|
 |
 |
Excerpt - From 1912 to the Beginning
Excerpt from Port Coquitlam: Where Rails Meet Rivers
By Chuck Davis
Most of the activity in the big municipality that was Coquitlam was concentrated around the Junction. Why, Junction leaders began to ask, should the people clustered there subsidize the construction of roads and such for the vast empty areas that lay beyond? Support for a separate city, one centering on the Junction, began to build. On October 17, 1912, a petition to create the City of Port Coquitlam was sent off to Victoria. To get an idea of the size and shape of the new city, Coquitlam’s municipal clerk, John Smith, conducted his own census. It showed there would be 1,342 people there and that 438 of them were “male British subjects of the full age of twenty-one years” (i.e., eligible voters).
One issue of the Star announced a contest to choose a new name for the proposed city. The Vancouver-based Coquitlam Terminal Company, which was promoting the Junction as a site for major industries, sponsored the contest. We haven’t discovered the name of the winner, but we do know the name that won the prize: Port Coquitlam.
It seemed as if the new city, when it was incorporated, would be off to a thriving start. New buildings were popping up everywhere. A contractor named Charles Davies, who had gone into business the year before (and who would later become one of PoCo’s more popular mayors), built the Commercial Hotel, which opened January 18, 1913, and stood for decades at the northeast corner of Flint Street and the Lougheed Highway. The hotel was an ambitious one for a small town: it had forty-six bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a bar, dining room, reception area, ladies rooms and two stores on the ground floor. “The hotel,” said an advertisement, “will be furnished in modern style and in every room there will be hot and cold water, each room being heated by hot water radiators and lighted with electricity.” (Renamed Frisco’s Inn, the old hotel was finally torn down in February 1998 after eighty-six years of use, but a memory will remain: the bar from the Commercial Hotel is planned to go into a pub in the residential/commercial development replacing the Commercial.)
There were predictions of “great elevators” along the local riverfront to hold prairie grain destined for export. In fact, plans to build a grain elevator on the Pitt River were announced in June 1913 but not carried through.
The Coquitlam Terminal Company wrote to council asking it to build more roads and ditches, saying the company itself had spent $17,000 in 1912 on public sidewalks, streets and bridges. “The major portion of this sum,” the company wrote, “represents a permanent improvement of which the Municipality has the benefit.” The letter was signed by Theo. M. Knappen. The company was spending a lot of money on advertising, too: a full-page ad placed by the Coquitlam Terminal Company, Limited/Coquitlam Townsite Company, Limited, was aimed directly at CPR employees. It says in part, “The question of money need not bother you if you are a C.P.R. employee. We will sell you a lot and build you a house on it, or on one of our own on terms that you can meet readily...” Activity was now feverish. The Greer Block, another sturdy office building, went up in 1912 at the corner of what is now Kingsway and Mary Hill. Perhaps it was erected by the brand new Coquitlam Construction Company, which had started April 1.
It was around this time that the little Coquitlam Theatre was built, with 135 individual wooden chairs in neat rows, and locals began going to see Chester Conklin and Fatty Arbuckle, Norma Desmond and the Keystone Kops. A 1912 advertisement for the theatre noted the “programme changed three times weekly.” There were live concerts there, too. A photograph of the building indicates it was rather a ramshackle affair. Long-time resident Annie Osborne remembers sitting in the theatre watching movies and on rainy days having to hold an umbrella over her head to shield herself from the leaking roof.
By Chuck Davis
Most of the activity in the big municipality that was Coquitlam was concentrated around the Junction. Why, Junction leaders began to ask, should the people clustered there subsidize the construction of roads and such for the vast empty areas that lay beyond? Support for a separate city, one centering on the Junction, began to build. On October 17, 1912, a petition to create the City of Port Coquitlam was sent off to Victoria. To get an idea of the size and shape of the new city, Coquitlam’s municipal clerk, John Smith, conducted his own census. It showed there would be 1,342 people there and that 438 of them were “male British subjects of the full age of twenty-one years” (i.e., eligible voters).
One issue of the Star announced a contest to choose a new name for the proposed city. The Vancouver-based Coquitlam Terminal Company, which was promoting the Junction as a site for major industries, sponsored the contest. We haven’t discovered the name of the winner, but we do know the name that won the prize: Port Coquitlam.
It seemed as if the new city, when it was incorporated, would be off to a thriving start. New buildings were popping up everywhere. A contractor named Charles Davies, who had gone into business the year before (and who would later become one of PoCo’s more popular mayors), built the Commercial Hotel, which opened January 18, 1913, and stood for decades at the northeast corner of Flint Street and the Lougheed Highway. The hotel was an ambitious one for a small town: it had forty-six bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a bar, dining room, reception area, ladies rooms and two stores on the ground floor. “The hotel,” said an advertisement, “will be furnished in modern style and in every room there will be hot and cold water, each room being heated by hot water radiators and lighted with electricity.” (Renamed Frisco’s Inn, the old hotel was finally torn down in February 1998 after eighty-six years of use, but a memory will remain: the bar from the Commercial Hotel is planned to go into a pub in the residential/commercial development replacing the Commercial.)
There were predictions of “great elevators” along the local riverfront to hold prairie grain destined for export. In fact, plans to build a grain elevator on the Pitt River were announced in June 1913 but not carried through.
The Coquitlam Terminal Company wrote to council asking it to build more roads and ditches, saying the company itself had spent $17,000 in 1912 on public sidewalks, streets and bridges. “The major portion of this sum,” the company wrote, “represents a permanent improvement of which the Municipality has the benefit.” The letter was signed by Theo. M. Knappen. The company was spending a lot of money on advertising, too: a full-page ad placed by the Coquitlam Terminal Company, Limited/Coquitlam Townsite Company, Limited, was aimed directly at CPR employees. It says in part, “The question of money need not bother you if you are a C.P.R. employee. We will sell you a lot and build you a house on it, or on one of our own on terms that you can meet readily...” Activity was now feverish. The Greer Block, another sturdy office building, went up in 1912 at the corner of what is now Kingsway and Mary Hill. Perhaps it was erected by the brand new Coquitlam Construction Company, which had started April 1.
It was around this time that the little Coquitlam Theatre was built, with 135 individual wooden chairs in neat rows, and locals began going to see Chester Conklin and Fatty Arbuckle, Norma Desmond and the Keystone Kops. A 1912 advertisement for the theatre noted the “programme changed three times weekly.” There were live concerts there, too. A photograph of the building indicates it was rather a ramshackle affair. Long-time resident Annie Osborne remembers sitting in the theatre watching movies and on rainy days having to hold an umbrella over her head to shield herself from the leaking roof.
