Recognize this building? Once a factory, now the Public Market

In the late 1970s, Granville Island began its transformation from a declining 37-acre industrial park in Vancouver's False Creek, to possibly the most successful urban redevelopment ever seen in North America.

Its previous life was much different than what you see now, although remnants of the past are very much in plain sight. Even some old tenants still remain: a cement factory, Ocean Construction Ltd. has been on Johnston St. for more than 80 years; and Micon Industries, a drill bit manufacturer, moved into its Anderson St. location in the 1960s. Both are thriving today, an embodiment of the Island's own dusty history.

A Century Ago: In the Beginning

A century ago, there was no such thing as Granville Island. There was, however, the small mill town of Granville, renamed Vancouver in 1886 with the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). The former town name was then given to the main north-south thoroughfare, Granville Street, which spanned the small inlet known as False Creek.

False Creek in the late 19th century was more than twice the size it is today, and its tidal flats included two sandbars over which spanned the original, rickety, wooden Granville Street bridge.

Those two sandbars would eventually become Granville Island.

Since early times, local First Nations used the sandbars' natural corral-like formation for fishing. The new settlers, however, wanted either water deep enough to navigate or dry land to buy, sell and develop.

What ensued in the wild-west atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Vancouver was a series of disputes, land grabs, conspiracies and entrepreneurial schemes. But no one could agree on a plan, nor get a foothold in the area. As a result, the flats lay undeveloped for another 20 years.

The Early 20th Century: Industrial Boom

When there was only water under the bridge - then came 1 million cubic yards of fill.

In 1909, a second, steel Granville Street Bridge was built to span the Creek. And finally, in 1915, with the port of Vancouver growing by leaps and bounds, the newly formed Vancouver Harbour Commission approved a reclamation project for the Island: 35 acres, connected to the mainland by a combined road and rail bridge at its south end.

Almost a million cubic yards of fill was dredged from the surrounding waters of False Creek to create the spreading pancake under the Granville Street Bridge. It was initially christened "Industrial Island," but the name that stuck came down from the bridge overhead.

Total cost for the reclamation in 1915: $342,000.

False Creek in the 1920s was the sawmilling hub of British Columbia's south coast, but the first tenants of Granville Island tended toward newer secondary industries serving the forest, mining, construction, and shipping sectors.

The very first tenant, B.C. Equipment Ltd., set the standard by building a wood-framed machine shop, clad on all sides in corrugated tin, at the Island's west end. (Today the same structure houses part of the Granville Island Public Market.) By 1923 virtually every lot on the Island was occupied, mostly by similar corrugated-tin factories.

The Island's factories made shingles, chain, barrels, wire rope, nails, saws, paint, cement, rivets, boilers, and all manner of industrial machinery.

At its height in 1930, 1,200 workers were employed on the Island. Most of the workers arrived at work by streetcar. There was a special stop in the middle of the Granville Street Bridge from whence they descended several flights of stairs to the Island below. The only other access to the Island was a pair of road and rail bridges leading to the Creek's south shore.

The boom ended with the onset of the Great Depression. Several of the sawmills around False Creek shut down, and a shantytown grew up along the channel opposite the Island on the Creek's south shore. (Living on floats and piles, the squatters remained until the 1950s, when a typhoid scare and a grisly murder prompted the city to evict them.)

The War Years: Survival of the Fittest

In 1930, over 1200 workers commuted to the Island by Streetcar.

By and large, the secondary industries on Granville Island survived the Depression. They successfully lobbied the overseers to lower their rents, and withheld civic taxes on the grounds that the city had no jurisdiction over federal property. The ensuing court case went all the way the House of Lords in London, then the highest court of appeal. The tenants lost, but by then the winds of war were blowing in Europe, and the industrial markets on which Granville Island's factories depended were well on the mend.

Demand for chain, wire rope and other products made on the Island soared as a result of the Second World War, and Granville Island entered its second heyday. As many of the young, male workers joined the armed forces, women took their places in the plants.

The Island was considered so vital to the war effort that in 1942, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, special identification cards were issued to workers to prevent saboteurs from infiltrating it.

A spectacular fire at the Overseas Wood Products mill, just opposite Granville Island on the south shore of False Creek, seemed to confirm the suspicions of the most fearful, but it in fact pointed to something that would become more obvious after the war: the slow dereliction of industry all around False Creek.

The End of an Era: Asphalt to Asphalt, Rust to Rust

In the postwar period, demand for heavy industrial output declined. The sawmills and even the Island's factories were becoming oily, dirty firetraps. To keep its tenants, the overseers charged some of the lowest industrial rents going, which meant the declining businesses hung on, and no newer, tertiary industries took their place.

Once a fertile fishing ground, False Creek had become a toxic sewer. Factories routinely discharged waste and other pollutants directly into the surrounding water.

As business declined, officials began entertaining a new reclamation plan: fill in the remainder of the Creek to create more industrial land, remove the water access (on which many of the existing factories still depended), and turn Granville Island into a land-locked plot.

In 1950, plans also started for the construction of a soaring, new, eight-lane Granville Street Bridge to replace the 1909 swing span that still stopped traffic every time a large vessel passed underneath.

The Creek was saved by the hefty $50-million price tag estimated to fulfill the reclamation plan. Just six acres were reclaimed from the Creek along the Island's south channel. It was technically no longer an island but instead a peninsula.

Nonetheless, the Island was in serious decline. Fire struck factory after factory, and rather than rebuild, their owners either relocated or called it quits. Trucks replaced barges and trains as the main means of transportation, and the Island's cramped, inner-city location no longer looked attractive to industry. Slowly, the vacant lots began to outnumber the occupied ones.

Two plans emerged out of the need to do something about it: the first proposed to replace old heavy industry with new; the second sought to return public access to the waterfront.

After many lengthy discussions, disputes, evictions, and arguments, city officials finally set the course for the future: transform the site into a people-friendly place with various uses, from parkland to housing to public exhibition space.

The Island Today: Reclamation Reformation

The colours and sounds of Granville Island today

Walking Granville Island today, you can see the traces of its origins. Around some of the trees you can see the sandy soil deposited for millennia by the many streams draining into False Creek. That soil was abruptly dug up from the tidal flats and smoothed to a surface exactly 10 feet above the high-tide mark.

You can see the piles - mostly steel replacements of the wooden originals - lining the Island's north shore. The second (1909) Granville Bridge bisected the Island along what is today Old Bridge Street.

In the narrow lots and buildings you can see the logic of early Twentieth-Century industrial land use; the 50-60-foot-wide lots allowed the tenants frontage to the water at one end and to the Island's rail network, running roughly along the course of today's streets, at the other. The absence of curbs and sidewalks responded to the need for unobstructed passage for trucks, trolleys and forklifts.

Our Island now sustains a thriving, healthy ecosystem, but this wasn't always true. In the early part of the Twentieth Century, False Creek was an industrial sewer. Sawmills and machine shops dumped their toxic waste into the water. Chemical leaks were common. By 1970, there was no sea life to be seen in the murky, dirty waters surrounding Granville Island. But nature has regenerated itself, with the help of developers and the city working together to remove toxic soils. Now we take pride the nature on our Island, and we encourage our residents, businesses and visitors to do the same.

Thanks to the efforts of several visionary people in the 1970's, the dream for a unique urban oasis is a thriving reality, and will continue on evolving and shaping itself into the future.