I recently had a free day in downtown Vancouver. Yes, this really is how I spend all my vacations!

Unlike my research excursions in Saskatchewan and Alberta, this was not a road trip, so at my Val Marie base station I got very invested in the task of planning the perfect route for my limited time in the city.

Route planning

Go figure, Vancouver is actually a step behind Edmonton and Regina in terms of making tax roll build year data easily available to the public. I eagerly look forward to being proven wrong on this point, but I wasn't personally able to find any kind of scrapeable official city interface. In the absence of primary-source municipal data, I relied on Jens von Bergmann's highly neat interactive assessment map.

Just by eyeballing the assessment data, we can identify five main areas of interest in the city where old residential stock predominates. Of these, the Strathcona neighbourhood is (theoretically) far and away the most historical, where pre-1910 construction is widespread. The other four are about equally tied for second, fitting into our pre-Depression era of interest.

Does my background as a GIS person make me an exceptional route planner? It's more like the exact opposite... I tend to enjoy the experience of being aimlessly lost, so I'm actually a very frustrating person to hang out with. Don't read any secret industry knowledge into my process here.

• First priority: hitting up Strathcona.
• Second priority: heading to any other target area.
• Last priority: with only a single day at our disposal, Kitsilano's geographic distance from Strathcona makes it easy to strike off the list.

With the Vancouver airport train making transit access to downtown easy, I decided to pick Grandview-Woodland as my backup area, setting up an ambitious 16-kilometer day hike for myself.

Note: Unlike most Western Canadian railway-era neighbourhoods, which are laid out along a single axis, Strathcona has houses facing in all four directions off each block. This makes systematically walking past every house in the area a big nuisance, and I definitely missed a few.

Ground truth

The complexity of my plan exceeded the durability of my feet. After about 9 kilometers (and having not taken off my boots since leaving home in Val Marie), I decided to give up, and only managed to hit a few blocks worth of Grandview-Woodland.

From some very blurry Streetview captures, I expected to find some type of original house number sign in Vancouver, but I wasn't sure exactly what. Here's one of the locations that I identified before ever setting foot in British Columbia:

You can see a bit of an odd reflection on this plate, which I mistook for a hint that the fixture has a slightly convex shape. From there, I speculated that we were looking at an enamel material, similar to what I documented in Regina and Moose Jaw. Wrong!

The real answer was a few hundred dollars in airfare away:

Fifteen of my 20 observations are all constructed in exactly the same way. This is Vancouver's most widespread heritage house number style!

I am really not the most handy person, but I am apparently gradually becoming a subject matter expert in heritage sign manufacturing techniques. Let's puzzle over what we've documented.

Making history

Just like in Edmonton, Vancouver's oldest house number plates are made out of painted foil under glass, held together by a scalloped metal bracket. However, unlike Edmonton, Vancouver plates are modular! Each digit is on a separate pane of glass.

I would have assumed that this modular style was developed for easier mass-production, but it's clear that each digit has been individually shaped by an (experienced) human hand holding a sharp blade. The most obvious proof is provided by this plate with two consecutive digits:

Even accounting for the way that foil signs tend to sag and fall apart over the decades, these two 4s are just not identical. However, the modular construction of the digits provides much more regularity than in Edmonton, where wonky kerning was one of the biggest tip-offs that every single one of these signs is bespoke.

One other neat innovation with the Vancouver plates: the foil comes with a very attractive tooled guilloché pattern. I didn't see this anywhere in the hundreds of foil plates I photographed in Edmonton, so it was most likely the house specialty of a long-gone Lower Mainland sign shop.

At first, I thought this beautiful rippled texture was the result of some complex metallurgical technique, but a closer inspection reveals a consistency to the grooves that implicates a machine. In Edmonton, the foil itself has been cut into the shape of the digits, but in Vancouver we can see that each digit comes with a full-sized rectangular piece of this special guilloché foil. So either the black glass paint was somehow scored and removed by hand, or these were manufactured with a single-use stencil that was discarded after its work was complete. (In either case, I am not sure why some kind of die or template couldn't have done a better job.)

Odd ones out

I briefly mentioned that 15 of my 20 house number observations all match each other. What about the rest?

829 is a vintage blue enamel sign, similar to what I've documented in Moose Jaw and Regina - although, with its unusual digit forms, it definitely doesn't come from either of those two prairie sign shops. It's also being kept behind frosted glass, so there's no proof that it was ever actually mounted on this building.

The remaining four oddballs are all very close to the glass signage we see in Edmonton, with slightly wonky numbers all applied to a single glass plate. I have documented slight variations in these kinds of signs all over the Canadian prairies, so they were probably being manufactured everywhere, and I can imagine multiple shops in Vancouver specializing in the same product.

429, in particular, is a ringer for Edmonton's airbrushed "serif" style of sign... although I actually don't think it's a perfect match (the thickness of the strokes looks different).

Finally, although 653 is clearly a modular glass sign like its other neighbours, it trades its guilloché pattern for a pretty celestial design. This implies multiple sources of decorative foil in turn-of-the-last-century British Columbia.

From observations in Edmonton, we know that these scalloped glass plates and brackets can be manufactured in any custom size if needed, so perhaps the availability of this patterned foil is what dictated the consistent, modular shape of the digits that we see in Vancouver?

Conclusion

Not bad for a single day!

As a self-employed person and my own boss, I rarely feel like my time is precious, so it was very entertaining to do a lot of prep work for a structured and limited-time event. It is always a joy to do a piece of desktop GIS analysis (e.g. identifying parts of Vancouver that should theoretically yield old architectural fixtures) and find the results corroborated by reality.

When it comes to house numbering in Vancouver, the frequency of a single common house number plate style (and the exclusion of other styles common to other cities) once again implies that the city government was originally involved somewhere. Because Vancouver is a large commercial and intellectual centre, I am holding out hope for the existence of archival resources that will one day help me reconstruct a more specific narrative of policy and procurement.

This makes four Canadian cities now conclusively documented by myself as having an original house number style, and I have to admit I am still having a lot of fun becoming the world expert in this subject. For how completely archaic and forgotten these heritage sign manufacturing techniques are, it's amazing how present they are in our modern landscape!!

Having pushed my heels to their natural limits, I regretted this excursion for the rest of my vacation.