MOUNT PLEASANT — PAST to PRESENT
18 short videos by Old Bruce
My goal is to identify, preserve and celebrate the best of Mount Pleasant’s past, and help make it available and accessible to the people in Mount Pleasant’s present, and happily forever after.
People have been living in the Lower Mainland and the Mount Pleasant area for about 10,000 years, on one of the greatest sites for a city in the world. Oddly today there is only one building in the whole of Vancouver dating from before the spring of 1886 when the official City of Vancouver was established. One building today, because the newly constructed wooden city burned down two months later. Thus Vancouver’s starting point, Gastown in downtown Vancouver, has surviving brick buildings starting from late 1886. Notably Mount Pleasant, unlike all the other Vancouver neighbourhoods south of the downtown area, has buildings surviving from 1887.
The modern history of Mount Pleasant began in 1867 when Julius Voight became its first non-Native settler/landowner. He built a cabin in the wilderness near 1st Avenue and Main Street, then a point of land known as Khiwah’esks. Mount Pleasant’s history formally begins with it being named in 1888 and promoted as a new sub-division on the outer edge of the fast-growing City of Vancouver.
Gastown and Mount Pleasant each have their original centre points consisting of unique triangular-shaped city blocks, just like Times Square in New York City. They act as very special historical focal points for the surrounding community. Unknown to most people, Old Mount Pleasant is a second Gastown, and its central Heritage Heart where Main Street, Kingsway and Broadway converge should continue to be preserved and celebrated. As the site of a new major Skytrain station, it is facing enormous redevelopment pressures that could demolish it completely and turn the area into what the rest of Broadway and Kingsway look like — uninteresting long strips of generic new buildings without tradition, history or heritage.
I hope you enjoy delving into our amazing collective past, it is like getting to know your ancestors better, and it gives pleasure and deeper meaning to our community life.
— Bruce MacDonald