Victory Square, Vancouver

__NOTOC__Victory Square is a park in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The square is bordered by West Hastings Street to the northeast, West Pender Street to the southwest, Cambie Street to the southeast, and Hamilton Street to the northwest. The term is also used to refer to the neighbourhood immediately surrounding the square.

History

Location

Victory Square was at one time the grounds of the city's provincial courthouse, which was torn down in 1911-13 when the new Rattenbury-designed courthouse on Georgia Street was opened (now the Vancouver Art Gallery). The location had significance when it was chosen, as it stands at the intersection of the old Granville townsite (aka Gastown) and the CPR Townsite, which was the downtown-designated land grant obtained by the CPR as part of the deal to locate the terminus and thereby found the city (the corner of Hastings and Hamilton is the northern tip of the CPR Townsite). Nine-tenths of an acre out of the 480 acres allotted to the CPR was held aside as "Government Square" on February 13 1886. The southwest corner of Hamilton and Hastings Streets is where L. A. Hamilton drove the first survey stake to commence laying out the street system for the city.

Boyd & Clendenning were contracted by the CPR to begin felling the forest at a rate of $26 per acre and an extra $2 per acre for lopping off large branches. A tangled mass soon built up to 20-feet thick that was to be the kindling for the great fire that leveled the townsite. [ Official Souvenir, 1946, 34-35.]

It was down the park's hillside that the clearing crews of the CPR entered Gastown a few steps ahead of the firestorm that destroyed the city on June 13, 1886, heading for their quarters in the Regina Hotel at Cambie and Water where they had themselves stored water and wetted blankets as safety precaution (it was the only building in that part of the city to survive the fire). Until that year, however, the site of Victory Square as with all of the downtown peninsula outside of Gastown had been dense west coast rainforest, with trees standing in dark, thick groves hundreds of feet high and also a small creek (now vanished).

The Cenotaph and the Old Courthouse

On the northern side of the square, on a plaza flanking Hastings Street, lies a war memorial called the Victory Square Cenotaph. Though obscure today, the site of the Cenotaph is significant because it was at tables at the foot of the old courthouse steps where men signed up for World War I in 1914—which was symbolic for the enlistees because of the strong royalist sentiment in the city, as it was on the courthouse steps where the main ceremonials of the various royal visits to Vancouver had taken place. The courthouse was the location of many official ceremonies, particularly the royal visits of the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York in 1901 and the Duke of Connaught in 1912.

The Cenotaph continues to be the focus of the city's annual Remembrance Day services.

Around Victory Square, Then And Now

During the old courthouse's tenure the vicinity was the hub of the city's financial and legal district, with the Vancouver curb exchange operating just across Hastings Street, mostly in a passageway cutting the corner diagonally behind the Astor Hotel (see photos in External links). The Inns of Court, a ramshackle and infamously leaky (if decorative) structure on the west side of Courthouse Square, was the location of adjutant legal services and offices connected to the Court House. The Oddfellows Hall and what is now the Army, Navy and Air Force Veterans Hall still stand further south (uphill) along Hamilton Street from where the Inns of Court used to be (now a modernist bank-cum-film studio). Most of the original main branches of the major banks were within the next few blocks west along Hastings, which in both directions was the hub of the city's shopping district until the completion of Pacific Centre in the 1970s, which severed the old pedestrian link between Woodward's, a block east of Victory Square, and Eaton's, two blocks west (now the SFU Harbour Centre campus). On the south side of Victory Square originally stood the Central School, which later became the original Vancouver Community College (then named Vancouver College), adjacent to which was the city's original main hospital (both were in a brickwork Gothic style).

Even once it was known that the courthouse was to be demolished, major construction continued to line the square where it had been. The Province, Sun and Dominion Buildings went up in rapid succession in the last years of the courthouse's existence, and remain today, although no longer as newspaper buildings. The maple trees on the Pender Street side of the park are the oldest street trees in the city, planted in 1897. [ [http://vancouver.ca/parks/trees/factsnfigures.htm] Vancouver Park Board, "Street Trees"]

References

External links

* [http://www.bcarchives.gov.bc.ca/cgi-bin/www2i/.visual/img_med/dir_76/d_01493.gifBC Archives Photo: Old Courthouse, January 1896]
* [http://www.bcarchives.gov.bc.ca/cgi-bin/www2i/.visual/img_med/dir_76/d_04183.gifBC Archives Photo: Old Courthouse, c.1905]