CPR

The Dunsmuir Tunnel

by Eve Lazarus on January 8, 2021

The Dunsmuir Tunnel opened in July 1932. It started at Waterfront Station, passed under Thurlow, crossed to Burrard and came out by the Georgia Viaduct.

While you’re stuck for an hour on the Lions Gate Bridge or crawling through the George Massey Tunnel, it may be comforting to know that traffic problems, just like the price of real estate, have always been an issue in Vancouver.

Story from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

An MLW S-3 yard engine pulling a passenger train through the Dunsmuir Tunnel, 1959. Courtesy Andy Cassidy

The crossing:

As early as 1914, there were calls for an end to the Carrall and Hastings Street crossing, where freight and passenger trains could hold up traffic for up to an hour a day getting from the CPR yards on Burrard Inlet to the yards at False Creek.

The crossing was still there in 1929 when a Vancouver Sun editorial called it an obstacle to the growth of Vancouver. “It costs Vancouver people thousands of dollars. It depreciates real estate values in the neighborhood to the extent of hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Train crossing Hastings Street, ca. 1920s. CVA Can 17

The tunnel:

The Dunsmuir Tunnel finally opened in July 1932. The new tunnel was 1,400 metres (4,600 feet) long and lined throughout with concrete. Steam engines now followed a 190-degree arc from Waterfront Station, passing under Thurlow, crossing to Burrard and then going under Dunsmuir to Cambie where the tunnel cut under the old bus depot at Larwill Park and came out by the Georgia Viaduct.

Andy Cassidy worked for the CPR at the Drake Street roundhouse until it closed in 1981. “I travelled through that tunnel daily for years either on the passenger cars going from the station to the coach yard, or later on while taking the locomotives from the shop over to the waiting train at the station,” he told me. “I used to have to adjust the locomotive headlights regularly on the way through.”

CPR steam engine #3716 leaving the Dunsmuir Tunnel, 1980. Courtesy Jacqueline Allan, Allan’s Digital Media Memories

Last train:

The last train went through the tunnel in August 1982. The tunnel then went under a $10 million renovation and was repurposed as SkyTrain’s Expo line, with the westbound track now stacked above the eastbound track. The new tunnel, with the Burrard and Granville Street stations built inside, opened in time for Expo 86.

Portal Park, West Hastings and Thurlow Streets. Photo courtesy City of Vancouver

The eastern entrance to the tunnel was a concrete art deco portal set into the base of the cliff below Beatty Street. It was demolished to make way for the Cosmo, a 27-storey tower that opened in 2012. The western end of the tunnel is under Portal Park at West Hastings and Thurlow Streets—a City of Vancouver park built on a concrete roof in June 1986.

Eve Lazarus photo, 2020. From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

Tags CPR, Dunsmuir Tunnel, Expo Line, Portal Park, SkyTrain, the Cosmo

Our missing heritage: the forgotten buildings of Bruce Price (1845-1903)

by Eve Lazarus on September 30, 2017

In the 1970s, the Scotia Tower and the hideous Vancouver Centre—currently home to London Drugs—obliterated a block of beautiful heritage buildings at Granville and Georgia Streets. The development took out the Strand Theatre (built in 1920), and the iconic Birks building, an 11-storey Edwardian where generations of Vancouverites met at the clock.

The Birks building and the second and third Hotel Vancouver in 1946. Courtesy Vancouver Archives 586-4615

I was surprised to discover that when the Birks building opened in 1913, it took out three of Vancouver’s earliest office buildings, including the four-storey Sir Donald Smith block (named for Lord Strathcona) and designed by Bruce Price in 1888.

The Donald Smith building opposite the first Hotel Vancouver at Granville and Georgia in 1899. Courtesy Vancouver Archives Bu P60

According to Building the West, New York-based Price was one of the most fashionable architects of the late 19^th century. He was the CPR’s architect of choice for a number of Canadian buildings, and although he designed several imposing buildings in Vancouver between 1886 and 1889, not one of them remains today.

The Van Horne block (named for the president of the CPR) at Granville and Dunsmuir, later became the Colonial Theatre, and one of Con Jone’s Don’t Argue tobacco stores, before becoming another casualty of the Pacific Centre in 1972 (see Past Tense blog for more information).

Originally known as the Van Horne building at 601-603 Granville, built in 1888/89. Courtesy Vancouver Archives 447-399 in 1972.

Price also designed the Crewe Block in the 600-block Granville: “built of brick and granite, with sixteen-inch pilasters running the height of the three-storey structure”* It lasted until 2001.

The granite-faced New York block (658 Granville) which Price designed in 1888, and the Daily World described as “the grandest building of its kind yet erected here, or for that matter in the Dominion,” would be replaced by the existing Hudson’s Bay store in the 1920s. According to the 1890 city directory, the building had a mixture of residents and businesses including the Dominion Brewing and Bottling Works, the CPR telegraph office, and John Milne Browning, the commissioner for the CPR Land Department.

Browning lived at West Georgia and Burrard in a stone and brick duplex that Price designed, described as “Double Cottage B.”* According to Changing Vancouver, sugar baron BT Rogers bought the property in 1906, and had the house lifted, enlarged and turned into a hotel called the Glencoe Lodge.

The Brownings home in 1899 would become part of the Glencoe Lodge. Courtesy Vancouver Archives Bu N414

The hotel was torn down to make way for a gas station in the early 1930s, and 40 years later, was bought up by the Royal Centre and is now the uninspiring Royal Bank building.

*source: Building the West: early architects of British Columbia

Our Missing Heritage: The buildings along West Georgia Street

by Eve Lazarus on November 8, 2014

1924 Vancouver streetscape by W.J. Moore

From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

I came across this photo* of downtown Vancouver in 1924 while I was playing on Vancouver Archive’s site a few years ago. It took me quite a while to figure out what I was looking at. There’s the Vancouver Block sticking up in the background—you can see the familiar clock—but check out all those other amazing buildings: the Strand Theatre, the Birks Building and the Second Hotel Vancouver—all missing from our streetscape less than half-a-century later.

The hotel was the first to go. Built by the CPR in 1916, you can see some of the incredible detail of the architecture in the photo (above). It even had a trellised outdoor roof café. It was all too grand for Vancouver apparently, because when the third (and existing) Hotel Vancouver was finished, its days were numbered. Eatons bought the site in 1949, pulled down the building and it remained an empty lot for the next two decades. The lot became the Eaton Centre in 1974, then Sears, and now it’s Nordstrom, a US department store.

Across the road from the second Hotel Vancouver was the beautiful old Birks Building. Well not that old really, only 61 in 1974. She was killed off to make way for the Scotia Tower and ugly Vancouver Centre (you know the one with London Drugs on Granville and Georgia).

* CVA Str N201.1

For more posts like this one see: Our Missing Heritage

Tags Birks Building, City of Vancouver Archives, CPR, Eatons, Nordstrom, Scotia Tower, Second Hotel Vancouver, Telus Garden, the Strand Theatre, Vancouver Block

Shopping for Vancouver Real Estate in 1909

by Eve Lazarus on July 14, 2013

From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

It turns out that standing in line to buy real estate isn`t some recent Vancouver phenomena—we`ve always done it. Philip T. Timms took this picture in 1909 as hundreds of Vancouver`s wealthiest citizens lined up to buy lots in Shaughnessy Heights from the CPR offices all the way down at the foot of Granville Street. The photo shows the corner of West Hastings and Hamilton Street.

Tags CPR, Marine Building, Philip T. Timms

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