From smallpox hospital to new centre for children and youth with health complexity
The site at Slocan Street and 21 Avenue in Vancouver is one of the oldest locations continually used for health care in the entire province.
The site will become home to a new centre for children and youth living with health complexity. It has a notable history that we're still learning about.
Indigenous hunting and gathering grounds
The lands south of Burrard Inlet, where the Slocan site is located, were once a rich temperate rainforest criss-crossed by streams flowing to the inlet. The lands were used by the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation), and səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh Nation) for hunting and gathering food, medicine, and resources such as wood, bark, and roots from the native Western red cedar and Douglas fir trees. The three Host Nations have cared for these lands for all time.
European settlers began clearing these lands for settlement beginning in 1863, when Hastings Townsite was established as a government reserve.
Smallpox epidemics
The arrival of European settlers also introduced smallpox to B.C., with tragic consequences for Indigenous communities. One of the worst smallpox epidemics to sweep through B.C. was in 1862, killing one-third of the First Nations population in the province. To learn more about this early history of smallpox, visit the First Nations Health Authority website.
1910s: The isolation hospital
To deal with the smallpox epidemics in the city of Vancouver, a preliminary isolation hospital with 12 beds was built on Keefer Street. But by 1909, with the arrival of more settlers, there was a need to expand.
Many residents objected to a new isolation hospital within city limits. So in 1911, a location was purchased for $45,000 at Slocan Street and 21 Avenue in Hastings Townsite. The Townsite had just voted to join the City of Vancouver in 1910, but was still seen as far enough away from the heart of the city. At the time of the sale, the site had already been completely cleared of native trees.
The isolation hospital took just over one year to build. It had an administrative building and two wards: a smaller ward for women and a larger ward for men. The front entrance included a mortuary.
1920s: Vaccination campaigns
During the 1920s, a series of vaccination campaigns helped curb successive waves of the disease. For example, a 1920 smallpox outbreak led to 80 per cent of school-aged children being vaccinated in just six months.
1930s: From smallpox to tuberculosis
By the early 1930s, the isolation hospital fell out of use due to a decline in smallpox (though the disease was not officially declared as eradicated until 1980 by the World Health Organization; its eradication was a direct result of global vaccination).
The buildings on the Slocan site were repurposed into a tuberculosis (TB) preventorium for children, which opened in 1931.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the preventorium treated children from all over the province for TB and polio, the major health issues of this time.
1958: A royal visit
An expansion in 1958 added 70 beds to the facility. On July 23, 1958, Princess Margaret visited the Preventorium to officially open the new unit, and the whole site was briefly renamed the Princess Margaret Children’s Village.
1961: The beginnings of Sunny Hill
With the success of antibiotics in treating TB, preventoriums were no longer needed. In 1961, the site was renamed the Sunny Hill Hospital for Children. It focused on caring for kids with cerebral palsy, disabilities, and children requiring extensive rehabilitation.
2020: A new vision for the site
In August 2020, Sunny Hill moved to the BC Children’s Hospital Oak Street campus, into a brand new, state-of-the-art facility.
The former Sunny Hill building will be demolished to make way for a new centre for children and youth living with health complexity – continuing the century-old legacy of health care on this site.
The new centre and service will be the first of its kind in Canada in how it coordinates care for these children and their families as their needs change. Learn more about the proposed services.
More information
For more information about the planned centre for children and youth living with health complexity on the Slocan site, visit the Slocan pages on the BC Children’s Hospital website. A more detailed history of the Slocan site can be found here. Or email us at slocaninfo@phsa.ca.
A special thank you to Kira Baker and her colleagues at the City of Vancouver Archives for their expertise and assistance with this research.
Image gallery
View the images below to see the evolving history of the site.
