Dwelling places and social spaces: revealing the environments of urban workers in Victoria using historical GIS.
Dunae, Patrick A. ; Lafreniere, Donald J. ; Gilliland, Jason A. 等
THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST UNDERWENT rapid economic growth in the late
19th century and cities on both sides of the Canada/US border burgeoned.
The building boom was sustained by a large cohort of tradesmen and
skilled labourers who lived in modest cabins, tenement blocks, boarding
houses, and residential hotels. Most of these urban wageworkers were
unmarried. They left few records of their experiences outside the job
site or union hall. In this case study of Victoria, British Columbia
circa 1891, we deployed a historical geographical information system
(HGIS) to reconstitute the urban residential and social space of about
2,000 otherwise elusive working men. Our research framework combines
qualitative methods that are familiar to historians and quantitative
methods favoured by geospatial researchers. By integrating both
qualitative and quantitative data, we are able to represent the multiple
spatial conditions experienced by Victoria's wageworkers in the
early 1890s. In the process, we repopulated the city and reconstructed a
largely vanished urban landscape. A primary objective of the essay is to
demonstrate how GIS can be used as a research tool and new epistemology
in the field of labour history.
LA REGION DU NORD-OUEST DU PACIFIQUE a connu une forte expansion
economique a la fin du XIXe siecle et les villes des deux cotes de la
frontiere canado-americaine se sont developpees rapidement. Le boom de
la construction a ete soutenu par l'importante cohorte de gens de
metier et d'ouvriers qualifies qui vivaient dans des cabanes
modestes, des immeubles locatifs, des pensions et des hotels-residences.
La plupart de ces salaries urbains etaient celibataires. Ils ont laisse
peu de documents attestant de leurs experiences hors de leur lieu de
travail ou de leur local syndical. Dans cette etude de cas de la ville
de Victoria, en Colombie-Britannique, vers 1891, nous avons deploye un
systeme d'information geographique-historique (SIGH) pour tenter de
reconstituer l'espace residentiel et social urbain d'environ 2
000 travailleurs ayant laisse peu de traces. Notre cadre de recherche
conjugue des methodes qualitatives familieres aux historiens et des
methodes quantitatives que preferent les specialistes de la recherche
geospatiale. En integrant les donnees qualitatives et quantitatives,
nous pouvons representer les multiples conditions spatiales dans
lesquelles ont vecu les salaries de Victoria au debut des annees 1890.
Ce processus nous permet de repeupler la ville et de reconstruire un
paysage urbain largement disparu. Un des objectifs premiers de cet essai
est de montrer comment les systemes d'information geographique
(SIG) peuvent servir d'outils de recherche et de nouvelle
epistemologie dans le domaine de l'histoire ouvriere.
**********
THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST EXPERIENCED rapid economic development in the
last decades of the 19th century, when the region was linked by railways
and steamships to outside capital and buoyant markets in the prairie
West, the eastern seaboard of America, and overseas. Cities on both
sides of the Canada/ US border grew at a remarkable pace. (1) The
workforce necessary to sustain the economic growth increased in a
proportional way. While Aboriginal labourers and immigrant workers from
Asia were important in this urban industrial landscape, white workers
who came from outside the region were important, too. Skilled workers
from the American Midwest, from the eastern provinces of Canada, and
from Europe were essential to the urbanization and industrialization of
the Pacific Northwest. As Carlos Schwantes, one of the region's
leading historians, has remarked, the "supercharged pace of urban
growth placed a premium on the skilled labour of carpenters, masons,
plumbers and other craftsmen." (2) It also placed a premium on
construction labourers and workers in new manufacturing, transportation,
and service sector industries. Collectively, to borrow a term from
Schwantes, these were the urban wageworkers of the Pacific Northwest.
The largest cohort of urban wageworkers consisted of young,
unmarried men. They were ubiquitous in cities like Seattle, Tacoma,
Vancouver, and Victoria. We see them everywhere. We can document their
activities in the workplace and union hall, and record their presence in
civic protests and holiday parades. And yet, historically, they are
elusive and nondescript. They were part of the social mainstream because
of their race and ethnicity, but they dwelled on the margins of
conventional society in cabins, tenements, and residential hotels. Ver),
few of these men wrote personal accounts of their domiciles, and most of
the habitations have disappeared from urban landscapes today. How, then,
can we reconstruct the social and domestic spaces of urban wageworkers
in the Pacific Northwest during this boom-time era?
Schwantes suggested a research framework using census records and
contemporary newspapers for examining the social conditions of unmarried
men who were drawn to the wageworkers' frontier. (3) We have built
on that framework in this paper, but look t o other sources of
information and new methodologies in order to reconstruct the domestic
social and spatial environments of urban wageworkers. In this case
study, we utilized a geographical information system (61s) to identify
wageworkers and take steps to understand how they experienced life in
Victoria, British Columbia, in the early 1890s.
A geographical information system (Gis) allows researchers to
methodically and efficiently organize and analyze spatially referenced
data, and to identify and visualize spatial patterns and processes. A
relatively new tool for social historians, it offers a novel way of
exploring and understanding historical activities and the environments
in which they took place. "[he field of historical GIS, sometimes
called spatial history, has been championed by historical geographers
such as Anne Kelly Knowles and Ian Gregory. (4) Historical geographer
Sherry Olson is a leader in the field in Canada.>> The growing
stature
of historical GIS in Canada was recently considered in a collection
of essays edited by Jennifer Bonnell and Marcel Fortin, an environmental
historian and map librarian, respectively. (6) As historian Richard
White says, HGIS "allows the orientation and coordination of
dissimilar things--an aerial photograph and a map, for example--in terms
of a single location;" (7) David Bodenhamer, another historian in
the vanguard of this scholarly field, observes that a GIS can integrate
an extensive array of data from different formats, including artifacts,
"all by virtue of their shared geography." (8) HGIS is thus a
powerful research tool that can "layer divergent source materials
and tie them to specific locations in space." (9) But GIS is more
than a means of handling diverse spatially referenced material. It is a
way of thinking, "an epistemology that places spatial relationships
as key components in understanding historical activities and
environments." (10) A primary objective of this essay is to
demonstrate how GIS can be used as a research tool and new epistemology
in the field of labour history.
Building an historical GIS, as Gregory has commented, is a
"middling to long-term process with long lag times before the full
rewards of the initial instrument are realized." (11) We started
building our historical GIS several years ago. Detailed descriptions of
the methods and components we used to develop it are provided in the
pages that follow. We began by acquiring spatial data from archival maps
and plans, and attribute data from nominal census records, directory
listings, and tax assessment rolls for the city of Victoria. (12) Our
GIS was developed initially with the intention of examining racialized
space in 19th-century Victoria, but was built to be adaptable to many
other historical enquiries, including this examination of urban
wageworkers. We were alerted to these workers when we reassessed the
dynamics of race and socially constructed space in Victoria's
Chinatown. (13) We were struck by the large number of wageworker cabins
and tenements on the northern perimeter of the Chinese quarter. When we
looked closely at contemporary maps, photographs, and directories, we
could see similar vernacular structures in other parts of the city (see
figure 1). When we compared municipal and Dominion census records, it
was apparent that wageworkers comprised a significant portion of the
city's population.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
Before commencing out study, some general remarks are in order.
Schwantes referred to places like Victoria as "urban-industrial
islands" on the wageworkers' frontier of the Pacific
Northwest. (14) Wageworkers who toiled on this frontier were undeniably
components in the "desiring machine of capitalism" that
eminent geographer Cole Harris described in his essays on the
resettlement of British Columbia. (15) But it was a complex machine that
affected workers differently, depending on where it was operating.
Accordingly, the living conditions of wageworkers in remote logging or
mining camps--which have received considerable attention-from labour
historians--should not be conflated with the living conditions of urban
wageworkers in Victoria. (16) Even on Vancouver Island, living
conditions varied from place to place and from sector to sector. In the
coal mining community of Wellington, for example, company housing was
prevalent, while in nearby Nanaimo, a larger colliery town, workers were
encouraged to purchase suburban five-acre lots. (17) Those arrangements
were unknown in Victoria.
Victoria had more in common with Seattle, where wageworkers lived
in high-density rental units close to the downtown core and near the
harbour. Living conditions were similar in Vancouver. But we should not
confuse wageworkers' abodes with the neatly fenced cottage homes
that have been associated with working-class people in Vancouver by some
historical geographers. Wageworkers in Vancouver, Victoria, and
neighbouring cities may have aspired to elegant wood-frame cottages
"surrounded by a garden and a fence," with "rabbit
hutches and chicken coops" in the yard. (18) But initially, the men
who are the focus of this study lived in much more crowded abodes, and
those places have not been examined by urban geographers and historians.
Rather, the scholarly literature on working-class households in Canada
has focused on family units and households of married couples and
widows. (19) In this essay, we are engaging with households and
exploring urban spaces that have not been considered before and are
using a Historical GIS as our way of seeing and analyzing these
environments.
I
VICTORIA WAS FOUNDED by the Hudson's Bay Company as a trading
post in 1843. Following the Oregon Treaty, Victoria became the capital
of a new British colony, Vancouver Island, in 1849. (20) It was an
entrepot for gold miners in the late 1850s and early 1860s and was
incorporated as a city in 1862. It retained its status as a capital city
when the colony of Vancouver Island was annexed by the mainland colony
of British Columbia in 1866. When British Columbia joined the Dominion
of Canada in 1871, it became the capital city of Canada's Pacific
province. Despite its status as an administrative centre, it grew slowly
until the mid-1880s. Its economic development was then facilitated by
the completion of the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway (1886)
on the lower mainland of British Columbia and the regional Esquimalt
& Nanaimo Railway in 1887. (21)
Victoria also benefited from the expansion of the maritime trade
and coastwise shipping between other burgeoning cries, notably Portland,
Tacoma, Seattle, and Vancouver, but did hot grow as rapidly as they did.
(22) Even so, in the late 1880s and early 1890s, Victoria was
experiencing a golden moment. It was still the metropolis of the
province and was undergoing significant growth, demographically and
economically. Job opportunities abounded for wageworkers drawn to the
city at this time. Moreover, because Victoria enjoyed a mild climate,
workers on building construction projects could expect year-round
employment.
In 1891, a visiting clergyman from Toronto commented on the buoyant
spirit of Victoria and the many building construction sites in the city.
"Splendid business blocks are being built on the principal business
streets and in the residential parts of the city new buildings meet you
almost everywhere." He was impressed by the handsome churches
recently erected by the Presbyterian and Methodist congregations and the
nearly completed Roman Catholic cathedral. He noted the new hospital and
courthouse and the modern street railway system. "I am not
sufficiently familiar with the features of a boom," he said,
"but it struck me that there was a boom in Victoria." (23)
The new structures provided tangible evidence of the city's
robust economy, and so were celebrated by civic boosters. Promotional
publications were packed with statistical tables related to
manufacturing output, postal services, real estate valuations, and
import duties, offering further evidence of economic growth. (24) But of
all statistical measures, population growth was most important, not only
for New World prominence as a growing industrial centre but also because
parliamentary representation and federal grants to the provinces were
based on population figures. (25) Civic leaders eagerly anticipated the
results of the third decennial census of Canada.
The census was taken in April 1891 by enumerators appointed by the
Dominion government. Business promoters, local politicians, and one of
the city's principal newspapers, the Victoria Daily Colonist,
confidently predicted that Victoria's population would be over
23,000 when the official returns were published. They were profoundly
dismayed when the Dominion Census Office announced in July 1891 that
Victoria's population was only 16,841. "We must confess that
we are surprised to find the population of Victoria to be less than 17,
000," the Daily Colonist declared in an editorial. "We
considered that at the very lowest calculation the enumerators would
find that it has twenty thousand inhabitants. We cannot help thinking
that there must be a mistake." (26)
In response to growing public indignation over the official census
returns, Victoria City Council commissioned a follow-up census. The
municipal census, known as a check census, was carried out under the
direction of R.T. Williams, a printer and publisher of one of the
Victoria city directories in the last week of September. (27) After a
careful tabulation, Williams postulated that Victoria's population
was 22,981--a figure much more gratifying to civic, political, and
business leaders than that of the Dominion census. The check census was
proof, the Victoria Daily Times declared, that "huge mistakes"
had been made by federal officials in determining the city's
population. (28) An alphabetical list of all persons enumerated in the
check census was posted in City Hall and residents were invited to
inspect the list in order to ensure its veracity. When that exercise in
civic validation was completed, the list was sent to Ottawa, with a
request that official census returns be revised in accordance with the
check census figures. The request was denied and the check census was
filed and forgotten. We retrieved, transcribed, and geo-referenced it as
part of our larger historical GIS project. Having record-matched the
federal and municipal data and considered it in context with other
contemporary records such as the city directory, we believe that
Victoria was indeed undercounted by Dominion enumerators. The
city's population was likely closer to 23,000, as proponents of the
check census claimed. (29) Within that population, we have identified a
cohort of nearly 2,000 unmarried white working men. With the aid of our
HGIS, we can place these wageworkers in their habitations and explore
their urban environment for the first time.
As noted earlier, GIS is a method of managing, modelling,
displaying, and analyzing spatially referenced data. Described simply,
HGIS allows us to link attribute data to the locations on earth in which
it resided or took place. The attribute data for this study includes
nominal census records generated during the official census of 1891, and
records from the municipal check census. The datasets are complementary.
The nominal schedule in the official census of 1891 consisted of two
dozen questions dealing with age, nativity, ethnic origin, civil
condition, religion, and occupation. It was designed so that one person
was identified as the head of the household with other residents being
assigned relative positions, such as such as wife of head, son of head,
lodger, and so forth. In the official census, enumerators also recorded
the number of rooms and floors in each household, and indicated if
abodes were constructed of wood, brick, or stone. The municipal check
census did not provide the same level of personal or structural detail;
it simply recorded the names, occupations, and workplaces of heads of
census households, plus the number of people who belonged to each
household. But while the municipal check census was less detailed than
the official census, it provided key information not recorded by
Dominion enumerators--specifically, the civic addresses of census
households. By record-matching the municipal check census to the
official census and spatially referencing the datasets to cartographic
records of buildings and land uses, we created the historical GIS used
in this study.
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]
We utilized a number of cartographic records in building our HGIS,
including archival maps that show surveyed lots in Victoria and the
legal descriptions of city properties in the 1890s. By digitally
scanning and geo-referencing the maps to a modern cadastral of the city,
we were able to delineate precisely the boundary lines of these
properties. Crucially, we also scanned and geo-rectified contemporary
fire insurance plans. Fire insurance plans were created for cities
throughout Canada, the United States, and Great Britain during this
period. They were produced by underwriting firms to assist in assessing
fire risk. Drawn to a scale of I inch to 50 feet (2.5 cm to 15.2
metres), the plans are extraordinarily detailed. They include a wealth
of information for every building and street in the city (e.g.,
footprint, construction materials, number of storeys, land uses, and
street numbers) and, conveniently for us, they also often indicate
occupancy. (30) Reflecting some of the racial prejudices and
discriminatory attitudes of the era, fire insurance plans produced by
the firm of Goad & Company pointedly indicated buildings that were
occupied by Chinese and Aboriginal people. Hence we see structures
identified as "Chinese dwellings" or "Indian
shanties" on fire insurance plans of Victoria in 1891. Structures
not identified as Chinese or Native Indian were, it was understood,
occupied by white residents (see figure 2).
[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]
We begin our survey of urban wageworkers by looking at the
industrialized heart of Victoria. This sector was situated on the north
side of the downtown business district, between Fisgard Street in
Chinatown and Rock Bay, adjacent to the industrial harbour. Several
large lumber mills and iron foundries were located here, along with
dozens of manufacturing firms that produced carriages, cornices, and
cooking stores, among other products. The waterfront was lined with
warehouses and fuel bunkers, and wharves were crowded with steamships
and sealing schooners. However, as we can see on fire insurance plans
(see figure 3), cabins and tenements were also part of this industrial
landscape. (31)
[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]
Many of these small dwellings were constructed in the mid-1880s in
response to a severe shortage of housing for working men. As
Victoria's economy gathered momentum and demand for workers
increased, the demand for basic housing became acute. The cabins and
tenements were built as investments by Victoria's merchant class in
response to the sudden housing boom. They were tucked behind factories
and industrial sites in otherwise undesirable city lots. Their locations
were ideal for investors, since the lots were among the least expensive
in the city, and suitable for workers, as they provided easy access to
work sites (see figure 4).
One of the first of these structures was erected in 1884 by Alfred
Stronach on Herald Street near the Albion Iron Works, then the largest
iron foundry north of San Francisco and the largest employer in
Victoria. Stronach had come to British Columbia from Nova Scotia during
the Cariboo Gold Rush of 1862. He invested his earnings from the
goldfields into real estate in Victoria. The rental unit at 28 Herald
Street, known locally as Stronachville, provided him with a steady
income. The unit consisted of a two-storey wood-frame building, with
dimensions of 21 x 50 feet (6 x 15 metres). The building contained
sixteen rooms, with eight rooms on each level. An exterior staircase and
balcony provided access to the top floor rooms. (32) A similar unit was
erected by Andrew Gray, a prosperous stair-builder, at 15 Herald Street
in 1885. It consisted of a two-storey frame building with sixteen units
on each floor. The units were described as "comfortable
cabins" by the Daily Colonist newspaper. The cabins were 12 x 15
feet (3.6 x 4.5 metres) in size and each was fitted with a cookstove,
cot, table, stool, and three shelves. "The rent charged is $3.50
per month, and while they are a boon to many single young men they
return a good rental to their owner," the newspaper reported. (33)
A few years later, the Daily Colonist published an item about
"model tenements" being constructed on Chatham Street, one
block north of Herald. The tenements were owned by a property developer
in Seattle and were "an indication of the growing value of real
estate in Victoria," the newspaper said. "The rapidly growing
value of Victoria real estate is every day becoming more and more
appreciated, and the economy of space is in consequence beginning to
interest property owners." (34) Understandably, local investors
were eager to capitalize on the burgeoning market for inexpensive rental
dwellings. The investors included Frank Campbell, a Victoria tobacconist
and news agent, who erected a two-storey block of cabins at 33 Chatham
Street in 1889. The next year, a slew of cabins and tenements were
erected on nearby Store Street on lots owned by a grocer, a butcher, and
a marine engineer. The firm of Hall, Ross & Co., which operated a
large rice mill near the harbour, and Messrs. Muirhead and Mann,
proprietors of the massive Victoria Planing Mills, also erected cabins
on Store Street at this time. Some of the units, notably a row of cabins
erected for saloon owner George Collins, were made of brick. However,
most of the cabins were built of lumber and erected using a process
known as balloon-frame construction. Simple and efficient, the
balloon-frame method of construction was standard in the Pacific
Northwest, where rough-milled lumber was readily available. Instead of
using traditional mortise-and-ten-on joints to connect heavy timber
frames, builders used machine-cut lumber studs that were fastened by lap
joints and secured by mass-produced wire nails. Because the studs were
lightweight, "even large buildings could be built by a handful of
men in a short amount of time using only a few basic hand tools
--hammer, saw, square, and nails--with perhaps only a plan book as a
guide to the finished product." (35) As housing historian Martin
Daunton has remarked, the process of balloon-frame construction
"required nailing rather than complicated carpentry."
Components such as doors and pine-sash windows were prefabricated and
inexpensive, while new techniques of applying plaster to interior walls
and shingles to exterior surfaces made it easy to construct these simple
dwellings. (36) Finished structures were covered with tarpaper and clad
in shiplap siding.
[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]
The model in Figure 5 illustrates a furnished cabin of the period;
it is drawn to a scale that represents the average living space
available to the urban wageworker. (37)
In the 1890s, the rental costs for furnished cabins hovered around
three or four dollars a month. (38) The newly erected cabins were
undoubtedly better than some of the dwellings from an earlier era. On an
1885 fire insurance map of Victoria, a huddle of small buildings on
Telegraph Street near the harbour is identified as "small worthless
shanties--white occupants." On the 1891 fire insurance map, the
shanties are gone, replaced by a neat row of small cabins. Even so, the
newer habitations were austere. They were hemmed in by a large
steam-powered generator, a boiler manufacturing factory, and coal
bunkers. Cabins on Store Street, a short distance away, were surrounded
by plies of lumber some fifteen feet (4.6 metres) high. Cabins on Herald
Street, Chatham Street, and Discovery Street were dominated by the hulk
of the Albion Iron Works; dwellings on Pembroke Street were dwarfed by
the gasometers of the Victoria Gas Works and powerhouse dynamos of the
British Columbia Electric Street Railway. As contemporary photographs
reveal, the landscape north of Chatham Street is bleak (see figure 6).
[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]
Living conditions were more congenial in the centre of the city, on
the east side of Douglas Street, one of Victoria's principal
thoroughfares. Near the corner of Pandora Avenue and Douglas Street,
opposite Victoria's City Hall and the newly opened public market,
property owners erected workingmen's cabins. Victoria photographers
Hannah and Richard Maynard owned several of these cabins, which were
located behind their new (1891) three-storey brick building on Pandora
Avenue. Nearby, a single-storey terrace of 24 cabins was erected at
110-112 Johnson Street on lots owned by W.P. Sayward, a lumber magnate.
A two-storey wood-frame tenement containing twenty rental units was
erected at 132 Johnson Street on property owned by John Coigdarippe, a
wholesale liquor merchant (see figure 7). A similar unit was erected at
152 Johnson Street on land owned by Samuel Styles, a building contractor
and city alderman. Styles also erected a small cluster of cabins a block
east at 171 Johnson Street.
In design, the Johnson Street dwellings were similar to those on
Herald Street and Chatham Street on the west side of Douglas Street, and
were of about the same vintage. The Johnson Street tenements were,
however, better situated than the industrial sector dwellings. In
contemporary photographs, the Johnson Street dwellings appear to be
well-kept. The cabins that Styles built at 152 Johnson are whitewashed,
neatly fenced, and shaded by trees. They are surrounded by pleasant
residential homes and respectable boarding houses, not scattered piles
of lumber. They are dwarfed not by the smoke stacks of an iron foundry,
but by the gables of the new (1890) Metropolitan Methodist Church. (39)
[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]
Additional tenements for working men were located on Humboldt
Street, east of Douglas Street, and on McClure Street toward Church
Hill, south of the downtown core. Several two- and three-storey
wood-frame buildings were erected in the years 1889-92. Like
workers' dwellings elsewhere in the city, they were designed to
maximize a large number of rental units on a relatively small piece of
land and to facilitate speedy construction. In March 1891, building
contractor George Maidment erected two buildings, each containing twenty
cabins in short order for Andrew Lawson, a publican who owned property
on Humboldt Street. Around the corner on McClure Street, contractor
Henry Mundy built a block of 32 units for Harold Munn, an alderman and
pharmacist. (40)
The design of tenements in Victoria probably derived from similar
structures erected in Seattle prior to the devastating fire of 1889.
(41) Existing literature on working-class housing and vernacular
architecture in urban British Columbia is silent on these structures.
(42) Certainly the structures identified here differ from workers'
dwellings in central Canadian cities like London, Hamilton, and Toronto,
or workers' houses in Montreal. (43) Most obviously they differ in
the building materials used in their construction. In central Canada,
brick or brick-clad wood "frame" construction was most common
for residential structures, while lumber was the norm in Victoria. (44)
More importantly, the Victoria cabins differ in their location within
the urban environment. In cities like London, Ontario, workers'
dwellings were proximal to industry but not, as in Victoria, placed amid
industrial sites (see figure 8). (45)
[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]
These inauspicious dwellings accommodated a significant number of
Victoria's wageworkers. Using municipal and federal government
census records, we identified over 400 working men in cabins and
tenements in Victoria in 1891. The overall population of cabin- and
tenement-dwellers was probably much larger. Enumerators were instructed
not to count temporary or transient residents who, in all likelihood,
also occupied these dwellings; and as we have already determined,
enumerators overlooked many of these places, especially small dwellings
that were not easily accessible from the city's main streets. (46)
But our sample count of cabin-dwellers is large enough to suggest a
prosopographical profile of these otherwise elusive wageworkers. We have
detailed data, derived from federal rather than municipal census
records, for about one-third of this population, and with this data can
infer demographic trends in the overall cohort of cabin and tenement
occupants. (47) Thus, we see a cohort of wageworkers with a median age
of 32 years. The overwhelming majority (80 per cent) of the men were
unmarried. (Hall a dozen old-timers were widowers and two dozen married
men, who were unaccompanied by their wives, rounded out the numbers.)
One-third of these wageworkers were employed as general labourers, and
about one-quarter were employed in the building trades as carpenters,
painters, and bricklayers. (48) The next largest occupational groups
consisted of seafarers (sailors, steamboat hands, and stokers),
teamsters, longshoremen, and sawmill workers. Nearly all of these
wageworkers came from outside the province. The majority of the
men--over 60 per cent--were from the British Isles (notably England and
Scotland); the next largest group (about 20 per cent) was from Canada
(mainly from the province of Ontario). Men from continental Europe
(France, Germany, Italy, and Belgium) and Scandinavia (Iceland and
Norway) comprised just over 10 per cent, while workers born in the US
comprised slightly less than 10 per cent of this cohort.
The demographic profile of wageworkers in Victoria is broadly
similar to one that Schwantes assembled using data from the US census of
1900. Out data is much more detailed, but it confirms trends that he
noticed in Seattle and Tacoma--namely that the majority of the
wageworker population of these cities came from out of state and
overseas. (49) By harnessing the spatio-analytical functions of an HGIS,
we can not only locate this group with fine spatial precision, we can
also derive a better understanding of the domestic spaces these men
occupied. By harmonizing census data with the spatial data provided by
fire insurance plans, we can virtually peer into the dwellings of out
Victoria wageworkers. We always assumed that these dwellings were
modest, but with HGIS can see how small they were. We calculated the
living space per person for every resident of Victoria by first
digitizing all of Victoria's buildings as they are depicted on fire
insurance plans. This painstaking process, however, allows us to
consider not only the size of the dwellings but also the building
materials, number of storeys, and building densities of all dwellings
and businesses in the city. As Figure 9 indicates, the average
wageworker had just 6.8 square metres of living space in which to sleep,
repose, prepare meals, and clean up after a ten-hour shift at the Albion
Iron Works or Victoria Planing Mills. In comparison, the average
non-cabin-dwelling resident in the city of Victoria enjoyed over 33
square metres of living space. (50) Moreover, these places afforded very
little privacy for occupants. A multiple-dwelling unit comprising a
dozen or so cabins would typically contain only one privy, to be shared
by all residents.
[FIGURE 9 OMITTED]
The small size of the units and inexpensive cost of construction,
coupled with high densities and high demands, made them very attractive
for investors and developers. Regrettably, we have no information on how
they were perceived by occupants. But while these dwelling units were
small and densely packed, they were regarded as adequate for the needs
of wageworkers. And although the accommodations may have been spartan,
they were not usually squalid. Indeed, the tenement blocks erected on
McClure Street in March 1891 were model dwellings compared to the
decrepit cabins occupied by an earlier generation of workers.
[FIGURE 10 OMITTED]
Some of the least desirable dwellings squatted on the south side of
Humboldt Street, on the edge of the James Bay mud flats. These decrepit
colonial-era cabins were squeezed together between a malodorous vinegar
factory and soap works, and the lumber piles of a furniture factory. The
assessed values of the dwellings were the lowest in the city. (51) The
cabins were not "improved" --that is, they did not have solid
foundations, electricity, or running water, and they were not hooked up
to the city's sewer system. The rickety outhouses provided for
these habitations were built on pilings over the harbour. In 1891, this
was Victoria's Skid Row. Cabins in Skid Row were among the worst
dwellings available in town. They were not usually occupied by gainfully
employed workers, but rather by indigents who, judging from newspaper
reports, lived and often died in tragic circumstances. (52)
Some wageworkers resided in boarding houses. A commercial directory
for 1891 listed nearly two dozen boarding houses in Victoria; a slightly
larger number of "boarding house keepers" are recorded on
contemporary census records for the city. (53) In the main, boarding
houses in Victoria conform to patterns discerned by scholars who have
looked at boarding houses in other Canadian cities--that is, many of
Victoria's boarding houses were run by widows and conducted as
family businesses. (54) The city's best-known boarding
houses--"Roccabella" on McClure Street near the Anglican
Cathedral; "Revere House" on Pandora Avenue, near the new
Methodist Church; and Mrs. McDonnell's "private boarding
house" on Birdcage Walk in James Bay, close to the Parliament
Buildings-- accommodated professional men such as architects, land
surveyors, school administrators, and financial investment agents. (55)
These genteel boarding houses were located in residential neighbourhoods
some distance from the city centre (see figure 11). Boarding houses that
catered to tradesmen and labourers stood on less fashionable streets and
included a large establishment run by Charles Monk. Census records
indicate that Monk and his wife provided accommodation in two adjacent
buildings (at No. 6 and No. 8 Humboldt Street), for twenty unmarried men
who worked as cabinet makers, carpenters, bakers, boiler makers, and
building painters. (56) Nearby at 11 Humboldt Street was a boarding
house run by Elizabeth Laury, a widow with five small children. Mrs.
Laury's boarding house, a two-storey, eleven-room wooden structure,
accommodated a dozen unmarried working men. Another widow, Mary
Whittaker, provided accommodation for seven boarders, most of whom were
teamsters and hostlers, in a boarding house situated at 70 Douglas
Street. (57)
Several other women who are identified in the census as
"boarding house keepers" were married to tradesmen and likely
took in boarders to supplement the family income. Twenty-six-year-old
Catherine Gardener is representative. Her husband, Frank, was a
carpenter and they provided lodging in their home on Green Street for a
couple of carpenters and a building painter. Thirty-fiveyear-old Nellie
Rogerson, who lived on Pandora Avenue with her husband Isaac, a building
contractor, is also representative. The Rogerson household included
seven lodgers--five carpenters, one cabinet maker, and a blacksmith.
(58)
[FIGURE 11 OMITTED]
[FIGURE 12 OMITTED]
Other examples of respectable boarding houses can be gleaned from
the census. (59) Overall, however, these places accommodated fewer than
100 wage-workers. (60) Many more wageworkers lived in residential
hotels. In 1891, there were about two dozen residential hotels in
Victoria. As Figure 12 indicates, most of the residential hotels were
located close to the city centre.
Many of the hotels were relatively new and comparable in style and
function to the downtown rooming houses described by architectural
historian Paul Groth in his history of residential hotels in the United
States:
The construction [of downtown rooming houses] was not temporary;
owners were confident that single-room living would bring in reliable
rents for a long time. On the ground floor were store windows and
commercial spaces that in their form, use and lease income clearly said
"downtown. "The fifteen to forty rooms on the floors above
said "residential" to those living in the structure.
Relatively generous light wells illuminated and ventilated the upstairs
rooms and reinforced the permanent commitment to residential use. (61)
The Colonial Metropole Hotel at 31-33 Johnson Street exemplified
this kind of dwelling (see figure 13). Originally built as a two-storey
wooden structure in 1885, it was rebuilt as a three-storey brick
structure in 1891. One side of the ground floor was leased to a variety
store, the other side to a shoe store. Rental accommodation in this
40-room hotel was located on the second and third floors of the
building. According to advertisements, rates in the Colonial Metropole
were "moderate and reasonable" and rooms were
"well-furnished and cheerful." (62) Rates varied between
hotels, but most charged about twenty dollars a month for room and board
and sixteen dollars for lodging without meals. (63) Rooms came with a
bed, wardrobe, and wash stand. Hot water bathrooms and lavatories on
each floor were shared by residents. (64)
[FIGURE 13 OMITTED]
For enumeration purposes, hotels were classified as census
households. Hotels--compared to single family residences, workers'
tenements, and boarding houses--were challenging places to enumerate.
While it was relatively straightforward to enumerate hotel proprietors
and employees who lived on the premises, it was more difficult to
determine the status of temporary and permanent members of these
ambiguous census households. Inevitably, some hotel residents were
absent when the enumerator made his rounds, and so census records for
these establishments are uneven and incomplete. (65) Nevertheless, the
residential hotel population comes into focus when we record-match
federal and municipal census returns. We have identified over 1,200
hotel residents, including over 450 enumerated on the Dominion census.
Extrapolating from these records, we found the median age of the
residential hotel population was 30 years, just younger than the median
of the cabin-dwellers. Much like the cabin-based group, nearly all of
the men (86 per cent) were single. The few married men we did find were
the hoteliers themselves or spouses of resident housekeepers. (66)
Nearly half (47 per cent) of the hotel residents were from the British
Isles, with another 41 per cent from Eastern Canada (mostly from Nova
Scotia and Ontario). The remainder of the men were from continental
Europe and the United States, with the exception of a handful of single
Chinese men who worked as hotel cooks and domestic servants.
The residential hotel population was more diverse in terms of
occupational strata than the cabin-dwelling population and, generally,
the boarding-house population. There were more skilled tradesmen in
hotels, and their presence is a testament to the construction boom
underway in Victoria at the time. But Victoria's residential hotels
accommodated members of every occupational social class (see figure 12).
(67) White-collar workers often resided in the same hotels as
blue-collar workers. Stonemasons and plumbers might be round sitting
around the bar in, say, the Colonial Metropole Hotel, with office clerks
and telegraph operators. Wageworkers in residential hotels enjoyed
amenities not found in cabins or tenements, and a measure of autonomy
hot found in boarding houses. (68)
[FIGURE 14 OMITTED]
The dynamics of residential choice are unclear and raise questions
that invite further research. Although building tradesmen are present in
almost all of Victoria's residential hotels, tradesmen with
different skills tended to favour different establishments. For example,
carpenters favoured the Brunswick Hotel and the Vancouver House on Yates
Street, while plasterers and plumbers favoured the Colonial Metropole
and the California Hotel on Johnson Street. Bricklayers were prominent
in the Commercial Hotel on Douglas Street. Specific occupational groups
may have congregated at certain residential hotels for no other reason
than word-of-mouth. In this scenario, a newly arrived carpenter in
Victoria might ask a fellow carpenter to recommend a place to stay. If
the workmate was ensconced comfortably in the Brunswick Hotel, he would
likely recommend it to his new chum. This informal system of
occupational congruence would have been convenient for building
contractors who required workers with particular skills. A contractor in
need of, say, bricklayers, may have known to look for them first in the
Commercial Hotel.
The proximity of a man's workplace may have influenced where
he lived. If so, this would account for the longshoremen, ships'
firemen, and sealers who lived near the harbour in the Railroad Hotel,
Gordon Hotel, and Grand Pacific Hotel, and the machinists and iron
moulders who boarded at the Pacific Telegraph Hotel, not far from iron
foundries on the north side of town. It should be noted, however, that
labouring men who lived in residential hotels were more distant from
their worksites than men who lived in cabins or tenements. (69) As well,
dwellings may have been chosen because of their amenities. The Dominion
Hotel, a three-storey brick structure located on the east end of Yates
Street, represented the top of the scale. It had recently been
refurbished, boasted a well-appointed dining room, and was located a
good distance away from sooty factory smokestacks. At the other end of
the scale was the Albion Hotel, a small, two-storey, wood-frame
structure on Herald Street. Located in the very centre of the industrial
sector of Victoria, it was probably very noisy. (70) The high demand for
accommodation and low vacancy rates may also have determined where
tradesmen lived. All of the residential hotels were fully occupied and
many of them were crowded. For example, the Brunswick Hotel on Yates
Street, a two-storey brick building with 24 rooms had over 40 residents;
the Colonial Metropole Hotel with its 40 rooms accommodated 85
residents; the Dominion Hotel with about 50 rooms contained over 100
residents. The ratio of residents-to-rooms indicates that occupants had
to double up in many hotels, especially when they first arrived in town.
A worker's pay packet also determined the type of dwelling he
rented. As Daunton noted, the higher the ratio of workers' wages to
rent, the more favourable the housing market to tenants. (71) A detailed
analysis of the cost of living in Victoria is beyond the scope of this
study, but prevailing wage rates for labourers and tradesmen in 1891
indicate that the ratio of wages to rent was favourable for working men.
Labourers earned between two dollars and three dollars a day and so,
presumably, could have managed the cost of a cabin or tenement. Skilled
tradesmen were better paid, with stonemasons and toaster carpenters
commanding as much as five dollars a day. (72) Based on these rates,
skilled workers could have afforded a room in one of the better
residential hotels--assuming, of course, that a room was available. If a
tradesman was a boarder, he would have taken his meals in the hotel
dining room. If he was a lodger, he might have taken his meals in nearby
saloons and restaurants. Most saloons offered free biscuits, cheeses,
and cold cuts on the bar, and sold inexpensive hot meals. A glass of
beer was only five cents. Full-course meals in ordinary restaurants cost
about 25 cents, and many restaurants were open 24 hours a day. Working
men who lived in furnished tenements could take nourishment from these
places, but frugal workers may have purchased their own groceries and
prepared meals in their small abodes. Grocery stores were conveniently
located near to cabins and tenements on Store Street, Johnson Street,
Humboldt Street, and McClure Street, and basic provisions were not
expensive. A loaf of bread cost 5 cents, a pound of beef 15 cents, and a
bushel of potatoes 60 cents. Ten cents bought a quart of milk, 12 cents
a quart of beer, and 35 cents a pound of coffee. (73)
[FIGURE 15 OMITTED]
It is tempting to imagine that wageworkers formed a sociable
community or fraternal culture. They might have congregated in some of
Victoria's many saloons for fellowship, recreation, and
entertainment. With the exception of temperance establishments like the
Osborne House and Angel Hotel, all of the residential hotels had saloon
bars attached to the premises. As Figure 15 shows, detached saloons were
located close to most of the cabin clusters and tenement blocks.
Some of the saloons may have functioned like the taverns Peter
DeLottinville described in his study of working-class culture in
19th-century Montreal. "Taverns," DeLottinville said, often
"held attractions beyond the simple comforts of food and
culture" for inner-city, working-class bachelors. "With no
public parks in the immediate area, and only occasional celebrations by
national societies and church groups," their recreations were often
centred on the local tavern. (74) But the saloons of Victoria may have
had fewer regular patrons than their counterparts in more established
cities like Montreal, simply because the clientele was so transient. The
fragmentary records suggest that the wageworkers' frontier was a
very fluid place, as workers moved from job to job and region to region
in response to labour shortages and higher wages. The fact that so many
of the wageworkers had come from outside the region indicates the
migratory character of this cohort and the tendency of men to be
somewhat rootless in their salad days.
In this respect, the Sivertz brothers may be representative of our
larger cohort. Christian Sivertz was one of the few wageworkers who left
a personal account of his experiences as a young man. In the late 1880s,
he left his home in a community of Icelandic settlers in Manitoba and
set out for the Pacific Northwest. He worked initially as a stoker on
steamboats based in Tacoma. The 25-year-old wageworker had no trouble
finding well-paid work when he came ashore in Victoria in 1890. His
first job saw him on a construction site, erecting a power house and car
barns for the new electric street railway company. Next, he hired on
with a contractor building a massive breakwater and quay at the entrance
to Victoria Harbour. A younger brother arrived in the city soon after
and round work as an assistant in a grocery store on Humboldt Street. He
probably lived in one of the nearby tenements or boarding houses. An
older brother arrived in 1892, worked for the city's Public Works
department for a while, then moved over to Point Roberts in Washington
State. (75) There were probably thousands of wageworkers like the
Sivertz brothers who traversed "the great marine highway of Puget
Sound and the Strait of Georgia" during this period. (76) The
transitory nature of these workers is evident in the rent books of
tenement owners, which show a high turnover among tenants. Typically,
tenants stayed for less than a year. Sometimes they left Victoria for
temporary employment in other places and sometimes they simply shifted
across town, exchanging a small furnished cabin in one neighbourhood for
a modest dwelling in another. Wageworkers in residential hotels were
similarly mobile, as we can see by comparing the names and addresses of
hotel residents in city directories from 1892 and 1894. There is
scarcely any continuity over this short period of time. (77)
Marriage might also determine where a wageworker lived; it may have
provided an escape from the congested quarters of bachelor cabins and
tenements and a ticket to one of Victoria's streetcar suburbs, such
as Fernwood, James Bay, Rock Bay, and Victoria West. Christian Sivertz
charted this course in 1892 when he married and built a home with his
wife on Spring Road in Fernwood. (78) Many other wageworkers followed a
similar matrimonial path--as we can see by record-linking decennial
census data from 1891 to 1901. Consider, for example, Albert McDonald, a
24-year-old teamster who occupied a Humboldt Street tenement in 1891,
but in 1901 was employed as a warehouseman and lived in a tidy bungalow
on Catherine Street in Victoria West. He was married and the father of
two small children. Twenty-eight-year-old Walter Disher was a bachelor
resident in one of Collins' brick cabins on Store Street in 1891;
ten years later he was living in his own home on David Street in Rock
Bay with his wife and newborn child, and was working as a streetcar
motorman. These men were relative newcomers to Victoria in 1891, and the
cabins and tenements' they occupied when enumerators called were
mere way stations on a longer life journey. (79) Suitable in the short
term, these small, modest dwellings might best be regarded as
transitional domestic spaces in the urban industrial frontier of the
Pacific Northwest.
In any event, most of these modest dwellings were ephemeral places.
By the end of the 19th century, Vancouver had displaced Victoria as the
metropolis of British Columbia. (80) As manufacturing, construction, and
service industries shifted from the provincial capital to Burrard Inlet,
so too did the urban labour force. The demand for workers'
dwellings in Victoria subsequently abated. Moreover, many of the
dwellings were precariously placed. Wageworkers' cabins near the
Albion Iron Works (figure 6) were destroyed in a conflagration in 1907.
Fortunately there were no fatalities, but the units were never replaced.
Cabins, tenements, and boarding houses on Humboldt Street were
demolished to make way for the landmark Empress Hotel, which opened in
1908. Other habitations in the downtown core disappeared as properties
were redeveloped for commercial use. Today, only a handful of former
residential hotels are still standing in Victoria.
II
OUR RESEARCH QUESTION was prompted by work by Carlos Schwantes,
particularly his 1987 essay, where he remarked on the challenges of
documenting transient workers who left very few records of their
experiences. The question was additionally challenging because
wageworker habitations have largely disappeared. We have endeavoured to
answer the question with a historical GIS of Victoria. In the course of
constructing our HGIS we found about 2,000 workers by record-matching
nominal entries from the 1891 Dominion census and municipal check
census, and cross-referencing the data with city directory listings.
Tallies based on historical census records and directory listings are
never definitive. We are confident, however, that the cohort of men
identified in our GIS is representative of the legion of working men
resident in Victoria in 1891. We are also confident that the
prosopographical profile of white, male wageworkers derived from our
HGIS of Victoria is descriptive of wageworkers in other coastal cities
in the Pacific Northwest at this time.
With census data alone, we can discern the demographic features of
this cohort and observe characteristics that may be significant to
labour historians. But we gain many more historical insights when we
place the data within a GIS. Indeed, when we mapped wageworkers to their
domiciles, social trends and residential patterns that had not been
evident previously came into clear focus. We discovered that the urban
labour force and the urban landscape were more stratified and nuanced
than we had anticipated. We could see, for the first time,
socio-occupational differences between wageworkers who lived in downtown
residential hotels and their comrades who occupied tenements and cabins.
Further distinctions were evident within residential sectors: skilled
workers and artisans were attracted to certain hotels, while
less-skilled (and less paid) workers gravitated to others. Looking more
closely still, we could see that occupation was a significant
determinant of who lived where. Carpenters, for example, tended to
congregate in certain hotels, while machinists and iron workers
congregated in others.
As well as allowing us to see the relationship between home and
work, and the propinquity of coworkers, a spatial view also affords a
look at the social life of working men. Saloons offered many amenities
for them but, as our GIS reveals, very few saloons were located in the
industrial sector in the city. The majority of the saloons, over two
dozen in number, were concentrated in the downtown core. Conveniently
located for men who lived in residential hotels and city centre cabins,
they were not as convenient for wageworkers in outlying areas. But even
for those in the heart of the industrial zone, downtown was only a
fifteen-minute walk away, so we expect that workers from all parts of
the city frequented the downtown saloons. On most nights, but
particularly on Saturday nights, downtown streets and sidewalks would
have been thronged with wageworkers drawn from spartan cabins to the
conviviality of saloons or the entertainment of music halls. (81)
The value of GIS as an epistemology is evident here. If we regard
epistemology as both a way of knowing and a way of thinking, we can
appreciate the perceptual power of GIS. It facilitates an inductive,
holistic approach to the past, one that utilizes both quantitative and
qualitative methods of analyzing, representing, and understanding
socio-spatial conditions and relationships. Consider, for example, the
sensory dimensions of past landscapes. In recent years, urban
archaeologists, historians, geographers, and other scholars have engaged
with the "invisible landscapes" of the past--notably with the
noises and smells of cities. Architectural historian Dell Upton
memorably remarked: "Where one landscape order was evident to the
eye in the arrangement of buildings and spaces, others apparent to the
ears and the nose slashed through boundaries defined by brick and
mortar." (82) In the late 19th century, the aural environment in
cities was dominated by sounds made by horses, "the principal
motive forces for transport and industry." As historian David
Garrioch observed in a widely noticed essay on the sounds of the city,
"hoof-beats, equine whinnies and snorts were ubiquitous. So were
the rumblings of wooden and iron-rimmed wheels." (83) Certain
smells were also ubiquitous: horse dung, urine (animal and human), and
tobacco smoke. (84) Those sounds and smells were pervasive in Victoria.
Within a GIS, particular sounds and smells can be spatialized and
discerned more finely. The soundscape of cabin-dwellers on Discovery
Street and Store Street (figure 6) was dominated by the incessant din of
the Albion Iron Works foundry. (85) Residents on nearby Pembroke Street
(figure 3) heard other keynotes, such as the screech of steel wheels on
steel rails, as streetcars slowly left the car barns first thing in the
morning and crept in again late at night. For workers in other parts of
the city, keynotes would have been different again. Likewise, workers
dwelled amid distinctive olfactory environments. Wageworkers who lived
on Humboldt Street close to the mud flats of James Bay endured the
unpleasant smell of offal from a soap factory and the acrid odours of a
vinegar factory; men who lived on the south side of Rock Bay endured the
sulphurous smells of the Victoria Gas Works. But ambient smells were not
all unpleasant. The comforting smells of malt and barley emanated from a
large brewery on Government Street near Discovery Street; fragrant
scents were produced by a spice mill and coffee rotisserie situated a
few blocks away, near workers' cabins on Douglas Street. Workers
who lived in downtown tenements likely appreciated the smells of
downtown bakeries. These sounds and smells of the city were not as
intense for people who lived in genteel boarding houses and suburban
homes, where floral notes were more prevalent.
With a historical GIS, we are more aware of the sensory character
of the city, just as we discern spatial relationships between people and
places more acutely. By taking a geospatial approach to historical
questions, our knowledge and understanding of environments and
populations is enhanced substantially. Moreover, when textual and
statistical records are geo-referenced or spatialized in a GIS, we often
see trends, patterns, and relationships that were not apparent to us
before. As Richard White has said, HGIS "generates questions that
might otherwise go unasked, it reveals historical relations that might
otherwise go unnoticed, and it undermines, or substantiates, stories
upon which we build our own versions of the past." (86)
We have outlined a new epistemological framework for the study of
workers and their environments. We have utilized GIS beyond its
cartographic and analytical characteristics, but as a tool that allowed
for a reflexive, interpretive approach to knowledge production.
Integrating both qualitative and quantitative data allowed us to
represent the multiple spatial conditions experienced by Victoria's
wageworkers in the early 1890s. Using mixed-methods analysis techniques,
notably the qualitative methods that are the tradition of historians in
concert with the quantitative methods more familiar to geospatial
researchers, we have repopulated the city and reconstructed a largely
vanished urban residential and social landscape in Victoria. We hope
that the research methods and epistemology presented in this essay will
be useful to labour historians who are interested in the experiences of
workers in other cries.
(1.) Urban growth in the region is examined in Carl Abbott's
impressive survey, How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban
Change in Western North America (Albuquerque 2008), Chapter 3. For
general surveys of the region see Jean Barman, The West Beyond the West:
A History of British Columbia, 3rd ed. (Toronto 2007) and Carlos Arnaldo
Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretative History, rev. and
enlarged ed. (Lincoln, NB 1996).
(2.) Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes, Hard Traveling: A Portrait of Work
Lire in the New Northwest (Lincoln, NB 1999), 4.
(3.) Carlos A. Schwantes, "The Concept of the
Wageworkers' Frontier: A Framework for Future Research,"
Western Historical Quarterly, 18 (January 1987): 39-55.
(4.) See Anne Kelly Knowles, ed., Past Time, Past Place: GIS for
History (Redlands, CA, 2002) and Kelly Knowles, Placing History: How
Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship
(Redlands, CA 2008); Ian N. Gregory and Paul S. Ell, Historical GIS:
Technologies, Methodologies and Scholarship (Cambridge, UK 2007); Ian N.
Gregory and Richard Healy, "Historical GIS: Structuring, Mapping,
and Analyzing Geographies of the Past," Progress in Human
Geography, 31 (2007): 638-53. See also Donald A. Debats and Ian Gregory,
eds., "Historical GIS and the Study of Urban History," special
issue, Social Science History, 35, no. 4 (Winter 2011).
(5.) See Jason Gilliland, "Modelling Residential Mobility in
Montreal, 1860-1900," Historical Methods, 31 (January 1998): 27-42;
Jason Gilliland and Sherry Olson, "Residential Segregation in the
Industrializing City: A Closer Look," Urban Geography, 33 (January
2010): 29-58; Sherry Olson, Kevin Henry, Michele Jomphe, Paul Brassard,
and Kevin Schwartzman, "Tracking Tuberculosis in the Past: The Use
of Genealogical Evidence," Journal of Historical Geography, 36, no.
3 (2010): 327-41; Jason Gilliland, Sherry Olson, and Danielle Gauvreau,
"Did Segregation Increase as the City Expanded? The case of
Montreal, 1881-1901," Social Science History, 35, no. 4 (Winter
2011): 465-503; Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton, Peopling the North
American City: Montreal 1840-1900 (Montreal 2011).
(6.) Jennifer Bonnell and Marcel Fortin, eds., Historical GIS in
Canada (Calgary 2013).
(7.) Richard White, "What is Spatial History?" quoted in
Historical GIS in Canada, ed. Bonnell and Fortin, 3.
(8.) David J. Bodenhamer, "Beyond GIS: Geospatial Technologies
and the Future of History," in History and GIS: Epistemologies,
Considerations and Reflections, ed. Alexander von Lunen and Charles
Travis (London 2012), 4.
(9.) Bonnell and Fortin, eds., Historical GIS in Canada, 3.
(10.) Paul Norman, Constructing a Socio-Demographic Data Time
Series: Computational Issues and Solutions (Manchester 2004), 4.
(11.) Ian Gregory, A Place in History: A Guide to Using GIS in
Historical Research (Oxford 2003), 15.
(12.) These and many other spatially referenced records are freely
available on the viHistory website. This digital archive of Vancouver
Island historical records is edited by Patrick Dunae and hosted by the
Humanities Media and Computing Centre at the University of Victoria,
accessed 25 April 2013, http//www.vihistory.ca.
(13.) Our historical GIS revealed trends and phenomena that we had
not expected from the existing literature. By mapping the location of
Chinese and other residents, we discovered that Victoria's
Chinatown was hot a "forbidden city," but a porous,
multi-ethnic community, and that about one-quarter of Victoria's
Chinese population resided outside of Chinatown. Our initial research is
discussed in Patrick A. Dunae, John S. Lutz, Donald J. Lafreniere, and
Jason A. Gilliland, "Race and Space in Victoria's Chinatown,
1891," BC Studies, 169 (Spring 2009): 51-80, reprinted in Home
Truths: Highlights from BC History, ed. Richard Mackie and Graeme Wynn
(Madeira Park, BC 2012). Further research and theoretical concepts are
discussed in Lutz, Dunae, Lafreniere, Gilliland, and Megan Harvey,
"Turning Space Inside Out--Spatial History and Race in Victorian
Victoria," in Historical GIS in Canada, ed. Bonnell and Fortin,
123-56.
(14.) Schwantes, "The Concept of the Wageworkers'
Frontier," 41.
(15.) Cole Harris, "The Struggle with Distance," in The
Resettlement of British Columbia. Essays on Colonialism and Geographical
Change, ed. Cole Harris (Vancouver 1997), 185. We recognize, of course,
that wageworkers were also part of a larger process of settler
colonialism, whereby Indigenous peoples were displaced and Aboriginal
lands were appropriated by imperially minded newcomers from Europe and
eastern North America, but we are not concerned with the colonial
project or its repercussions in this essay. The larger process is well
described and closely analyzed in several books, including Adele Perry,
On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia,
1849-1871 (Vancouver 1997); Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers:
Indigenous Peoples in 19th Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver 2010);
Renisa Mawani, Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and
Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921 (Vancouver 2009).
(16.) The deplorable conditions of worker camps were described in
A. Ross McCormack, Reformers, Rebels, and Revolutionaries (Toronto 1977)
and Carlos Schwantes, Radical Heritage: Labor, Socialism, and Reform in
Washington and British Columbia, 1888-1917 (Boise, ID 1994). Living
conditions were better in larger resource-industry towns like Rossland,
BC. They are described in Jeremy Mouat, Roaring Days: Rossland's
Mines and the History of British Columbia (Vancouver 1995) in a chapter
entitled "Social Relations in Fin de Siecle Rossland," 109-29.
(17.) Company housing arrangements for mine workers in the
Vancouver Island settlements of Wellington and Extension, and in the
successor town of Ladysmith (1898), are described in John H. Hinde, When
Coal Was long: Ladysmith and Coal-Mining on Vancouver Island (Vancouver
2003). John Douglas Belshaw discusses housing conditions for miners in
Nanaimo in his book, Colonization and Community. The Vancouver Island
Coalfield and the Making of the British Columbia Working Class (Montreal
2002).
(18.) Deryck W. Holdsworth, "Cottages and Castles for
Vancouver Home-Seekers," in "Vancouver Past: Essays in Social
History," ed. Robert A. J. McDonald and Jean Barman, Vancouver
Centennial Issue, BC Studies (Vancouver 1986), 15, reprinted in Mackie
and Wynn, Home Truths; Gillian Wade, "Modest Comforts," in The
Working Lives Collective, Working Lives: Vancouver 1886-1986 (Vancouver
1985), 109.
(19.) Usually, studies relating to working-class housing in 19th
century Canada focus on family households. Such studies include Michael
J. Doucet, "Working-class Housing in a Small 19th-Century City:
Hamilton, Ontario, 1852-1881," in Essays in Canadian Working Class
History, ed. Gregory S. Kealey and Peter Warrian (Toronto 1976), 83-105;
Michael Doucet and John Weaver, Housing the North American City
(Montreal 1991); Peter Ennals and Deryck Holdsworth, Homeplace: The
Making of the Canadian Dwelling Over Three Centuries (Toronto 1998); and
Bettina Bradbury, Working Families: Age, Gender and Daily Survival in
Industrializing Montreal (Toronto 2007). Working-class family households
in British Columbia are featured in Peter Baskerville and Eric W. Sager,
Unwilling Idlers. The Urban Unemployed and Their Families in Late
Victorian Canada (Toronto 1998).
(20.) The treaty was concluded in 1846 and resolved a long-standing
dispute between Great Britain and the United States regarding
sovereignty in the Oregon Territory. It is officially known as the
Treaty of Washington, 1846, but popularly called the Oregon Treaty. It
established the 49th parallel west from the Rocky Mountains to the
Pacific Ocean as the international boundary. The Hudson's Bay
Company, which represented British interests in the region and operated
a major post at Fort Vancouver near the mouth of the Columbia River, far
south of the new boundary line, relocated its operations to Vancouver
Island. In 1872, the international boundary line between mainland
British Columbia and Washington State and the archipelago of islands
between the continent and Vancouver Island was clarified.
(21.) On the economic development of Victoria, see J.M.S. Careless,
"The Business Community in the Early Development of Victoria,
British Columbia," in Historical Essays on British Columbia, ed. J.
Friesen and H.K. Ralston (Toronto 1976), 177-200; Charles N. Forward,
"The Evolution of Victoria's Functional Character," in
Town and City: Aspects of Western Canadian Urban Development, ed. Alan
F.J. Artibise (Regina 1981), 347-70; and Peter A. Baskerville, Beyond
the Island. An Illustrated History of Victoria (Burlington, ON 1986).
(22.) In addition to Abbott, How Cities Won the West, see Matthew
Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New Haven,
CT 2007); E.K. MacColl, The Growth of a City: Power and Politics in
Portland, Oregon, 1885-1915 (Portland, OR 1979); Norbert MacDonald,
Distant Neighbors: A Comparative History of Seattle and Vancouver
(Lincoln, NB 1987); Robert A.J. McDonald, Making Vancouver: Class,
Status, and Social Boundaries, 1863-1913 (Vancouver 1996); and Murray
Morgan, Puget's Sound: A Narrative of Early Tacoma and the Southern
Sound (Seattle 1979). Immigration and urbanization in late 19th century
British Columbia are described and analyzed by John Douglas Belshaw in
Becoming British Columbian: A Population History (Vancouver 2009),
41-50.
(23.) Victoria Daily Times, 2 October 1891. Victoria's
streetcar line, opened in February 1890, was the second electric street
railway implemented in Canada after one in Windsor, Ontario in 1886.
(24.) Sec the statistical data and enthusiastic commentary in a
promotional booklet entitled Victoria Illustrated: Containing a General
Description of British Columbia, and a Review of the Resources, Terminal
Advantages, General Industries, and Climate of Victoria, The "Queen
City," and its Tributary Country (Victoria, BC 1891). Promotional
publications like Victoria Illustrated were produced in towns and cries
throughout western North America. The publications reveal the booster
spirit and inter-city rivalries that characterized urban development in
this period. Abbott, How Cities Won the West, 3-8, 34, and passim.
(25.) For historical studies on the significance of the census in
Canada sec Bruce Curtis, The Politics of Population: State Formation,
Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840-1875 (Toronto 2001) and Eric
W. Sager and Peter Baskerville, eds., Household Counts: Canadian
Households and Families in 1901 (Toronto 2007).
(26.) Victoria Daily Colonist, 29 July 1891.
(27.) Victoria Daily Colonist, 14 October 1891.
(28.) Victoria Daily Times, 21 October 1891.
(29.) Records from the official 1891 census were transcribed and
are available at the viHistory website. We transcribed the municipal
check census from a copy held in the British Columbia Archives, MS 1908,
microfilm reel A1356. It, too, is available at the viHistory website. We
presented a comprehensive geo-demographic study of the two 1891
enumerations of Victoria to the 36th annual meeting of the Social
Science History Association in Boston, MA, in November 2011. The paper
was entitled "Missing and Marginalized Victorians: A GIS of the
1891 Check Census of Victoria, British Columbia."
(30). For more on fire insurance plans, see Diane L. Oswald, Fire
Insurance Maps: Their History and Applications (College Station, TX
1997); and Jason Gilliland and Matthew Novak, "Positioning the Past
with the Present: On Integrating Fire Insurance Plans and GIS for Urban
Environmental History," Environmental History, 11 (January 2006):
136-39.
(31.) On the 1890s fire insurance plans of Victoria, the term
"cabin" usually indicated a relatively small, detached
structure; however, a terrace of attached small abodes might also be
labelled "cabins." "The term "tenement"
generally indicated a two- or three-storey wood-frame building
containing a dozen or more separate abodes. In Victoria at this time,
"tenement" was a neutral and relatively benign term denoting a
multiple-occupancy dwelling. It did not denote squalid, slum housing,
nor did it have the pathetic connotations of the dwellings described by
Jacob Riis in his famous expose, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among
the Tenements of New York (New York 1890).
(32.) Victoria Daily Colonist, 16 January 1884. Stronach enlarged
this rental unit in 1891. He retired to his native Nova Scotia and died
there in 1892. Victoria Daily Colonist, 18 February 1892.
(33.) Victoria Daily Colonist, 16 June 1885.
(34.) Victoria Daily Colonist, 21 November 1889.
(35.) Daniel Turbeville, "Cities of Kindling: Geographical
Implications of the Urban Fire Hazard on the Pacific Northwest Coast
Frontier, 1851-1920." PhD thesis, Simon Fraser University, 1985,
37.
(36.) M.J. Daunton, "American Cities," in Housing the
Workers, 1850-1914: A Comparative Perspective, ed. M.J. Daunton (London
1990), 262.
(37.) Our deepest appreciation is extended to Eli Paddle, PhD
Candidate, Department of Geography, University of Western Ontario, for
his assistance in drawing this wageworker cabin with Google SketchUp.
(38.) Rents are gleaned from rent books and correspondence from one
of the major property owners, John Medwedrich (d. 1898), whose records
were preserved in the probate files of his estate. British Columbia
Archives, GR 1304, British Columbia. Supreme Court (Victoria),
Probate/estate files, 1859-1941. We are grateful to Victoria historian
Chris Hanna for this information.
(39.) The Johnson Street cabins and surrounding commercial and
residential buildings can be seen in panoramic photographs of Victoria,
c. 1891. These are available online at Virtual Victoria 1891--View from
the Steeple. Specifically, see BC Archives image A-03387 in the section,
"Close-ups & Hot spots," accessed 25 April 2013,
http://www.cliomedia.ca/steeple/ index.htm.
(40.) Victoria Daily Colonist, 29 March 1891.
(41.) Wood-frame tenements and cabins on the edge of Seattle's
industrial harbour are evident on an 1888 fire insurance atlas. Fire
Insurance Map of Seattle, Washington Territory (New York, 1888), plate
4. We are grateful to staff at the University of Washington Special
Collections Library for allowing us to examine original copies of these
records. The wooden structures were destroyed in the tire of 6 June 1889
and replaced by brick buildings. See Jeffrey K. Ochsner and Dennis A.
Anderson, "Meeting the Danger of Fire: Design and Construction in
Seattle after 1889," Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 93 (Summer 2002):
115-26.
(42.) Although he does not describe tenements per se, architectural
historian Donald Luxton provides an excellent overview of the urban
building boom of the period and an introduction to contemporary building
forms in Building the West: Early Architects of British Columbia
(Vancouver 2003), 100-11. Jill Wade describes tenements in Vancouver
circa 1900 in the introduction to her study, Houses for All: The
Struggle for Social Housing in Vancouver, 1919-1950 (Vancouver 1994),
17. Vancouver City Directories and tire insurance plans show that
tenements and cabins were part of Vancouver's urban landscape as
early as the 1890s.
(43.) See Doucet, "Working-Class Housing in a Small
19th-Century Canadian City: Hamilton, Ontario, 1852-1881," in
Kealey and Warrior, eds., Essays in Canadian Working Class History;
Jason Gilliland and Sherry Olson, "Claims on Housing Space in
Nineteenth Century Montreal," Shared Spaces/Partage de
l'espace (Working papers series no. 14, Department of Geography,
McGill University, Montreal 1993); Robert Lewis. Manufacturing Montreal:
The Making of an Industrial Landscape (Baltimore 2000); and Olson and
Thornton, Peopling the North American City.
(44.) More specifically, working-class housing in central Canadian
cities such as Montreal during this era was constructed in wood and then
exteriors were clad with brick due to regulations to combat
conflagrations. See Jason Gilliland, "Fire and Urban Form:
Destruction and Reconstruction in 19th-century Montreal," in
Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern
World, ed. G. Bankoff, U. Luebken, and J. Sand (Milwaukee 2012), and
Francois Dufaux, "A New World from Two Old Ones: The Evolution of
Montreal's Tenements, 1850-1892," Urban Morphology, 4, no. 1
(2000): 9-19. As Harris has noted for Toronto, despite building
regulations that demanded brick construction, some working-class
residents continued to construct wooden dwellings in the suburbs, beyond
the eye of the building inspector. See Richard Harris, Unplanned
Suburbs: Toronto's American Tragedy, 1900 to 1950 (Baltimore 1996).
Wood frame construction was also predominant in the Maritime provinces
and Newfoundland during this era. See Ennals and Holdsworth, Homeplace:
The Making of the Canadian Dwelling.
(45.) The relationship between workplaces and dwellings in London
was explored by Donald J. Lafreniere and Jason A. Gilliland, "A
Socio-Spatial Analysis of the Nineteenth-Century Journey to Work in
London, Ontario" (paper presented to the 35th annual meeting of the
Social Science History Association, Chicago, Illinois, November 2010).
(46.) Although Dominion census officers were instructed in
systematic data entry methods and provided with detailed procedural
manuals, enumerators were inconsistent and somewhat capricious when
recording cabins and tenements. Some enumerators described cabins as
"house dwellings" while others described the abodes as
"shanties." Some tenement blocks were thoroughly canvassed,
and others were overlooked. Municipal check census officers were more
thorough in identifying cabin-dwellers, but cursory in recording
detailed demographic information. Patrick A. Dunae, "Making the
1891 Census in British Columbia," Histoire sociale/ Social History,
31 (November 1998): 234-35.
(47.) In all, we have 442 records for tenement and cabin dwellers.
Of this number, 135 records (30 per cent) were generated by the official
Dominion census. Although federal enumerators undercounted the
population, they nevertheless visited nearly all of the tenement
buildings and cabin clusters in the city. We can, accordingly,
extrapolate the data across the larger cohort with a good degree of
confidence.
(48.) Thankfully the check census enumerators did capture the
occupation and employer of most residents. This allowed us to test our
extrapolation of the sub-sample derived from the official Dominion
census as described in the previous note.
(49.) Schwantes, "Concept of the Wageworkers'
Frontier," 48.
(50.) The figures reported are medians. The median is more
representative of the "typical" dwelling as it removes the
effects on the mean from the very large homes of Victoria's
wealthiest citizens. The mean size of a wageworker dwelling was 10.5
square metres compared to 54 square metres for the average
non-cabin-dwelling resident.
(51.) The assessed value of some of the cabins on Humboldt Street
was only $200; in contrast, the assessed value of newly built tenements
on McClure Street was $2,000. Older properties, such as A.V.
Stronach's cabins at 28 Herald and Andrew Gray's cabins at 15
Herald were assessed at $2,100 and $2,500, respectively. Porter's
cabins at 36 Store Street were assessed at $4,500 in 1891 (figures taken
from City of Victoria Archives, Property Tax Assessment Rolls, 1891).
(52.) The unfortunate residents of Victoria's Skid Row
included "Old Jack," a former miner who expired in his shanty
in 1890. "He is said to have made a large fortune [in Nevada and
California], but like many others he failed to keep it and died with
scarcely anything. In appearance, he was a broken down old man, but was
not over 48 years old." Victoria Daily Colonist, 6 June 1890.
(53.) Henderson's 1891 British Columbia Gazetteer and
Directory, classified business directory, 729. Unfortunately for us, the
principal directory publishers in British Columbia--R.T. Williams &
Company and the Henderson Directory Company--did not routinely identify
residents as boarders or roomers in the alphabetical section of their
city directories. In Ontario, in contrast, directory publishers
indicated people who were boarders and roomers by using the
abbreviations "bds" and "rms" after individual
names. With this information, Richard Harris was able to identify a
large cohort of lodgers in Toronto and Hamilton. See his important work,
"The End Justified the Means: Boarding and Rooming in a City of
Homes, 1890-19517 Journal of Social History, 26, no. 2 (Winter 1992):
331-58.
(54.) Bettina Bradbury, "Pigs, Cows, and Boarders: Non-wage
Forms of Survival among Montreal Familles, 1861-1891," Labour/Le
Travail, 14 (Fall 1984): especially 32-45; and Harris, "Boarding
and Rooming in a City of Homes, 1890-1951," 343.
(55.) Statistics Canada RG 31, Census of Canada, 1891: microfilm
reel T6292, Victoria City, District 4, sub-district 7, James Bay Ward,
p. 2, household 9, Library and Archives Canada (hereafter LAC), accessed
25 April 2013, http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/
census-1891/
(56.) Monk owned two almost identical houses on the north side of
Humboldt Street, near Douglas Street. Each two-storey wooden house
contained seven rooms.
(57.) RG 31, Census of Canada, 1891, microfilm reel T6292, Victoria
City, District 4, sub-district 7, James Bay Ward, p. 2, household 8,
LAC; and sub-district 3, Johnson Street Ward, p. 52, household 251.
(58.) RG 31, Census of Canada, 1891, microfilm reel T6292, Victoria
City, District 4, sub-district 6, Yates Street Ward, p. 54, household
283, LAC; and sub-district 3, Johnson Street Ward, p. 21, household 98.
(59.) Census information about boarding house keepers can be
misleading. Several women recorded on the official 1891 census of
Victoria as "boarding house keepers" were in fact brothel
operators. See Patrick A. Dunae, "Sex, Charades and Census Records:
Locating Female Sex Trade Workers in a Victorian City," Histoire
sociale/Social History, 42, no. 84 (November 2009): 268-97.
(60.) Peter Baskerville asserts that census takers and directory
publishers undercounted the number of women who operated boarding houses
in Vancouver and Victoria in 1891. Baskerville, "She Has Already
Hinted at 'Board' Enterprising Urban Women in British
Columbia, 1863-1896," Histoire social/Social History, 26, no. 52
(November 1993): 227. Undoubtedly the incidence of boarding was
underrepresented in contemporary records. Many private family households
included lodgers and boarders, and so functioned informally as boarding
houses.
(61.) Paul Groth, Living Downtown. The History of Residential
Hotels in the United States (Los Angeles 1994), 97..
(62.) Victoria Daily Colonist, 21 January 1891.
(63.) Lynch's Ready Guide. Containing railway, steamer, stage
and ocean steamship timetables and General Directory to Victoria,
British Columbia and Puget Soand (Victoria, BC 1892), 33.
(64.) Groth, Living Downtown, 90-94.
(65.) The problem of enumerating hotel dwellers has been and
continues to be a methodological issue for census takers. For more on
the census under-enumeration of residential hotels in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries see Groth, Living Downtown; and for a modern
discussion of hotel enumeration see L. Brownrigg, "People Who Live
in Hotels: An Exploratory Overview," Ethnographic Exploratory
Report #23, Statistical Research Division (US Census Bureau 2006).
(66.) To offer but a few examples, Joseph and Ronda Sauer were
resident proprietors of the Grand Pacific Hotel; hotel owner Henry Noble
resided with his wife Clara in the Commercial Hotel; Robert Ward
conducted the Albion Hotel with his wife Annie; hotelier Thomas Burnes
and his wife Katherine resided in the eponymous Burnes House Hotel.
Other married couples included John and Julie Clark who lived in the
Poodle Dog Hotel; John was a telegraph operator and Julie worked as a
housekeeper. A contrary example to this pattern is a married couple,
George and Eliza Witt, who resided in the Colonial Metropole Hotel. Fie
was enumerated as a travelling actor" and she as an "actress.
Presumably, they both worked on a regional theatre circuit, but called
the Colonial Metropole Hotel home. Re 31, Census of Canada, 1891,
microfilm reel T6292, Victoria City, District 4, sub-district 5, Yates
Street Ward, p. 8, households 34 and 35, LAC; and page 55, household
173.
(67.) To aid in comparing the myriad of occupational titles we
found in both the Dominion and check censuses, we utilized the
occupational class structure developed by Gordon Darroch and Michael
Ornstein, "Ethnicity and Occupational Structure in Canada in 1871:
The Vertical Mosaic in Historical Perspective," Canadian Historical
Review, 61 (September 1980): 305-33. Thanks to Lisa Dillon, Departement
de demographie, Universite de Montreal, for advice on applying Darroch
and Ornstein's occupational class scheme to the 1891 census.
(68.) Residential hotels were more attractive than boarding houses
to wageworkers who valued independence and autonomy. Hotel residents
were not hampered by the strictures of boarding houses that sometimes
seemed "too much like [family] homes." Wendy Gamber, The
Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore 2007), 164. See
also Baskerville, "Familiar Strangers: Urban Families with
Boarders, Canada, 1901," Social Science History, 25, no. 3 (Autumn
2001): 321-46.
(69.) The relationship between the type of rental housing and the
journey to work is an area of inquiry yet to be explored by historical
geographers; however, in a preliminary analysis of the journey to work
in Victoria, we have observed this pattern to be true.
(70.) In advertisements, the Albion Iron Works boasted that its
foundries operated continuously, day and night.
(71.) Daunton, "Cities of Homes and Cities of Tenements,| 296.
(72.) Information on wages is derived from federal government
Immigration Branch reports. See Canada, Parliament, Sessional Papers
No.7, Report of the Immigration Branch, Department of Agriculture
(1892), Victoria, BC District Agency, 144-45.
(73.) Canada, Parliament, Sessional Papers No.7, "List of
retail prices of the ordinary articles of food and raiment required by
the working classes at Victoria, BC agency in 1891," 145.
(74.) Peter DeLottinville, "Joe Beef of Montreal:
Working-Class Culture and the Tavern, 1869-1889," in Canadian
Working-Class History: Selected Readings, 3rd ed., ed. Laurel Sefton
MacDowell and Ian Radforth (Toronto 2006), 105.
(75.) B.G. Sivertz, The Sivertz Family, Book I: Christian Sivertz
of Victoria and Canada's Early Labor Movement (Victoria, BC 1984),
9-11.
(76.) Abbott, How Cities Won the West, 11.
(77.) The transitory nature of urban wageworkers is evident by
comparing the names of Victoria hotel residents in Williams'
Official British Columbia Directory over a three-year period, 1892 to
1894. Names that appear in one year are replaced by other names in
successive years. By comparing directories over a short span of time, we
can also see evidence of workers' moving between different cabins
and tenements.
(78.) Sivertz worked at a number of jobs before securing a
permanent position as a letter carrier with the Dominion Post Office. He
was a pioneer in the Victoria Trades and Labour Council (1890) and
attained high office in the labour movement when he was elected
president of the BC Federation of Labour. See Paul Phillips, No Power
Greater. A Century of Labour in British Columbia (Vancouver 1967), 20.
(79.) In the fourth decennial census of Canada (1901), residents
born outside the Dominion were asked to state when they immigrated to
Canada. With this information, we can determine when immigrant
wageworkers who were residents for the 1891 census arrived in the
country. Most of the immigrants were recent arrivals. Walter Disher, for
example, immigrated to Canada from England in 1889. Nominal census
schedules for 1901 are available on microfilm from Library and Archives
Canada and online: accessed 25 April 2013, http://www.
collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/census-1901/index-e.html.
(80.) Victoria's relative economic decline is well documented.
See Belshaw, Becoming British Columbian, 69, 195-200; Forward, "The
Evolution of Victoria's Functional Character'; John S. Lutz,
"Losing Steam: The Boiler and Engine Industry as an Index of
British Columbia's Deindustrialization, 1880-1915," Historical
Papers/Communications historiques, 23 (1988): 168-207; and Robert A.J.
McDonald, "Victoria, Vancouver, and the Economic Development of
British Columbia, 1886-1914," in British Columbia: Historical
Readings, ed. W. Peter Ward and Robert A.J. McDonald (Vancouver 1981),
369-95.
(81.) Several music halls were also located here. The Standard
Theatre, on the southwest corner of Douglas Street and Yates Street, was
one of the most popular venues for working men. It offered booze,
billiards, and vaudeville for its patrons. Chad Evans, Frontier Theatre:
A History of Nineteen-century Theatrical Entertainment in the Canadian
Far West and Alaska (Victoria, BC 1984), 192.
(82.) Dell Upton, "The City as Material Culture," in The
Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology: Essays in Honor of James
Deetz, ed. Anne Elizabeth Yentsch and Mary C. Beaudry (Boca Raton, FL
1992), 53.
(83.) David Garrioch, "Sounds of the City: The Soundscape of
Early Modern European Towns," Urban History, 30, no. 1 (2003): 7.
(84.) Upton, "The City as Material Culture," 59.
(85.) The term "soundscape" was coined by the musical
composer and environmentalist, R. Murray Schafer. In his concept,
specific "keynotes" resound within a soundscape. Schafer, The
Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World
(Rochester, VT 1994). Joy Part draws lapon his work in a meditative
essay, "Notes for a More Sensuous History of Twentieth-century
Canada: The Timely, the Tacit, and the Material Body," Canadian
Historical Review, 82, no. 4 (December 2001): 720-45. In the essay, she
enjoins historians to be less reverent of the written word and more
attentive to resources that convey the sounds, smells, and tactile
textures of historical conditions.
(86.) White, "What is Spatial History?" quoted in Bonnell
and Fortin, eds., Historical GIS in Canada, 3.