One of the coolest documents in the Vancouver archives is the 1912 Goad’s Atlas of the City of Vancouver and Surrounding Municipalities.

It shows every single building in the city, the old streetcar lines, and the location of long-gone piers on the waterfront. It even has the original shoreline of False Creek (it went up to Clark Drive, and there was a bridge across Main Street).

The atlas was used as a map by fire insurance companies that were trying to assess the risk of a property. Wooden buildings posed a higher fire risk, hence they were coloured yellow, while brick or stone buildings were coloured pink.

“The beautiful thing about the fire insurance maps is that if the use of the structure has anything to do with fire risk, they will write on the map what was there,” said city archivist Heather Gordon.

“So you will see the name of a sawmill, you can get that kind of detail, which people really love for doing environmental site assessments. Or just look up what was on their property, back in the day.”

Unfortunately few people outside the archival community know the Goad’s Atlas even exists. But the Vancouver archives hopes to change this, because it’s just been scanned and mounted onto Vanmap, the city’s geographic information system.

Basically Vanmap is an interactive map that allows people to search for all sorts of data. In the “Public Places” folder, for example, you can find the locations of community centres, libraries, hospitals, parks, off leash dog parks, and schools.

The Goad’s map can be found in the Aerial Imagery folder. If you check it off, it comes up, and you can zoom in to a neighbourhood, or even do a search by address.

You can even overlay modern Vancouver on top of the 1912 one. If you overlay the current shoreline on top of the original, you find the shoreline has been pushed out, all over the city.

The atlas is quite large, 20 inches high by 30 inches wide. It divides the city into plates, which allow you to zoom in on a neighbourhood. Plate three is Gastown, for example.

The plates have been digitally stitched together and “georectified” so that they seamlessly blend with a modern map. You can also look up various neighbourhoods on the city’s “Open Data Catalogue,” which provides access to 130 city “datasets.”

Gordon said between Vanmap and the Open Data Catalogue, the public will have unprecedented access to the Goad map. But be warned, you can get lost for hours looking through the old city on the Goad’s map.

If you’ve ever wondered where the English Bay pier was located, zoom in to the West End and there it is, just west of the foot of Gilford. There’s a pavilion at the head of the pier. At the corner of Denman and Davie is something called the Imperial Skating Rink, presumably a roller skating venue. Who knew?

“Some of the plates will show some of the old streams, because at the time, they were still there,” said Gordon. “The streets will even show little wood bridges over them.”

It’s an amazing document. Hastings street west of Burrard is still called its original name, Seaton. Point Grey was then a separate municipality, and so was South Vancouver, which was south of 16th.

You can even see the original subdivision plan for the University Endowment Lands, which was supposed to be developed as a residential neighbourhood.

Vanmap can be finicky, so it may take you some time to get used to it. You should probably click off most of the folders before looking at the Goad’s map, which can take awhile to load. Part of the map can also be accessed at the federal government’s library and archives site.

Gordon says the Vancouver archives hopes to scan about 2,000 maps this year, which will be added to the 500 maps that are already viewable on the Archives website. The archives also has about 90,000 photos on its website, all of which can be downloaded by the public.

But that’s just a drop in the bucket – the archives has 1.5 million photos overall.

“I worked it out the other day, it works out that six percent of the photographic holdings are scanned,” said Gordon. “And we’ve been scanning since 1997.”

Vanmap can be found here.

The Open Data Catalogue is here.

Archives can be found here.

jmackie@vancouversun.ca

1912 map of what is now Pacific Spirit Park; 1912 map of Vancouver's West End.