Pat Jollota

“This city starts at Fifth Street.” It’s an accurate description. Downtown Vancouver grew from the Columbia River ferry landing a century and a half ago. It was the logical point to walk off the boat from Portland and emerge in the business district. Later it was the logical place to build the river bridge and the interstate highway. Ah, there’s the rub. Highways need space, and a large part of downtown was razed to let the cars flow through. When you drive past Vancouver on Interstate 5 today, you are driving on the old downtown. And what isn’t gone has greatly changed.

Vanishing Vancouver, a new book by Pat Jollota in the “Images of America” series, is a community photo album. Like the people in an old family album, many of the landmarks in this book are no longer with us, and those that remain show a glint of familiarity but are noticeably different. It’s fascinating to see the changes in buildings, streets, and vehicles.

If you’re familiar with Vancouver, you might recall some long-gone businesses like the Vancouver Brewery, Kaiser Shipyards, the Holland Restaurant, and Hi School Drug. You will also see early photos of an Igloo Restaurant, and Burgerville USA.

But need not be from Vancouver to be drawn into the history told on more than one hundred pages of captioned photos. The city is the home of the earliest permanent European settlement in Washington. It has served as an encampment for both British and American interests. Ulysses Grant was stationed here before the Civil War and POWs were housed here during World War II. Vancouver has hosted business and industry for nearly two hundred years. History has continuously changed the landscape and the urban appearance. The photographs in Jollota’s book captures many of the ghosts of this vanished past.

You’ll see images of the Columbia River — frozen. (A plane is parked on the ice in one photo.) You’ll see a parade of Prunarians. They were an important group 100 years ago, but seem rather curious from the perspective of 2013. And you’ll learn about the Witness Tree that served as the basis of the street grid and all property claims in town.

Whether buildings succumb to highways, civic developers, new technologies, fire, flood, or abandonment, all cities change. It is very easy to not notice the changes that happen gradually. It is far easier to forget things that have vanished completely.

Vanishing Vancouver, $21.99, Arcadia Publishing. Available at local retailers, online bookstores, or through Arcadia Publishing at www.arcadiapublishing.com or 888-313-2665.

One more thing: Knowing of the modern city center west of Interstate 5, I was fascinated to see images of the older, now-missing downtown. The pictures reminded me of Tumwater, another Washington city that yielded its central business district to I-5 pavement. (See Tumwater by Heather Lockman and Carla Wulfsberg, another book in the “Images of America” series.)

[I wrote this review originally for WA-List.com]… (més)