Quote:
Originally Posted by KnoxfordGuy
Saint John, NB Pre 1877 fire when the downtown (or uptown by locals) was still wooden
by James McGrath, on Flickr
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I've come back to this picture a few times this week and I think I figured out what about it intrigues me so much: this is presumably what St. John's looked like prior to the Great Fire of 1892. In pictures from that before that time, the quality is so low it's hard to see the detail of the wooden buildings like in this photo - but the general roof shape and window placement and scale of the buildings is the same as all the wooden parts of the core at that time (Water Street was already mostly stone). I think our two cities would've been visually interchangeable at that time. It's only after 1892 that we did our own thing using the trends popular at that time (curved mansard roofs, etc.).