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David Oppenheimer served as
mayor of Vancouver without
pay from 1888 to 1891
Vancouver's oldest company is older than the city
itself. The story began in Germany in the last century when four
young brothers, Godfrey, Charles, David and Isaac Oppenheimer
left their native Frankfurt "to help in building a new continent."
They left in 1848 and settled first in New Orleans. In 1853 they
moved to a California just beginning to burn with Gold Rush fever,
but by 1857 the fever was beginning to cool, so they looked north.
It happens that the four Oppenheimer brothers had
dealt with people in Victoria, which was then almost entirely supplied
not over land, but by water from San Francisco. "So it was
to this outpost of the British Empire," says a company history,
"that the brothers moved in 1858 and entered the grocery business
in that tiny village. (The population then was slightly more than
3,000.) It was a hardy settlement of soldiers, sailors, miners,
trappers, businessmen and a mixed group of adventurers and Indians."
Their timing was excellent: Not long after they
arrived in Victoria, gold was discovered in the Cariboo and a stampede
of development began. They realized immediately that the company
must be moved to the mainland, closer to the thousands of newly
arrived gold miners operating along the banks of the Fraser.
They chose Yale, at the head of navigation. Sternwheelers
brought supplies from New Westminster and Fort Langley to the Oppenheimer
Brothers' store and warehouse, and from there they went out to all
parts of the Cariboo "on a road of sorts that had been hacked
out of the wilderness and rock by the Royal Engineers."
By 1863, with the establishment of a regular freighting
service, the importance of Yale had diminished and the Oppenheimers
went back to Victoria.
By the early 1880s the Cariboo Gold Rush was over.
By then, however, David Oppenheimer, the second-youngest of the
brothers, was looking elsewhere. He found out somehow that the Canadian
Pacific rail terminus would not be in Port Moody, as was expected,
but in the tiny village of Granville (more commonly called Gastown)
on Burrard Inlet. He and Isaac, the youngest, moved to Granville.
It was 1885.
The firm of Oppenheimer Brothers has been here ever
since. By 1886, the year of Vancouver's incorporation, the company
was firmly established. David and Isaac played a part in the incorporation,
and they quickly became a force in local politics. Isaac was elected
to council, and David became the second mayor of the city. He was
52.
A brief biography gives the bare bones: "In
1888 he was elected mayor by acclamation and served for four (one-year)
terms. During his office such advances as the purchase of the water
works, the sewage system, and street paving were initiated, as was
the city's first transportation system with the introduction of
streetcars in 1890. The first Cambie Street Bridge and the first
Granville Bridge were opened while he was in office. Oppenheimer
served as mayor without pay and donated his own land for schools
and parks. He established the lighting company (later B.C. Electric,
now B.C. Hydro.)"
It isn’t mentioned in that brief paragraph,
but David Oppenheimer also officially opened Stanley Park and established
the Parks Board.
After the 1886 fire the two brothers built a warehouse
on the southeast corner of Powell Street and Columbia Avenue. "It
was, "archivist Major J.S. Matthews wrote, "the
first and only wholesale grocery business on the mainland of British
Columbia."
Oppenheimer was the first president of the Vancouver
Board of Trade.
As mayor he encouraged council to offer special
inducements to new industries. This led among other things to the
construction in 1888 of the city's first engineering plant, Vancouver
City Ironworks. It was Oppenheimer who led the drive for concessions
to the B.C. Sugar Refining Co., concessions that led to the building
of the refinery that still sits on the city's waterfront.
His success is all the more remarkable when we learn
he spoke English haltingly and with a very pronounced accent. "Mayor
Oppenheimer wasn't a great scholar," pioneer Joseph A. Russell,
K.C., once told Major Matthews. "His English was broken—very
broken at times."
Russell was remembering the occasion when the mayor
was officiating at the opening of Stanley Park on Sept. 27, 1886.
Oppenheimer's speech had impressed Matthews, and he asked Russell
if he, Russell, had written it. Russell said he hadn't, but he had
"checked over" what the mayor had to say. "At the
time he had a secretary, Mr. Burdis: a very clever writer, but at
the time Mr. Burdis didn't happen to be in proper form for writing.
A little too fond of raising his elbow. That was the reason I checked
it over."
The ceremony went off without a hitch. And so did
the formal dedication of the park a year later, in October 6, 1889,
when the Governor General, Lord Stanley, was on hand. As a result
of Major Matthews' efforts, that 1889 ceremony was re-created 54
years later (Aug. 25, 1943) at the same spot. Playing the role of
Mayor David Oppenheimer was his great-nephew David Oppenheimer .
. . of Oppenheimer Brothers!
Mayor Oppenheimer died on the last day of 1897,
and is remembered by a bust, sponsored by his friends and carved
by Charles Marega, standing inside Stanley Park near the
Beach Street entrance.
The Oppenheimer food-brokerage business is still
around, now called The
Oppenheimer Group, nearly 150 years after it was established
in B.C., and 120 years after it arrived in Vancouver.
(An excerpt from The History of Metropolitan Vancouver, by Chuck
Davis.)
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