Gastown Historic District

Gastown is the oldest neighbourhood in Vancouver, British Columbia, centred on Water Street between Richards and Carrall streets. Its origins date to September 1867, when John 'Gassy Jack' Deighton, a former river pilot, arrived by canoe near Burrard Inlet and opened a saloon for the workers at Hastings Mill. The settlement that grew around the saloon was known as Gastown and was formally laid out as the Granville townsite in 1870. A fire in June 1886 destroyed the young city of Vancouver, which had been incorporated that April, and the district was rapidly rebuilt in brick and stone. Much of what visitors see today dates from the building boom of the 1890s to the early 1900s, when Gastown served as a warehouse, hotel and wholesale district for the Klondike gold rush and the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The streetscape is typified by Victorian and Edwardian commercial buildings with cast-iron columns, decorative cornices and loading docks, along with cobbled stretches of Water Street. The Gastown Steam Clock at Water and Cambie, built in 1977, is a modern addition powered by an underground steam system and is a popular stop. The area fell into decline in the mid-20th century, and local campaigns in the 1960s saved it from redevelopment; the provincial government designated Gastown a historic area in 1971, and it was declared a National Historic Site of Canada in 2009. The district is not a museum with a single curatorial narrative, but is read chronologically as visitors walk from Maple Tree Square outward, with heritage plaques and walking tours interpreting the layers of settlement, including the earlier Indigenous presence of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Many historic buildings have been restored and now house shops, galleries, restaurants and design studios, while some structures have been adapted with new interiors behind preserved facades. Visitors typically allow one to two hours to walk the district.