Lauchlan Hamilton was the CPR land commissioner who, starting in 1885 as a young man of 33, surveyed much of Vancouver and named many of its streets. (A plaque commemorating his work is on the building at the southwest corner of Hamilton and Hastings, once a bank.)
If you live or work downtown Hamilton put you where you are.
Hamilton’s impact on early Vancouver’s physical appearance was enormous, but this is just one of the Western Canadian cities he laid out. William Van Horne and the CPR gave him complete authority (at the age of 28) to select the 25 million acres the railway had been given as a subsidy and also authorized him to survey the land for the cities along the line. Hamilton designed early Calgary, Regina and Moose Jaw and, he once wrote, “numberless” other settlements along the line.
![The Buzzer [Image: Translink]](https://vancouverhistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/ct_print_buzzer_page-1024x646.jpg)
On June 2, 1916 The Buzzer, that little publication you get on the trolleys and SkyTrain in the lower mainland, produced its first issue.
The official opening of the big, handsome Royal Bank Building on the northeast corner of Granville at Hastings was June 5, 1931—95 years ago today.
On June 15, 1921 a brief and ineffective period of prohibition that had started in BC in 1917 came to an end, but from this date on there would be provincial government control of the sale of spirituous and malt liquors.
On June 22, 1956 Burnaby’s stylish new Municipal Hall opened near Deer Lake in the geographical centre of the municipality. Architectural historian Dr. Harold Kalman wrote this about the building: “Fred Hollingsworth, one of the pioneers of the new West Coast style, produced an understated masterpiece of modernism, a two-storey structure whose crisp rectangular design symbolized Burnaby’s progressive leadership.”
Hundreds of books have been produced by Vancouver writers, and dozens more have been written about Vancouver. Now, researched exclusively for vancouverhistory.ca, Karen Cannon has compiled an annotated list of 945 Vancouver books. Ms. Cannon is a retired librarian. You’ll make some fascinating discoveries in her collection.
When an old-fashioned historian dies in these times of instant news and fleeting celebrity, it’s usually little noted. But the death of Vancouver’s 75-year-old Chuck Davis in Nov. 2010 had been preceded — since his earlier announcement he had just weeks to live — by a huge wave of public tributes. Those who knew Davis well — and I was one — understood that someone unique was leaving the scene. The history of Vancouver and Davis are, and will always be, inextricably bound.
When he stepped off the train in Vancouver in Dec. 1944, the nine-year-old looked around, saw green instead of the white of mid-winter Winnipeg, and said to his father, “I think we’ve come to the right place.” But his father, fleeing an unhappy marriage, may have soon had other thoughts. They lived, dirt poor, in an unheated squatters shack on Burrard Inlet until it burned down. And when thieves stole his father’s entire stock of warehoused candy — he’d planned to open a candy store in East Vancouver — the two were left destitute. For years, father and son bounced around Vancouver, Burnaby, and Ontario — taking odd jobs, living in a series of dumps, trying to survive.
