We’re a couple of local photographers, and for the past year we’ve been shooting Vancouverites for So It Is: Vancouver, a coffee table book that shows why we’re proud to call this place home. The book profiles a bunch of people who live here today, and through them we tell the story of the city we live in today.
We're running a Kickstarter campaign to fund the printing of the book - and in a way asking the question "do you think this book should exist?". If you think it should, please support us and pre-order the book.
Jesse Keefer – his relative accidentally burnt the city down.
Vancouver and the land it sits on are steeped in thousands of years of human history. In those terms, the city has barely been around for the blink of an eye. But it almost didn't even last that long.
The city was incorporated on April 6th 1886. Less than three months later a fire swept through the city and in less than an hour, burning it to the ground. At the risk of stepping on the toes of the excellent Vancouver Was Awesome, let's wind it forward to present day.
Jesse Keefer (above) splits his time between Vancouver and Galiano Island, where he runs a resort / hideaway called Bodega Ridge. He's tied to the story of Vancouver forever through his distant relative, George Keefer.
If you're thinking that name sound familiar, George was a former surveyor and the guy after whom Keefer Street was named.
In 1886, George was employed as a construction worker, clearing land for the Canadian Pacific Railway where the Yaletown Roundhouse now sits. It was during a series of controlled fires that one of them got out of control, and the Great Vancouver Fire began.
A little-known and hard-to-verify twist to the story - on his deathbed George confessed to negligence that caused the fire.
While the tragedy destroyed lives and homes, the city rallied and within 24 hours the rebuilding project began. That rebuild influenced much of Vancouver as we know it today - and included the formation of the city's first police force, sworn in to recover whiskey barrels looted during the fire. While the fire itself definitely wasn't awesome, the spirit of Vancouverites and people who flooded in from neighbouring areas to help with the rebuild definitely were.
