This blog features before and after photographs, mostly from the Vancouver Archives, BC Archives and Vancouver Public Library collections. The older images are all in the public domain. It’s a companion blog to the Changing City blog which tracks contemporary development projects in Vancouver BC and buildingvancouver a blog that looks at who built some of the heritage buildings that are still standing in the city.
We’ll be adding more posts from time to time as we get the opportunity to shoot new ‘after’ shots to appropriate historic images.
To see similar images of much more recent change visit the flickr site
Thank you so much for this new blog. I am a native Vancouverite, age 52, so this is just wonderful for me.
Nice nice work!
First of all .. Congratulations on this wonderful blog!
Would love to see the original hotel at the corner of Main and Georgia ( Now the London Pub).
Thank you for this series, one per day. Clicking on a new one makes a great start to my day.
You’re welcome – we can’t guarantee to keep that pace up for much longer, but we should get a few up every week for a while longer.
Wonderful sight, My wife used to work at H. A. Bordgerson Ship Chandler company (41 Alexander St.) right across from the Europe Hotel in gas town…In those days you could walk around gas town without ever worrying about your safety 24/7 In fact she use to carry many thousands of dollars in a brown paper bag to the bank over on E.Hastings st….. (Can’t do that today…) keep up the good work I will be sending some others to look….
Great Site–can I add a footnote?
The date you give for the closing of the Sears in Harbour Centre (1980) didn’t seem right to me–in fact it seemed way, way, off–so I did a fact check search on Google;
http://changingvancouver.wordpress.com/
Re:
Hastings and Richards
(…. the Harbour Centre redevelopment by WZMH including a Simpsons Sears store which closed in 1980 …)
Result-
http://www.sears.ca/content/corporate-info/about/history/1983-1987
(1987)
“The struggling Harbour Centre Store in Vancouver closed its doors on New Year’s Eve. (1987)”
Thanks – we always welcome corrections. Sometimes they’re typos, and sometimes we’re wrong!