Kelowna's Cultural District Heritage
Kelowna’s Cultural District was once the centre of the Fruit Packing Industry and is rooted in an industrial past. It is a 6 block area in the north end of Downtown Kelowna. Its boundaries are Okanagan Lake to the west, Ellis Street to the East, Queensway to the South and Clement Avenue to the North. It has an incredible history for you to explore..take a journey back in time and you will find cigar factories, sawmills, packinghouses, wars, fires and even connections to Lords and Ladies all in Downtown Kelowna’s Cultural District.
- Railyards & Warehouses…where did our fruit go?
- Lumber, Lords & Ladies….and don’t forget the wine!
- Wars, Fires, pioneers and packinghouses
- Where commerce and transport meet
Railyards & Warehouses…where did our fruit go? (West and North boundary of Kelowna's Cultural District – Okanagan Lake & Clement Avenue)
For roughly 80 years, this part of Kelowna's historic industrial district was dominated by a web of rail yards, barge slips and warehouses that helped connect Kelowna orchardists to world markets for their award winning tree fruit products. Beginning shortly after 1900, teams of shunting horses jostled and hauled railcars between the packinghouses and marshalling yards, eventually positioning the cars on rail barges headed for Okanagan Landing at the head of the Lake and, from there, on to more distant world markets.
In the mid 1920s, the area took on a more organized look and feel with the laying of a rail line between Kelowna and Vernon and with the construction of an accompanying Canadian National Railway station house and expanded rail marshalling yards. Across Ellis Street from the Station, a water tower was built to service the steam locomotives. Passenger service to and from Kelowna was offered for more than thirty years.
Just north of this location along Ellis Street, one of Kelowna's most distinctive packinghouses dominated the landscape. B. C. Fruit Shippers began operation in the late 1920s, and adorning the south-facing gable of its packing plant was one of its most distinctive trademark apple box labels, Big Chief Brand. For more than thirty years the company graded, sorted and packed Kelowna area fruit from an expanding acreage of mature orchards. The packinghouse was razed in one of several mysterious fires that plagued the region's tree fruit industry in the 1960s.
In the 1950s and 1960s improvements in transportation, an expanded industrial base, improved community services, and a strengthening tourist economy combined to drive Kelowna's population dramatically upward. At the same time, the fruit industry began to wind down its operations in this part of the city; and the City came under increasing pressure to take a leadership role in the revitalization of foreshore areas adjacent to the downtown.
Beginning largely in the 1970s, the City initiated a plan to acquire the bulk of the land west of Ellis Street from City Hall north to Clement Avenue. By the early 1990s that task was complete and the City began to improve the area on a number of fronts. First, it set plans in place to establish Waterfront Park, which opened in 1995. Second, it began to negotiate with private interests to develop a major waterfront hotel property and a multipurpose arena – the Grand Okanagan Lakefront Resort was opened in 1992 and Prospera Place was opened in 1999. Third, the City commissioned the planning and implementation of a Cultural District to meet the needs of a growing community and to strengthen the City's role as a tourist destination.
Adjacent to the Cultural District on its north and east sides are increasingly built up urban residential areas of condominiums and town homes that reflect both contemporary architecture and lifestyles.
Lumber, Lords & Ladies….and don't forget the wine! (Artwalk pedestrian corridor in Kelowna's Cultural District.)
Smith Avenue was named for Eustace Smith who, for a time in the 1890s, managed the Guisachan Ranch for Lord and Lady Aberdeen. Some early maps of the area show this as Eustace Avenue, and at one time Smith Avenue extended from Water Street through to Ellis Street. For decades in the early part of the 20th century it was flanked on the south by acres of sawn lumber either drying in the open air or stacked and ready for market. The extent of the lumber yards shown in early photographs demonstrates both the strength of the Kelowna Sawmill Company and the healthy demand for interior lumber.
In the early 1940s, the sawmill and much of its adjoining lumber yard were burned to the ground. Soon after, the City purchased the property from S. M. Simpson as part of a plan to develop a civic core for the City. In 1948 the Memorial Arena was opened, and in 1962 the R. C. M. P. opened their new administration building at a cost of $102,000.
On the north side of Smith Avenue, packinghouses and warehouses with their raised and covered loading decks backed onto Canadian Pacific Railway marshalling yards. Between here and Haynes Avenue, the next street to the north, four rail spurs gave the area the look and feel of a bustling industrial neighbourhood. Between the 1920s and the 1950s the area became almost completely built up. Perhaps the industry's strongest representations at this time were the Cascade Co-operative Union, the Laurel Co-operative Union, and the Kelowna Growers Exchange packinghouse and cold storage buildings. The Cascade, for example, operated on Smith Avenue from the mid 1920s to the 1970s.
The Okanagan Valley's wine industry also got its start in this neighbourhood. Domestic Wines and By-products Limited began operations here in 1932, with its initial purpose to make apple wines. These first products were poorly received and the company quickly switched to grape wines, and in 1935 the company was successful in securing a contract to supply sacramental wines to Canada's Catholic Church. The company changed its name in 1936 to Calona Wines and operated in its Smith Avenue plant until 1951 when it moved to brand new facilities on Richter Street.
The Artwalk is part of a linear pathway that helps link the downtown business district with the Cultural District. Built in 2002, the Artwalk will continue to evolve as the Cultural District strengthens its role in the community.
Wars, Fires, pioneers and packinghouses (Ellis Street, East Boundary of Kelowna's Cultural District)
From 1892, when the City of Kelowna was laid out, surveyed and named, Ellis Street has been one of two main transportation corridors that connected the downtown business area to the more industrial north end. The street was probably named for Fred Ellis, one of the area's pioneers who arrived here in the 1890s. A business associate of one of Kelowna's earliest real estate developers, Ted Carruthers, Ellis was killed in the Boer War.
As the tree fruit industry began to mature shortly after 1900, Ellis Street became the site of new packinghouses, box factories, warehouses, canneries and cold storage buildings. By the 1920s the area was abuzz with the seasonal rhythm and pattern of agricultural life.
Look east across Ellis Street and you will see a block of large simple structures that were part of the tree fruit industry complex. Operated largely as cold storage buildings, they were built in the late 1930s through the 1940s. After World War II, the industry began to consolidate and centralize its operations into fewer but much larger packinghouses located further into the City's industrial district north of Clement Avenue. By the early 1980s these buildings were no longer in use by the industry and most were converted to light industrial use. As the City's Cultural District began to emerge in the 1990s, most of the buildings were slowly shifted to arts and culture related operations.
In the 1960s, a series of devastating fires razed several of Kelowna's packinghouses, and those on the west side of Ellis Street narrowly missed being caught in the various blazes. At the same time, Kelowna's population began to grow dramatically and the City's business district started to spread north and replace some earlier industrial uses. The Kelowna Daily Courier newspaper, for example, moved from its long-established Water Street location to the NW corner of Ellis Street and Doyle Avenue in the mid 1950s.
This area of Ellis Street is currently dominated by the major branch of the Okanagan Regional Library built in 1996 and by an adjacent parkade built in 1998. The Public Health building just to the north of the parkade was officially opened on April 27, 1992.
Where commerce and transport meet (Queensway Transit Mall, south boundary of Kelowna’s Cultural District)
Queensway was originally called Mill Avenue probably for the Kelowna Sawmill Company that operated on the north side of the street. In 1953 the portion of the street that runs between Ellis Street and the lake was re-named in honour of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
From early in Kelowna's downtown history, Queensway has marked a kind of transition line between the Central Business District and other land uses to the north. In the 1890s and very early in the 20th century, that land use was farming – more specifically the cattle ranch of A. B. Knox. As the town's economy strengthened with the orcharding land boom just prior to World War I, the area north of Queensway saw construction of packinghouses and, most particularly, the Kelowna Sawmill Company. For roughly 50 years the first block of Queensway north toward Doyle Avenue was filled with sawmill equipment, logs and stacks of lumber drying in the open air or piled and ready for sale.
In October 1944 a fire tore through the sawmill and its lumberyards destroying everything. Soon after, S. M. Simpson sold the property to the City of Kelowna which undertook to begin using the land for strictly civic purposes. City Hall was built in 1950, a large branch of the Okanagan Regional Library was opened in the mid 1950s, the Kelowna Museum opened its doors here in 1967, the Bennett Clock was completed in 1981, and Kasugai Gardens was opened in 1987.
On the south side of Queensway, commercial and light industrial businesses have come and gone over the years. At the east end of the street, Kelowna Growers Exchange had its retail store, supplying orchardists with their fruit ranching equipment and supplies. A little further to the west Kelowna Creamery Limited had its operations. Incorporated in 1915, it operated in Kelowna until 1959.
On the northeast corner of Water Street and Queensway where City Hall now stands, the Kelowna Steam Laundry tended to the domestic and commercial cleaning needs of the community.
As the Kelowna's population grew in the 1980s and 1990s and as increased attention cam to public transit, the City implemented a program that better met the needs of a commuting public. In the mid 1990s the Transit Mall was built at the east end of Queensway. As the central departure point for the entire central Okanagan, this bus loop services the largest of Kelowna’s four town centres.