Here’s another shot a few years later of the Granville and Pender junction in the early 1900s. The Post Office and Customs House is still there on Pender, and there’s a new building on the corner with Granville. It was home to F W Welsh, grocers, and P Burns, butchers. Just out of shot was a building shared by a dressmaker and tailor where Emil Guenther, an architect, had his office. 

The building went up in 1899, and it could be by C O Wickenden who designed a building on Pender for a Mr Tomkins that year – although no Tomkins appear living on Pender in the street directory that year or in the following years. It didn’t last very long as Somervell and Putnam’s Merchants Bank (later a Bank of Montreal branch) was built in 1915, and later converted to the Segal School of Business by Simon Fraser University. Underwood, McKinley, Wilson & Smith’s Pender Place now occupy the Post Office spot. After the Post Office operations moved the original building became the Dominion of Canada Assay Office