Strathcona

Strathcona is one of this city’s earliest neighbourhoods. It features beautifully restored row houses, overflowing flower gardens, and welcoming front porches.

Strathcona grew out of the collection of shacks and small buildings that surrounded the Hastings Mill site, and has a unique mix of people, history, land use, and architecture.

It is a neighbourhood of houses, apartment buildings, and rooming houses where neighbours walk to the corner store, do tai chi in the parks or stroll in the community garden. It is a community that has managed to survive, and thrive, despite constant pressure for change.

Strathcona includes the neighbourhoods of:

• Downtown Eastside
• False Creek Flats

The late 19th and early 20th century architecture in the area is a relative rarity in Vancouver and many houses in Strathcona are designated heritage houses. This housing stock in particular is being renovated, thus raising property values and attracting wealthier home owners to the area. A number of homeowners have restored their houses in the original Victorian or Edwardian styles, with a particular attention to the “true colours” of the period, which in some cases has been supported by grants from the “Restore It!” program of the Vancouver Heritage Foundation.

Neighbourhood history and heritage

Known as the “East End” – the original East End School which gave the area its name was at the corner of Powell and Jackson – well into the 1950s, Vancouver’s first neighbourhood grew up around the Hastings Milland expanded southward from Burrard Inlet. It has always been a diverse neighbourhood where a succession of immigrants including the British, Irish, Russian, Croatian, Greeks, and Scandinavians, Japanese and Chinese have lived before moving on to other parts of the city.