Tourist attraction in Granville Island

Popular Granville Island

 History: The peninsula was originally used by First Nations as a fishing area. North west Granville Island in 1922. Many of the buildings shown here are still standing as of 2006. The city of Vancouver was called Granville until it was renamed in 1886 but the former name was kept and given to Granville Street which spanned the small inlet known as False Creek. False Creek in the late 19th century was more than twice today's size and its tidal flats included a large permanent sandbar over which spanned the original rickety wooden Granville Street bridge. This sandbar which would eventually become Granville Island was first mapped by Captain George Henry Richards in the British Boundary Commission's naval expdition in 1858-59 and the island today conforms roughly to the size and shape documented
at that time.


A British Admiralty Chart of 1893 shows the island in greater detail and conforming even more accurately to today's Granville Island. The first attempt to stabilize the sandbar by driving piles around the perimeter was an unofficial attempt to create some free real estate shortly after the creation of the original Granville Street bridge in 1889. The Federal government put a stop to the work as a menace to navigation but the pis are still visible in a photo taken in 1891. In 1915 with the port of Vancouver growing the newly formed Vancouver Harbour Commission approved a reclamation project in False Creak for an industrial area.

A 14 hectare (35 acre) island connected to the mainland by a combined road and rail bridge aits south end was to be built. Almost 760,000 cubic metres (1,000,000 cu yd) of fill was dredged largely by a man named Alvin Kingston from the surrounding waters of False Creek to create the island under the Granville Street Bridge. The total cost for the reclamation was $342,000. It was originally called Industrial Island but Granville Island named after the bridge that ran directly overhead was the name that stuck. The very first tenant B.C. Equipment Ltd. setthe standard by building a wood framed machine shop clad on all sides in corrugated tin at the Island's western end. (Today the same structure houses part of the Granville Island Public Market.) The company repaired and assembled heavy equipment for mining and forestry industries and used barges for shipping.

By 1923 virtually every lot on the island was occupied mostly by similar corrugated tin factories. During the Great Depreion one of Vancouver's several hobo jungles sprang up on the False Creek flats opposite Granville Island in town or in floathouses and survived by fishing and beachcombing and sold salmon smelt and wood door to door or at the public market on Main Street. They were basically self sufficient and were left alone. During the Second World War Wright's Canadian Ropes on the island was Canada's biggest manufacturer of product was supplied to forestry and mining industries. Afire in 1953 gutted their Granville Island factory so they moved to south Vancouver in 1956.