Here’s the southern half of the 500 block of Granville Street. The picture was taken in 1981 from half-way up the block looking south to Dunsmuir, and really very little change had occurred since this 1905 VPL image.
The building on the right, closest to the photographer was the Inglis Reid building, originally designed by G W Grant for builder/investor Bedford Davidson in 1902 for $8,000. It was substantially rebuilt at a cost of $22,000 in 1922. The smaller building to the south was known as the Anderson block. The biggest building on this end of the block was the four-storey Gordon Drysdale block, built for his dry goods business in 1907 and designed by Hooper and Watkins with an addition in 1912 by S B Birds. Like many of our successful businessmen and developers, the Drysdale family lived in the West End at 825 Broughton. Gordon and his wife Maria, and both their older children were born in Nova Scotia (George in 1888 and Janet in 1892), but their youngest son, Norman, was born in BC in 1895.
The smaller building to the south was another designed by G W Grant for Bedford Davidson in 1903, at a cost of $10,000. The one building that has changed is the corner block; originally also a Grant design for Dr S J Tunstall, it was replaced in 1960 with a smaller 2-storey structure (seen better in this companion 1981 image)
Today the Pacific Centre’s north building occupies this entire part of the block, completed in 1990 and designed by Zeidler Roberts Partnership. In 2007 the Holt Renfrew store at the southern end of the block was redesigned by New York designers Janson Goldstein who had local glass studio Nathan Allan Glass Studios create a unique ‘slumped’ glass facade with convex panels of individual quilted glass pillows.
Image sources: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 779-W01.35, Vancouver Public Library and CVA 779-W01.34
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Changing Vancouver 