to the complaints of downtown businessmen who had been losing trade to suburban shopping centres, rezoned the West End to allow significantly higher population density. Artists’ renderings made the proposed high rise architecture look classy and attractive. To avoid overcrowding, broad areas of open space, determined by a mathematical formula, would surround each new structure.
By 1972 When investors’ enthusiasm for high rise construction fizzled the West End was no longer a cozy neighborhood of few pretensions. During a 13-year period developers had built more than 220 high rises, several of them 20-storey Bauhaus cell blocks containing 200 or more suites. Few apartment dwellers enjoyed views of the bay and the mountains; most simply looked out at the people living across the way.
Despite many protests the era of monolith building claimed much of the traditional architecture of the West End. Typical of lost heritage structures was the Simpson Block, a patterned brownstone building with arched porticos and wood-paneled interiors built at the corner of Denman and Davie in 1912. Some buildings, notably the Thomas A. Fee house (1904) at 1119 Broughton, have survived with extensive modifications.
By the 1970s automobile traffic plagued the West End’s once-quiet streets. City planners blocked off many intersections with shrubbery, trees and benches but on summer nights bumper-to-bumper traffic circled the 1200-blocks of Pendrell and Davie Streets as hundreds of curious motorists came to stare at and occasionally consort with local prostitutes. In the mid-’80s a citizens’ organization known as “Shame the Johns” began silent curbside vigils to interfere with the sex trade. Eventually the provincial government obtained a court order forcing prostitutes from neighborhood streets.
According to federal census data the population of the West End remained static during the 1980s: there were 36,950 residents in 1981, 37,190 in 1991�a change of.6 per cent. By the end of the decade the neighborhood had experienced considerable “gentrification” recording a 28 per cent increase in residents with incomes over $70,000 per annum and a 20 per cent drop among those with incomes of less than $10,000. During the same period there had been a 61.3 per cent growth in the number of privately owned dwellings. Housing conditions reflected the “two-tier” economy as deteriorating, ill-maintained buildings, many of them from the 1956-1972 period, stood next to luxury condominiums. During the 1980s the rental cost of apartment units in the West End rose steadily, averaging $701 per month in 1991.
The West End has always been a highly transient neighborhood: 72 per cent of its residents moved between 1985 and 1991. Many were low income earners who left the area permanently but the most significant exodus was among persons of retirement age. In the 1980s there was nearly a 20 per cent decline in the number of residents over the age of 55. In 1991 49.7 per cent of West Enders were between the ages of 20 and 40.
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