Granville Street is a major street in Vancouver, British Columbia,
Canada, and part of Highway 99. Granville Street is most often
associated with the Granville Entertainment District and the Granville
Mall. This street also cuts through suburban neighborhoods like Shaughnessy, and Marpole via the Granville Street Bridge.
The
community was known as "Gastown" (Gassy's Town) after its first citizen
- Jack Deighton, known as "Gassy" Jack. "To gas" is period English
slang for "to boast and to exaggerate". In 1870 the community was laid
out as the "township of Granville" but everybody called it Gastown. The
name Granville honours Granville Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Granville, who
was British Secretary of State for the Colonies at the time of local
settlement.
In 1886 it was incorporated as the city of Vancouver,
named after Captain George Vancouver, who accompanied James Cook on his
voyage to the West Coast and subsequently spent 2 years exploring and
charting the West Coast.
During the 1950s, Granville Street attracted many tourists to one of the world's largest displays of neon signs.
Towards
the middle of the twentieth century, the Downtown portion of Granville
Street had become a flourishing centre for entertainment, known for its
cinemas (built along the "Theatre Row," from the Granville Bridge to
where Granville Street intersects Robson Street), restaurants, clubs,
the Vogue and Orpheum theatres, and, later, arcades, pizza parlours,
pawn stores, pornography shops and strip clubs.
By the late
1990s, Granville Street suffered gradual deterioration and many movie
theatres, such as "The Plaza, Caprice, Paradise, [and] Granville Centre
[...] have all closed for good," writes Dmitrios Otis in his article
"The Last Peep Show." In the early 2000s, the news of the upcoming 2010
Winter Olympic Games, to be hosted in Whistler, a series of
gentrification projects, still undergoing as of 2006, had caused the
shutdown of many more businesses that had heretofore become landmarks of
the street and of the city.
Also, Otis writes that "once
dominated by movie theatres, pinball arcades, and sex shops [Downtown
Granville is being replaced] by nightclubs and bars, as [...it]
transforms into a booze-based 'Entertainment District'." In April 2005,
Capitol 6, a beloved 1920s-era movie theatre complex (built in 1921 and
restored and reopened in 1977) closed its doors (Chapman). By August
2005, Movieland Arcade, located at 906 Granville Street became "the last
home of authentic, 8 mm 'peep show' film booths in the world" (Otis).
On July 7, 2005, the Granville Book Company, a popular and independently
owned bookstore was forced to close (Tupper) due to the rising rents
and regulations the city began imposing in the early 2000s in order to
"clean up" the street by the 2010 Olympics and combat Vancouver's "No
Fun City" image. (Note the "Fun City" red banners put up by the city on
the lamp-posts in the pizza-shop photograph). Landlords have been unable
to find replacement tenants for many of these closed locations; for
example, the Granville Book Company site was still boarded up and vacant
as of July 12, 2006.
While proponents of the Granville
gentrification project in general (and the 2010 Olympics in specific)
claim that the improvements made to the street will only benefit its
residents, the customers frequenting the clubs and the remaining
theatres and cinemas, maintain that the project is a temporary solution,
since the closing down of the less "classy" businesses, and the
build-up of Yaletown-style condominiums in their place, will not
eliminate the unwanted pizzerias, corner-stores and pornography shops -
and their patrons - but will simply displace them elsewhere (an issue
reminiscent of the city's long-standing inability to solve the problems
of the DTES).
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