620 Keefer Street

The house

Built

1905 or earlier. It is listed in the 1905 directory, and the City's assessment record gives 1905.

On the 1912 map

A wood-frame house, numbered 620, on the south side of Keefer just east of Princess Avenue.

Heritage

On the Vancouver Heritage Register (category B) as the Bezzasso House.

Today

Still standing.

John A. Clandenning, a foreman, is listed here in 1905, the earliest directory in the record. The City's assessment record also gives 1905 as the year built. The 1912 fire insurance map shows a wood-frame house on the lot, set back from Keefer with a rear wing, among a row of similar houses.

It still stands. The Vancouver Heritage Register lists it in category B as the Bezzasso House; the Bezzasso family is the one the directory lists here in 1945.

Of the 26 addresses on this block that appear in the directories between 1905 and 1945, five still have a building from before 1946 (602, 612, 620, 630 and 658). The rest were rebuilt or merged into larger lots.

The neighbours

The 600 block of Keefer as each directory lists it, odd numbers (north side) first.

The street and the city

In 1905 the cross street at the west end of the block was Carl Avenue (“Carl ave. intersects” in that year's listing). By 1912 it was Princess Avenue, and the fire insurance map still notes the old name.

The 1905 directory gives a job for nearly everyone on the block: a grocer, a painter, a tailor, a mill hand, a logger, a planerman, an engineer, a Gas Company worker and the principal of Strathcona School across the street.

From 1915 the directories stop naming many residents of this block. They print “Foreigners” at 643 and 647 in 1915; “Chinese” at four addresses and “Japanese” at 611 in 1925; and “Orientals” at five addresses in 1935. The canvassers didn't record these people's names, so we can't give them. By 1945 the directory prints names at 615 and 630, where it had printed only “Orientals” in 1935: W H Dong and W H Lee. Whether they are the people the 1935 canvasser left unnamed, the directories don't say.

In 1935 the block lists K Ikeno at 611 and J Oiye at 661; neither name is on the block in 1945. In 1942 the federal government forced Japanese Canadians to leave the coast, and their homes were later sold without their consent. The directories record names, not origins, so whether this touched these two households they don't say.

How we know

Every year here comes from that year's printed city directory, held by the Vancouver Public Library. Canvassers compiled each one door to door, so a listing is who they recorded at the door, not a legal record of who owned or rented it. Names are copied as printed, spellings and all.

The street section lists each address in order; the name section lists each person with their work and address, which is where the jobs come from. h marks a householder, r someone living there, wid a widow. Anything we infer (a likely build date, a misprinted number, a renumbered address) is marked as inferred. Names are shown up to 1945; later years say only how the address was used.