Last year I took on the challenge of the first-ever Local History Advent Calendar! For 24 days in a row, I presented random historical tidbits I’d collected over the previous year and presented them in the form of “treats” for my 2018 Local History Advent Calendar. This year, the “Heart of Mount Pleasant” was number 1 on Heritage Vancouver’s Top 10 Watch List for 2019. So I decided to choose Mount Pleasant as the theme for the Vanalogue Local History Advent Calendar for 2019. Each day you can “open” a new historical treat. Think of them as holiday cocktail party fodder – 24 facts about Mount Pleasant history that can be used as conversation starters at your next social event.
Day 1 of the LHAC 2019 featured the Mount Pleasant Streetcar Barns and its resident janitor cat ‘Toots‘. The car barns were bounded by Main Street on the east and Quebec Street on the west, between 13th and 14th Avenues . The building was two-tiered to compensate for the grade of the property at the Main St side vs the Quebec Street side. Cars could enter and exit at grade from both sides. For 46 years, from 1906 to 1952, street cars would start and end their routes from that location.
For 10 years starting in 1945, the entire transit system was converted from streetcars to trolley buses – the campaign was called “Rails to Rubber“. In 1952, the ‘Fairview Beltline’ was transferred from streetcar to bus and the Mount Pleasant car barns were closed. The land was eventually sold and a series of supermarkets, starting with the Dominion Store, have occupied the site ever since.
But you can still see evidence of this part of Mount Pleasant’s history on Quebec Street between 13th and 12th Avenues (just south of the Fire Hall). A portion of streetcar rails, like a scar on the landscape, can be seen on Quebec street near the former site of the Mount Pleasant carbarns.
In his novel, All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy wrote, “Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.” We should similarly appreciate urban landscape scars like those of the Mount Pleasant streetcar line. These historic “scars” on our city’s landscape form part of the history of Vancouver; as such they should be shown and celebrated rather than hidden.
vanalogue 
And there was the Stry (Street Railway, geddit?) Credit Union and bowling alley upstairs at 6h and Main.
See the GVC credit union history at https://issuu.com/gvccu/docs/a_history_of_greater_vancouver_comm
The car barns were very heavily build to hold the weight of the streetcars, had 1 metre thick floors, which were a devil to demolish.
Hi Bill, Thanks for your comments! Yes, the Street Railwaymen’s (STRY) Association met at the Odd Fellow’s Hall at 2214 Main (at 6th) but the Street Railwaymen’s Union, Co-operative Society, and bowling alley (how cool is that?) were located up the hill at 125 East 8th. I can imagine how weighty those car barns would have to be to support the weight.