St. Francis of Assisi Church and Friary

St. Francis of Assisi Church: In 1939, the Catholic diocese decided to move the parish church from its original location at Broadway and Victoria and they built the church that now stands next to the monastery. Attributed to George Aspell, the Romanesque Revival style and campanile (bell tower) dates from 1938. The stained glass windows were installed in the 1990s along with new Gothic pews.

St Francis of Assisi Friary: Next door to the church stands the former Wilga, a classic Grandview mansion from 1909, built for the Australian immigrant William Miller who, with his brother, John J. Miller, made a fortune in the BC Interior land market at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the early 1920s, Franciscan monks took over the mansion called Wilga on the corner of Napier and Semlin that William Miller had had built for himself in 1909. It became a monastery and at one point, there were sixteen friars living in the house. The monks left the house in 1990 and it became the rectory for the parish priest of St. Francis.It was acquired by the Franciscan Order in 1925 and used for mass until the church was built. The Friary was rehabilitated in the 1990s and won a City of Vancouver Heritage Award.

The church is located near Commercial Drive, called the “Little Italy” in the 1960s for its early population of Italian-Canadians which in and around 1967 numbered 30,000.
Read more on the link, an excerpt from Michael Kluckner’s “Vanishing Vancouver: The Last 25 years”.

Source

Grandview Heritage Group website, Exploring Vancouver: The Architectural Guide, Harold Kalman and Robin Ward, Building the West: The Early Architects of British Columbia

More information

http://grandviewheritagegroup.org/?p=247