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At the top of Heritage Vancouver’s annual watch list of vulnerable places is the heart of the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood. This commercial hub of Vancouver’s first suburb is well over a century old, blossoming in the late-1880s around the nexus of Main, Broadway and Kingsway.
If you lived here in the early 20th century the hub had all your staples, with grocers, clothing shops, butchers and banks. Streetcars brought people to the stores then. Today a different kind of transit project is on track for the neighbourhood. And it’s one of the factors threatening the neighbourhood’s heart.
The Broadway subway plan calls for a station here in 2025. The city has already launched planning efforts for a six-kilometre stretch of Broadway, from the east side’s Clark Drive to the west side’s Vine Street.
And, banking on the increasing desirability of the area, nicknamed Mount Pixel for its tech boom and the upscaling that comes up with it, a few developers have been amassing small properties for larger future projects.
Whether you hold dear the historic 1890s Mount Pleasant, when it welcomed the streetcar, or the hipster 1990s Mount Pleasant, when it became a destination for eclectic shopping, Heritage Vancouver warns development pressures might smash or squeeze out what makes the neighbourhood special.
That includes its built heritage, but also its diverse demographics and intimate streetscape, a legacy of its pre-car pedestrian and streetcar days.
Settler history aside, Mount Pleasant’s Indigenous heritage stretches back millennia, when the area was mostly a dense rainforest of huge fir, cedar and hemlock, bisected by the ancient trail that would become Kingsway. A creek held trout and spawning salmon, elk and bears roamed the woods and plants like berry bushes and Labrador Tea (later enjoyed by British settlers) made this an area of natural abundance.
Some of those landscapes appear in the city’s archival photographs of Mount Pleasant, starting from the 1890s.
Here’s a selection of images that show the evolution of the neighbourhood.
You can read Heritage Vancouver’s Top10 Watch List for 2019 here . ![[Tyee]](/design-article.thetyee.ca/ui/img/yellowblob.png){kind=small}
Read more: Photo Essays
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