Inside Vancouver
A Memoir of Gastown
By Christina Burridge published Oct 1, 2012
Amongst modern
restaurants and shops
lie hints of Gastown's past.
A longtime resident remembers.
My Alexander Street building is 100 years old and I've lived in it for the last 20.
Almost every evening I've taken the same stroll: across the Main Street overpass to look at the fish boats moored alongside the fish plant that's been there since 1906, along the Crab Park beach, and back down Water Street, the historic heart of the city. In the brick buildings with their fir beams and wooden floors around Maple Tree Square live the ghosts of iconic Vancouver restaurants like Chez Joel, La Créperie, and Cherrystone Cove.
In the early '90s, when I moved in, those three were gone. Instead we had La Brochette (which I still miss) with its 18th-century French rotisserie and real fireplace, serving simple roasted meat and fish with vegetables from the chef's garden. There was Incendio too (still here), drawing the pizza-hungry from across the city with its Italian wood burning oven; and Umberto's Al Porto (also still here, though no longer operated by Umberto), where us media types went every Friday for idle afternoons of wine, martinis, and chat while watching the train tracks and the port. For pure drinking there was always the taxi drivers' watering hole, the Archimedes Club (now the Alibi Room). On long summer nights, Crab Park was mainly empty, save for a few Portuguese sailors debating whether they had enough money to eat at the Adega (now Campagnolo) on Main Street, Polish hake fishermen with nowhere to go (but thrilled by my husband's shaky ability to chat in their language), and a few crabbers hoping to haul something off the dock.
At the time the lure of Gastown was lots of space for (relatively) little money in heritage buildings within walking distance of downtown. For more than a decade that lure didn't reel in new blood or new money. Instead, restrictive zoning, costly seismic upgrades, and the overspill from the deteriorating Downtown Eastside sent Gastown into nearly terminal decline-only T-shirt tat, bong shops, and the Old Spaghetti Factory survived. Even by early 2006 there was nowhere to eat except Incendio and Sapphire (a long gone Sri Lankan restaurant, now Jules Bistro), and the Irish Heather.
