Gastown stands on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, whose villages, travel routes, fisheries, and trade long predated Vancouver. Colonial settlement intensified after Hastings Mill opened on Burrard Inlet. In 1867 John Deighton, nicknamed Gassy Jack, established a saloon near the mill, and a small service settlement grew around it. The name Gastown endured even after officials laid out the townsite of Granville. Workers, sailors, loggers, merchants, Indigenous residents, migrants, and sex workers shaped the rough waterfront community.

The Canadian Pacific Railway selected the western terminus nearby, and the new City of Vancouver incorporated in 1886. Weeks later the Great Vancouver Fire destroyed most buildings in the young city, including Gastown's wooden fabric. Reconstruction in brick and stone produced warehouses, hotels, banks, offices, shops, and saloons along Water, Cordova, and surrounding streets. Rail sidings and docks tied the district to resource exports and trans-Pacific commerce. The resulting Romanesque, Italianate, and commercial buildings belonged chiefly to the post-fire boom, not to Deighton's original 1867 settlement.

As Vancouver's commercial center moved west and new transportation patterns developed, Gastown declined. Hotels became inexpensive lodging, industries left, and disinvestment increased, but the neighborhood remained home to low-income residents and community services. Proposals for freeway construction threatened extensive demolition during the 1960s. Local activists, preservationists, residents, and business interests helped block the plans. Governments designated Gastown as a protected historic area and national historic site in the early 1970s, making it central to Vancouver's shift from urban clearance toward heritage conservation and adaptive reuse.

Restoration retained many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century façades and structural systems while shops, restaurants, offices, housing, and tourist businesses transformed interiors. Streets received brick paving, decorative lamps, and other coordinated heritage treatments. The famous steam clock installed in 1977 is a modern attraction using a steam mechanism with electrical controls, not a surviving Victorian civic clock. Fire escapes, seismic upgrades, storefront replacements, utilities, and new buildings add further layers. Gastown is therefore an authentic historic district shaped by substantial restoration and selective period styling, not a preserved 1880s stage set.

The City of Vancouver regulates alterations through heritage review while ownership remains mixed among private, public, and nonprofit bodies. Streets are free, and individual venues follow separate schedules. Preservation operates amid serious housing insecurity, drug toxicity, homelessness, policing disputes, tourism, and redevelopment pressure shared with the wider Downtown Eastside. Responsible interpretation does not use attractive masonry to erase current residents or Indigenous title. Gastown's history connects colonial settlement, industrial labor, catastrophe, rebuilding, decline, activism, heritage economics, and the continuing question of who benefits when a working neighborhood becomes a visitor destination.