Gastown Highlights: A Tour of Vancouver’s Oldest Neighbourhood

Gastown’s cobblestone streets are at the heart of Vancouver’s complex identity as a Pacific port city. On this walking tour, you’ll navigate the city’s preserved historic quarter while engaging with contemporary issues like gentrification, houselessness, and reconciliation.

The tour starts at Waterfront Station, the 1914 Canadian Pacific Railroad terminus that remains the city’s busiest transit hub. You’ll walk through brick-lined streets and past the controversial Gastown Steam Clock, which draws Instagram crowds despite being notoriously unreliable. In Maple Tree Square, you’ll hear how Gassy Jack’s statue, honouring the neighbourhood’s namesake, was toppled during a 2022 protest for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

You’ll wander through former ‘Japantown’ – which was disrupted by World War II-era internment camps – and explore how the “Vancouverism” urban planning philosophy continues to shape development in one of the world’s most livable, yet unaffordable, cities. The tour ends at the 1913 Astoria Hotel, which has served as worker housing, a boxing club, a film location, and an affordable housing complex, embodying Vancouver’s constant reinvention.

On this two-hour tour, you’ll have the chance to:

• Pass preserved architecture that was saved by an unlikely 1960s alliance of hippies, dissidents, and property owners fighting urban renewal
• Experience the tension between high-end eateries like Ask for Luigi Restaurant and vulnerable residents in Canada’s ”poorest postal code”
• Learn about the lost Asahi baseball team that played at Oppenheimer Park until 1941 Japanese-Canadian internment
• Discover how activists created Vancouver’s only legal tent city alongside a public beach at CRAB Park at Portside
• Hear how Blood Alley’s historic slaughterhouses have been redesigned into a community performance space
• Understand the complex relationship between port city prosperity and drug trade controversies
• Find out about the Strathcona neighborhood’s transformation from planned 1950s demolition to one of Vancouver’s greenest communities
• See how the philosophy of mixed residential and commercial development makes Vancouver unique among North American cities

By the end of this tour, you’ll have navigated Vancouver’s historical layers, where preservation battles and social activism create ongoing dialogue about community identity and urban development.