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The pursuit of power, profit and privacy : a study of Vancouver’s west end elite, 1886-1914

University of British Columbia

Vancouver's West End, located between Stanley Park and the commercial/administrative enterprises of the central business district, quickly emerged as the city's prime residential neighborhood during the late 1880's. Until approximately 1912 Vancouver's leading citizens resided in the West End, shaping its growth and that of much of the city. Coming predominantly from Eastern Canada and Great Britain and arriving in Vancouver before or just after the turn of the century, Vancouver's West End elite created a residential landscape that reflected the architecture, institutions and urban images of the late Victorian Age. The transplant of a sophisticated and established urban culture to a pristine urban environment allowed Vancouver's upper class quickly to create a comfortable residential environment in a new, West Coast urban setting. In short, the West End was an identifiable neighborhood that reflected the processes of social and spatial sorting common throughout the late nineteenth century industrial urban world, and it provided a secure social and geographical base where the ambitious upper class could build and manoeuver to structure their future in British Columbia. While the West End portrayed status and functioned as an environment in which upper class social interaction and cohesion could be initiated and sustained, it was only part of the larger civic arena within which the elite population operated. This larger setting included the elaborate institutional network of corporations, exclusive clubs and recreational associations within which members of the elite consolidated their socio-economic ascendancy. An understanding of the institutional basis of elite power in Vancouver is essential to gaining an understanding of the elite's impact on the social and geographical environment of the city. Chapter three concentrates on the development of the elite's network of voluntary associations while chapter four examines the corporate connections and activities of the elite. In conclusion, the study examines the beliefs and commitments that helped to endorse the vast socio-economic power of the business dominated elite in early Vancouver. It is suggested that most immigrants to pre-1914 Vancouver saw the city as the land of private opportunity, a place where prosperity could be attained by everyone who adhered to the rules of hard work, thrift and common sense. A widely shared commitment to material progress and urban expansion helped to inspire a deferential attitude towards those businessmen who were leaders of expansion in the city's private sector and, more specifically, it sanctioned the rapid demise of the West End as an upper class single-family neighborhood.

Text

2010-02-19

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/20586

Geography

University of British Columbia

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