Yaletown sits between Homer Street, False Creek and Robson Street, on land the Canadian Pacific Railway developed as rail yards after bridges went up across False Creek in 1889. Many of the workers came from Yale, British Columbia. The district took its name from them. The CPR released the land for warehouse development around 1908. Hamilton Street and were built out within a few years, in brick raised on platforms at rail car height, with canopies cantilevered over the sidewalk.
Those two streets are still the most intact stretch from that period. 's patio, at Hamilton and Davie, sits under the canopy of a 1911 paper and stationery warehouse. , at Hamilton and Helmcken, seats diners on the raised loading dock of a converted brick warehouse. Brix and Mortar, on Homer Street, opened as Brix Restaurant and Wine Bar in 1999 and merged with the lounge George in 2015. The was built in 2002 to the dimensions of a Hamilton Street warehouse lost to fire.
Real estate cycles and contamination emptied the district out over the following decades, and the city bought up the land. Expo 86 was staged on the rail yard next door. Afterward the site was sold for redevelopment, and the blocks around Hamilton and Mainland filled in with glass residential towers. The old CPR roundhouse on Drake Street is now the , its turntable an outdoor amphitheatre, with the locomotive that pulled Vancouver's first passenger train on display inside.
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