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Top Attractions in Downtown Eastside

Vancouver Police Museum

The Vancouver Police Museum opened to commemorate the centennial of the Vancouver Police Department and the City of Vancouver, British Columbia in 1986. Located at 240 E. Cordova Street in Vancouvers Gastown, the museum is housed in a building that was once both the Coroner’s Court and autopsy facilities and the City Analyst’s laboratory . In 1935, the Coroners Court was used as a makeshift hospital by police during the Battle of Ballantyne Pier. It was designed by architect Arthur J. Bird, and today it is a municipally designated heritage building. The museum is run by the Vancouver Police Historical Society, a non-profit organization established in 1983 with the mandate to foster interest in the history of the Vancouver Police Department and to open a museum for this purpose. The catalyst for the project was the museums first curator, Joe Swan, a former police sergeant and amateur historian. Swan wrote the departments official history book, which was published by the Vancouver Historical Society in 1986, entitled, A Century of Service: The Vancouver Police, 1886-1986. The museum houses a collection of approximately 20,000 objects. This includes archival documents, photographs, publications, confiscated firearms and other weapons, counterfeit currency, and a various other artifacts and memorabilia, of which an estimated 40% is on display. The museum offers educational programs for children and walking tours of the neighbourhood on the theme, "Sins of the City." The museum has a gift shop and publishes a quarterly newsletter. The museum is self-funded through admission and program fees, membership fees, donations, gift shop sales, and project grants; the museum receives no direct funding from the Vancouver Police Department or the City of Vancouver but does receive in-kind support.

St. James Anglican Church

St. James' Anglican Church (Parish of Saint James, Vancouver) is a unique church building in the Diocese of New Westminster of the Anglican Church of Canada located at the north-east corner of East Cordova Street and Gore Avenue in the City of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The original building was completed in the spring of 1881 on Alexander Street to the north west of the present site and was sponsored by Captain James Raymur, the manager of Hastings Mill. This building burned down in the Great Vancouver Fire of 1886. The heat of the fire melted the church bell into a puddle that was eventually put on display at the Museum of Vancouver. The present (and third) church building was designed by Adrian Gilbert Scott and is the second to be built at this location on land donated by the Canadian Pacific Railway. Its design is a combination of Art Deco, Romanesque Revival, Byzantine Revival, and Gothic Revival architecture. The walls are made of reinforced concrete, while the roof is made of slate. The building was constructed between 1935 and 1937 and consecrated in 1938. St. James was the first Anglican church in Vancouver, formerly named Granville, until the establishment of a local church (daughter church) that would eventually become the congregation of Christ Church Cathedral. Its worship and piety are explicitly Anglo-Catholic.

Oppenheimer Park

Oppenheimer Park is located in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Opened in 1902 as the Powell Street Grounds by Vancouvers second mayor, David Oppenheimer; it was later renamed in honour of the mayor. The park is bounded by Jackson Street, Dunlevy Street, Powell Street, and East Cordova. Oppenheimer Parks facilities include a softball field, a basketball court, a childrens playground, and a community centre with bathrooms, meeting space, and public computer access. The park employs two full-time activity coordinators and several part-time staff. The Asahi baseball team used Oppenheimer Park as its home field prior to World War II, although it is most notable historically as being the site of one of the large demonstrations of striking workers during the events of Bloody Sunday in 1938. The park remained a popular family destination until the late 1980s when crack cocaine trade and abuse began to dominate the parks usage. Since 2004, initiatives by the Vancouver Police and the Strathcona Business Improvement Association have attempted to return the park to its original image of safe recreation, with some success. Vancouvers longest running community celebration, the annual Powell Street Festival takes place in and around Oppenheimer Park.

Powell Street Festival

Japantown, Little Tokyo or Paueru-gai is an old neighbourhood in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, located east of Gastown and north of Chinatown, that once had a concentration of Japanese immigrants. It was attacked on 7 September 1907 by the Asiatic Exclusion League, which smashed many windows in parts of Chinatown, and then moved on to Japantown. Japantown received warning of the attacks, and though residents resisted the Asiatic Exclusion League members, considerable damage was done. The centenary of the attacks were marked by a Riot Walk through Chinatown and Japantown on 7 September 2007. During World War II when Japanese Canadians had their property confiscated and were interned (see Japanese Canadian internment), Japantown ceased to be a distinct Japanese ethnic area. Although some Japanese returned after the war, the community never revived. The area is now part of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Along Powell Street, a few remnants of the former Japanese neighbourhood still exist. The Vancouver Buddhist Church, formerly the Japanese Methodist Church, still exists at 220 Jackson Avenue at Powell, as does the Vancouver Japanese Language School and Japanese Hall at 475 and 487 Alexander Street at Jackson, which is the only property in Canada that was ever returned to the Japanese Canadians after the World War II. Until the boom in Japanese restaurants in the 1980s, two restaurants on Powell Street were among the only Japanese dining establishments in the city. Oppenheimer Park in this area was the home for Asahi baseball team and it is the site for the annual two-day Powell Street Festival which began in 1977. It is held every August, in the first weekend of the month, and is a community celebration of Japanese heritage as well as the alternative and street culture of the Downtown Eastside.

Hastings Mill

Hastings Mill was a sawmill on the south shore of Burrard Inlet and was the first commercial operation around which the settlement that would become Vancouver developed in British Columbia, Canada. In 1867, Captain Edward Stamp began producing lumber in Stamp's Mill at the foot of what is now Dunlevy Avenue after a planned site at Brockton Point proved unsuitable due to difficult currents and a shoal. Stamp's efforts in developing the mill are summarized by Robert Macdonald in Making Vancouver: Class, Status and Social Boundaries, 1863-1913: In 1865 he formed a company in England, backed by capital of $100,000 , to produce lumber in British Columbia. Stamp also secured from the colonial government of British Columbia the right to purchase or lease 16,000 acres of timber on the lower coast, and selected a mill site on a point of land along Burrard Inlet's south shore. Delayed by the failure of crucial machinery parts to arrive from England, Stamp did not begin cutting lumber for export until June 1867. After managing the firm for less than two years he retired, and shortly thereafter his company went into liquidation in England. The mill closed for a period in 1870 but opened again in August after being purchased by Dickson, DeWolf and Company of San Francisco. Known at first as Stamp's Mill, it now became the Hastings Sawmill Company, or Hastings Mill. The early settlement was in effect a company town. People shopped at the Hastings Mill Store and sent their children to the Hastings Mill School, which included students from Moodyville on the opposite side of the inlet. This would change after the CPR chose Vancouver as the terminus for the transcontinental railway. Nevertheless, the lumber industry remained the backbone of the new settlement's economy, and Hastings Mill was "the nucleus around which the city of Vancouver grew up in the 1880s" and remained important to the local economy until it closed in the 1920s. When Hastings Mill closed, the building that housed the Hastings Mill Store was transported by barge to the foot of Alma Street to begin a new life as the Old Hastings Mill Store Museum. Operated by the Native Daughters of British Columbia, the museum features artifacts and curios from Vancouver's past, and First Nations art. This was also one of the only structures to survive the great fire in 1886 and was used as a hospital and morgue for the fire's victims.
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