This Week in History, 1914: Many considered the existing city hall at Main and Pender a bit of a dump.
in 1886 was in a small wooden building at 147-151 Powell. Council didn’t have the money to pay for it, so the contractor locked the city out for a couple of weeks until council came up with the cash.Start your day with a roundup of B.
C.-focused news and opinion delivered straight to your inbox at 7 a.m., Monday to Friday.By clicking on the sign up button you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. You may unsubscribe any time by clicking on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of our emails or any newsletter. Postmedia Network Inc. | 365 Bloor Street East, Toronto, Ontario, M4W 3L4 | 416-383-2300A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try againIn 1897, city hall moved to the Market Hall at 415 Westminster . But it wasn’t that big, either, and wasn’t exactly an architectural showpiece.“Vancouver is no more a village,” he was quoted as saying in the Jan. 3, 1914, Daily Province. “Every citizen is, or ought to be, ashamed of the ramshackle building used as a city hall. It is safe to say it is the worst in Canada. “We hear a great deal about ‘Beautiful Vancouver.’ True, nature has been kind, lavish in the beautiful setting she provided, but what about our efforts to assist it still further?Article content “Nil. No forethought exhibits itself, no evidence of a comprehensive layout which is the pride of well-governed cities and a pleasure to beholders.” So Hewitt put forth his own plan: a three-block civic centre from Hastings to Georgia Streets, between Cambie and Hamilton. Both The Province and The Vancouver Sun ran a “birds-eye view” illustration of his plan, which featured a city hall that resembled the Parliament buildings in Ottawa. Its dominant feature was a central tower looking north from Pender Street that was topped by a clock. Around the tower was a lower building that stretched along the four streets, with an open green area or quadrangle in the middle. The city hall block would have been where Vancouver Community College is today . The proposal would have also incorporated the former Vancouver courthouse site , along with the block that now houses the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.Article content Ed Hewitt’s 1914 plan for a new city hall and civic centre in Vancouver. The whereabouts of the original illustration is unknown; this is a reproduction from the Jan. 4, 1914 Vancouver Sun. Heritage expert Don Luxton said big proposals like this were part of the City Beautiful movement, which advocated comprehensive urban planning. “If you look at what San Francisco did, that’s what everyone was trying to do,” he said. “They were trying to build big monumental civic centres that were like Europe. They were trying to become great cities, and trying to clean the dirty Victorian industrial city up. Brighten it and whiten it and bring order to it and all that kind of thing.” As it happened, architect R. Mackay Fripp pitched another civic centre in the same area around the same time Hewitt unveiled his plan. Fripp’s plan would have incorporated the VCC site and the Cambie Street Grounds , but left out the Victory Square block. His neo-classical city hall would have been on Beatty Street, and there was a grand boulevard slashing across the neighbourhood from Robson to Pender.Article contentThere was a civic election on Jan. 8, 1914, which included a plebiscite on whether the city should build a new city hall on Main Street or at the Central School site. Central School won, 4,528 to 3,619. In the election, Mayor Truman Smith Baxter defeated former Mayor Louis D. Taylor. Taylor had campaigned against a new city hall, saying the money could be better spent elsewhere. Vancouver had an economic recession during the First World War, so none of the 1914 proposals were ever built. On March 12, 1922, The Sun resurrected the Hewitt proposal, but nothing came of it. The city wound up leasing the 10-storey Holden Building at 16 East Hastings to use as a city hall and offices in 1924. There was an elegant proposal for a new city hall and civic centre on Burrard Street in the 1928This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.Finally in 1935, Gerry McGeer ran on a platform of building a new city hall, and did, at 12th and Cambie. But originally, it was supposed to be built on the VCC site at Pender and Cambie, above Victory Square. McGeer moved it out of downtown after an unemployed march downtown turned violent, and he read the Riot Act at Victory Square on April 23, 1935.
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