West Hastings Street Looking East in Downtown Vancouver

Looking east along West Hastings Street in downtown Vancouver, the former Main Post Office clock tower at 701 West Hastings rises on the left while the red mansard roof of the Dominion Building closes the view near Cambie Street. Both survive from the short, feverish period when Hastings was becoming the financial and administrative spine of a very young city.

There is some irony in that. Vancouver once thought Hastings Street was too far out of town for a post office.

In October 1886, only a few months after the Great Fire, merchants and residents petitioned City Council to have the post office moved from Hastings to a more convenient location between Abbott and Carrall. Council agreed, asking Ottawa to get on with it before the rainy season arrived. Decades later, pioneer George Schetky still remembered the “terrific row” caused by putting the post office so far from the centre of civic life.

The city solved the problem in the usual Vancouver fashion. It moved.

By the first decade of the twentieth century, development had marched west along Hastings. The federal government began its new Main Post Office at Granville and Hastings in 1905, an imposing granite building with a clock tower intended to make Ottawa's presence rather difficult to miss. Banks followed the money west too. By 1912, ten bank buildings stood along Hastings between Hornby and Cambie.

A Philip Timms photograph from 1909 catches the transformation in progress. The Winch Building is under construction. So is the Post Office. Farther east, the steel frame of the Dominion Trust Building is climbing over Cambie Street. All three were going up at once.

The Dominion Building at the far end of this photograph may be the better symbol of the period. Conceived during the real-estate boom as an expensive new office tower, it ran into financing trouble before it was finished. Once completed in 1910, the anticipated flood of tenants failed to appear. Dominion Trust itself collapsed four years later amid the wreckage of the boom and a financial scandal substantial enough to help shake confidence in other local institutions.

The buildings were selling permanence. The money behind some of them was considerably more adventurous.

More than a century later, the financial district has migrated west again, the streetcars are gone, and the old Post Office has been folded into Sinclair Centre. West Hastings still keeps much of the evidence. Stone banks, old offices, copper roofs, the clock tower, and down the corridor that absurd red roof of the Dominion Building, still visible between considerably newer walls.

Vancouver moved on.

The street kept the receipts.