High-def prints of our city from decades past for your viewing, thanks to “Vancouver is Awesome” and the Vancouver Archives:
Over the years the City of Vancouver Archives have done a great job of digitizing much of their collection of more than 1,000,000 photos of our city’s past, making them available for everyone to enjoy. … They’re free mostly because after a certain amount of time the copyright on photos expires, putting them into the public domain; anyone can then use them for any purpose.
We’ve put together 12 incredible public domain black and white images from the Archives in this slideshow here, linking to the high resolution JPG file for each of them. Click the link of the one you want, download it, get it printed and then hang it on your wall! Or visit the archives search tool HERE and find your own. Just make sure you do an ‘Advanced Search’ and under the ‘Copyright Status’ tab on the left click ‘Public Domain’ and all the images that come up are yours.
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Here’s my choice from the 12:
12 years before the Lions Gate Bridge was built.
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If you go to the site, you can enlarge the print sufficiently to check out the details around Lost Lagoon and see how all that’s changed. But more significantly, note how the city ended before Burnaby Mountain, and how polluted the city likely was. You can see mills spewing smoke around the inlet, so that even with a fraction of today’s population, the air was appalling by our standards.
And there was no seawall around Stanley Park nor sand at Third Beach.
Is that the Denman Arena on the west side of the Lagoon? I always thought it was closer to where the Bay theatre ended up.
I find pictures of Vancouver from 1926 interesting – up until that point development took place in the absence of formal planning and zoning. Another 1926 photo:
http://searcharchives.vancouver.ca/uploads/r/null/7/8/788561/ce072490-3b01-4b65-8d61-bfaa102cca83-A43247.jpg
Amazing foreshore and beaches in North Van in the photo.
All tidal flats have been built over and are being used by the Port or industry, except for an area east of Second Narrows, and very small areas of reserve land.
The Maplewood Flats Conservation Area near Second Narrows was also supposed to be paved over, but it is now managed by the Wild Bird Trust of BC. Maplewood Flats is the only remaining waterfront wetland ecosystem on the North Shore. Great place for birdwatching, especially in winter.