Before and after: When the Downtown Eastside was Vancouver's vibrant downtown | Daily Hive

Before and after: The rise and fall of Vancouver's original vibrant city centre in the Downtown Eastside

1919: Parade celebrating the end of World War I on the 100 block of East Hastings, looking east toward Main Street. (Vancouver Public Library Archives | Google Maps)

Over the first six decades of the 20th century, what is now known as the Downtown Eastside functioned as Vancouver’s original and thriving downtown.

Archival photographs from the 1910s through the 1960s show a Downtown Eastside that stands in sharp contrast to its present-day condition.

The intersection of East Hastings Street and Main Street was the era’s equivalent of today’s intersection of West Georgia Street and Granville Street — a focal point of commerce, public transit, and civic life.

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Hastings Street was lined with quintessential “big city” commercial uses: shops, major anchor department stores (most famously Woodward’s), banks, office buildings, hotels, theatres, and restaurants. This mix attracted middle- and upper-class shoppers as well as daily workers from across Metro Vancouver.

The Downtown Eastside served as the region’s primary Central Business District, closely tied to streetcars and interurban rail networks that connected the city and suburbs — services that disappeared by the 1950s.

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1916: Looking east on the zero block of East Hastings Street from Carrall Street. (Vancouver Public Library Archives)

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1954: Passengers waiting to board the streetcar on West Hastings Street at Abbott Street, looking west. (Vancouver Public Library Archives)

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The Downtown Eastside’s vitality extended beyond its buildings and businesses. It was equally defined by its street life, public events, and entertainment.

Hastings Street regularly hosted large public gatherings and major parades. One of the most prominent was the annual PNE Fair opening parade, which drew massive crowds along the street every summer for nearly six decades, until 1995.

Events like these reinforced Hastings Street’s role as the city’s ceremonial main street — Vancouver’s primary public showcase. In later years, this civic role shifted westward, to municipally designated ceremonial streets such as West Georgia Street and Burrard Street.

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1936: Jubilee Parade looking west on West Hastings Street toward Abbott Street, with a locomotive float by U.S. film and television entertainment giant Metro-Goldwyn Mayer (MGM). (Vancouver Public Library Archives)

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1949: PNE Parade on the 100 block of East Hastings Street looking west toward Main Street. (Vancouver Public Library Archives)

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The Great Depression struck Vancouver in 1929, with impacts that lingered well into the 1930s. The Downtown Eastside felt these effects early and intensely, as it was often the first place where job seekers arrived — and stayed — when employment failed to materialize.

At the same time, the region’s economic and civic “centre of gravity” began to move west. Key decisions — such as the 1912 construction of the courthouse and the relocations of Vancouver City Hall and Vancouver Public Library’s Central Branch — along with broader planning and economic trends, redirected investment and foot traffic away from the Downtown Eastside. Commercial energy increasingly consolidated in the emerging downtown core to the west.

As institutions and visitors moved, many businesses followed, gradually reducing daily activity and weakening the customer base that had sustained a bustling retail and entertainment district.

The disappearance of Japantown also played a role in the Downtown Eastside’s decline. Before the Second World War, the Powell Street area was a vibrant Japanese Canadian community that supported local businesses and street life. The forced removal and internment of Japanese Canadians beginning in 1942 abruptly dismantled this community, and few residents were able to return after the war, leaving a lasting social and economic void in the neighbourhood.

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1912: Japanese arch erected on the 100 block of East Hastings Street looking west toward Main Street. (Vancouver Public Library Archives)

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1938: South side of the 100 block of East Hastings Street near Columbia Street. (Vancouver Public Library Archives)

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In the latter half of the 20th century, multiple forces compounded these changes.

Many old hotels, originally built to house natural resource and transient workers in the early 1900s, were increasingly converted into low-cost single-room occupancy (SRO) housing. As other parts of the city became less affordable, this concentrated poverty within the Downtown Eastside.

Policy and systemic failures further intensified the situation. The deinstitutionalization of mental health care — particularly the closure of Riverview Hospital — combined with a lack of adequate community-based supports, pushed many vulnerable individuals into the only housing they could afford: SROs in the Downtown Eastside.

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1912: Looking east on West Hastings Street from Homer Street. (Vancouver Public Library Archives)

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1928: Looking east on West Hastings Street toward Abbott Street. (Vancouver Public Library Archives)

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1949: Looking east on West Hastings Street from Hamilton Street and Victory Square. (Vancouver Public Library Archives)

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The loss of key commercial anchors also accelerated the decline.

Most notably, the closure of Woodward’s in 1993 drained much of the remaining mainstream retail foot traffic, leaving behind vacant storefronts and fewer reasons for the broader public to visit the area.

As poverty and instability became increasingly concentrated and entrenched, the neighbourhood grew associated with homelessness, untreated mental health challenges, substance abuse, street-level drug markets, and crime and public disorder — not because this outcome was inevitable, but because decades of economic shifts and housing and health policies left the Downtown Eastside bearing a disproportionate share of the region’s social needs.

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1934: Looking west from the 100 block of East Hastings Street near Main Street. (Vancouver Public Library Archives)

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1910 looking east to 100 block east hastings street on north side

1910: Looking east on the 100 block of East Hastings Street. (Vancouver Public Library Archives)

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Today, Vancouver has a real opportunity to change course. Vancouver City Council’s approved approach for the Downtown Eastside earlier in December 2025 is the most serious attempt in generations to address the district’s long-standing problems.

Instead of relying on short-term fixes and solely on public funding from the municipal, provincial, and federal governments, the new plan aims to attract and incentivize private sector-led development as a part of the solution to generate better and safer housing for the area’s most vulnerable — replacing dilapidated and aging SROs — while also reintroducing a mix of incomes, particularly middle-income working individuals and families, to the area to catalyze and provide renewed support for local businesses and community life.

While no single plan can undo decades of decline and poor government policy choices overnight, it offers a more credible framework than previous efforts to gradually restore balance and functionality to the neighbourhood.

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1911: Looking east on West Hastings Street from near Carrall Street. (Vancouver Public Library Archives)

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1965: Baseball at Oppenheimer Park. (Vancouver Public Library Archives)

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1938: Large group of workers at Oppenheimer Park during the Post Office and Art Gallery sit-in. (Vancouver Public Library Archives)

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Before:

1919: Parade celebrating the end of World War I on the 100 block of East Hastings, looking east toward Main Street. (Vancouver Public Library Archives | Google Maps)

Present day:

Google Maps

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