Early Yaletown

This is the CPR’s machine shop staff on Drake Street. The facility opened after a fire destroyed the one in the town of Yale, where the CPR based its west coast operations prior to the announcement that Vancouver was to become the terminus of the transcontinental railroad. Employees relocated to the area, including some who dismantled their houses in Yale and rebuilt them in Vancouver. Mayor Oppenheimer describes the move in an 1889 speech:

The administration of the Canadian Pacific Railway continues, as was to be expected, [to make] our City more and more the headquarters of the management of their Pacific Division and the source of supply for their army of workmen and mechanics, officials and linemen … Since the opening of their workshops and car factory, a whole quarter of the town on False Creek has sprung up, which has been named by the inhabitants after their former place of abode, Yaletown, a name which will very likely adhere to this thriving section of CPR life in our midst.

Mrs Sheehan on the porch of 1371 Seymour Street, one of the houses moved from Yale to Yaletown, in 1887.

Early Yaletown was a disgusting place, owing to the lack of a sewer system and the existence of a “piggery” and outhouse that “simply empty into an old creek bed, with just sufficient water running through to carry the filth far enough to give a considerable proportion of that neighbourhood in the vicinity of the Golden Gate hotel the benefits thereof,” in the words of an irate letter-to-the-editor writer in 1891. Besides the stench, the number of typhoid fever cases in the area “could not be counted on your fingers.”

Agreeing with the letter writer and others that the public health situation in Yaletown was dire, the World opined that “had the request for sanitation come from the wealthy West Enders, instead of the humble Yaletownites, it would have been complied with long ere this; the latter apparently are regarded of no consequence, except when their votes are wanted at election times.”

By the early 20th century, Yaletown had become a warehouse district (with a sewer system), but remained a working class neighbourhood until it was gentrified in the 1990s.

Source: CPR staff, ca. 1888-89, photo by Charles S Bailey, City of Vancouver Archives #Can P21; Sheehan house, City of Vancouver Archives #Bu P62; Mayor Oppenheimer quote from the Vancouver Daily World, 7 January 1889.