Granville Island

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Northwest Granville Island in 2005. The long gray building is the public market.

Granville Island is a small peninsula and shopping district in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It is located in False Creek, under the south end of the Granville Street Bridge. Granville Island was once an industrial manufacturing area, but is now a major tourist destination, providing amenities such as a public market, a large marina, the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (named in honour of the artist), various theatres including one run by The Arts Club Theatre, and various shopping areas clustered around the one industrial outpost remaining, a cement plant. The island is very popular with tourists and locals alike. Since its redevelopment in the 1970's, Granville Island has maintained a healthy community of craft studios, including a glassblowing studio, a printmaking shop, a luthier, a master shoemaker, various jewellers, and the B.C. Potter's Guild. A weekly farmer's market has also been ongoing since the island's redevelopment.

Granville Island Brewing Co. is also the name of a beer company which originated on Granville Island in 1984, but whose main base of operations was moved to Kelowna, British Columbia some time later. It does continue, however, to brew some of its varieties at the original site, and offers beer-tasting tours.

In 2004, Project for Public Spaces named Granville Island "One of the World's Great Places". ^[1]

1 History
2 Public market
3 References
4 External links

[edit] History

The city of Vancouver was once 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 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.

In 1915, with the port of Vancouver growing and the newly formed Vancouver Harbour Commission approved a reclamation project in False Creek for an industrial area. A 35 acres (142,000 m²) island, connected to the mainland by a combined road and rail bridge at its south end, was to be built. Almost 1 million cubic yards (760,000 m³) of fill was dredged 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 was the name that stuck, named after the bridge that ran directly overhead.

North-west Granville Island in 1922. Many of the buildings shown here are still standing as of 2006.

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 first tenants of Granville Island tended toward newer, secondary industries serving the forest, mining, construction, and shipping sectors. Factories made shingles, chain, barrels, wire rope, nails, saws, paint, cement, rivets, boilers, and many types of industrial machinery. In 1930, 1,200 workers were employed on the island mostly arriving at work by streetcar. There was a special stop in the middle of the Granville Street Bridge where 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.

During the Great Depression a shanty town named Bennettville, after the former Prime Minister of Canada Richard Bennett, grew up along the channel opposite the Granville Island on the Creek's south shore. Squatters on the island and in the town operated small boats or sold salmon or buckets of smelt door to door to survive. They were basically self-sufficient and were left alone.

The Depression saw several sawmills around False Creek shut down, yet secondary industries on Granville Island survived. 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 Europe, being at war, depended on the industrial factories on Granville Island. 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.

Granville Island and Granville Street Bridge as seen from western False Creek

In 1949 city officials gave eviction notices to seven hundred people when a typhoid scare and a grisly murder prompted the city to remove the shantytown.

In the postwar period, demand for heavy industrial output declined. The sawmills and even the Island's factories were becoming oily, dirty firetraps. Factories routinely discharged waste and other pollutants directly into the surrounding water. 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.

As business declined, officials began entertaining a new reclamation plan. The idea was to 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. 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.

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 larger vessel passed underneath.

The island was in serious decline as fire struck factory after factory. Rather than rebuild, owners either relocated or left industry alltogeter. 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.

A summer day on Granville Island

The redevelopment of Granville Island, spearheaded by Ron Basford, transformed the site into a people-friendly place with various uses, from parkland to housing to public exhibition space, from which modern Granville Island was born. For an economical investment of $19 million in the late 1970's, the federal government now reaps over $35 million a year in taxes.

[edit] Public market

Over fifty permanent and temporary vendors sell a variety of food and crafts in the market buildings. Hours of operation are 9:00am to 7:00pm, seven days per week, except holidays.^[2]