A new sign at Hakai’s Victoria office offers a glimpse into the 150-year history of the Old Victoria Custom House and its enduring connection to the city’s waterfront.
The Old Victoria Custom House at 1002 Wharf Street still occupies its original position on the edge of Victoria's Inner Harbour, more than 150 years after it was built.
This summer, a new sign went up beside the entrance at 1002 Wharf Street: the Hakai Institute, in the familiar red letters, mounted where anyone walking the Inner Harbour can see it.
Long before there was a building at 1002 Wharf Street, there was a coastline. The harbour sits within the traditional territory of the Lekwungen people, who harvested camas bulbs and seafood along a shoreline dotted with sites of cultural and spiritual significance. That relationship with the water changed abruptly in 1843, when the Hudson's Bay Company arrived and Fort Victoria went up as the company's main depot west of the Rockies. Fifteen years later, the discovery of gold on the Fraser River sent as many as 30,000 miners flooding through the harbour, the first of several rushes that would keep Victoria's waterfront busy through the mid-1860s. By the late 1800s, the harbour had become the off-season home of the Pacific fur sealing fleet, as many as 100 schooners tied up along the same shore.
The Old Victoria Custom House shortly after its construction in 1874–75. Its waterfront location gave federal officials direct access to the busy harbour below; the foundation stone was shipped over from Galiano Island aboard the schooner Kate, according to the Royal BC Museum and Archives.
Photo believed to be courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives. Digitally colourized; the original photograph is black-and-white.
It was into this working harbour, in 1874, that the federal government built a customs house. The Old Victoria Custom House was constructed in 1874–75, only a few years after British Columbia joined Confederation, to a design by T. S. Scott, Canada's first chief architect of public works. It was built in the Second Empire style then favoured for new federal buildings: three storeys of brick, painted a dusty rose with cream trim, on a high stone foundation, a steep mansard roof, hooded dormers, stone quoins at the corners. A lower floor served as a receiving warehouse, offices occupied the floors above, and a rooftop viewing platform gave officials a clear view of the harbour and its traffic.
First photo: Prospectors crowd the entrance to the Custom House on Wharf Street. Second photo: The line stretches down the street, hundreds of men deep, on February 21, 1898, during the Klondike gold rush.
Photos by John Wallace Jones, courtesy of the British Library. Digitally colourized; the original photograph is black-and-white.
That waterfront position wasn't incidental. The lot had been reserved decades earlier by the Hudson's Bay Company for public purposes, and passed to the new Dominion government after Confederation. A local newspaper account from 1873, while the building was still being planned, noted approvingly that the site "has a water frontage, which will be found useful as a landing."
The building housed three federal departments: Customs, Inland Revenue, and Marine and Fisheries. Ships arriving in what was then British Columbia's leading commercial port were logged and duties collected on the main floor, in a Long Room whose five windows looked straight out over the harbour. When gold was discovered in the Klondike in 1897, prospectors rushed to Victoria and lined up by the hundreds at the Custom House, spilling out along Wharf Street, waiting for a mining licence, a scene captured in a photograph from February 1898 that still survives in the British Library's collection.
Its purpose kept shifting after that. Customs operations moved elsewhere in 1899, and the building settled into a slower life as offices for various federal departments, including, for a time, the harbour master. In the 1940s it briefly served as a naval mess, renamed the Marine Building. Then, in 1952, its interior was substantially renovated to house a new tenant: HMCS Malahat, a Royal Canadian Navy reserve division. The building took on the name it's still sometimes known by today, the Malahat Building, and remained a naval facility for roughly the next decade, before returning to civilian office use.
The Custom House overlooking Victoria's working waterfront. The building's relationship with the harbour remained constant even as the shoreline around it changed.
Photo courtesy of the Royal BC Museum and Archives, reference H-03216. Digitally colourized; the original photograph is black-and-white.
The harbour outside its windows was changing too. By the early 1900s, the working waterfront of warehouses and sealing schooners had begun giving way to steamships, ferries, and floatplanes, and eventually to the condos and hotels that line much of the Inner Harbour today.
In 1987, long after the navy had gone, the Old Victoria Custom House was designated a National Historic Site of Canada, recognized both for its connection to the era when Victoria was the dominant commercial centre on Canada's Pacific coast, and as one of the country's rare surviving examples of a 19th-century federal building in the Second Empire style.
In the early days of Hakai Magazine, around 2014, Tula Foundation founder Eric Peterson simply wanted an office in Victoria, and left the search to colleagues Jude Isabella and Dave Garrison. They came back with a suggestion: basement and attic space in an older downtown building. The price was right, so Eric said yes without asking many questions, including, as it turned out, the address. "I thought no more about it," he says.
The former Custom House at 1002 Wharf Street, now home to Hakai's Victoria office. Hakai has occupied space in the building since 2014 and expanded onto its main floors in late 2023.
The new Hakai sign at 1002 Wharf Street, installed in summer 2026.
It was a month or so later, on a visit to Victoria, that he finally asked where the office actually was. "I was astounded to find that the building was HMCS Malahat, aka the Customs House," Eric says. "I was thrilled at the location." The discovery wasn't entirely a surprise to him. In the late 1950s and 1960s, his father ran an architecture firm in that part of town, later moving it to nearby Langley Street, and as kids, waiting for rides home from the movies or the ice rink, Eric and his siblings used to hang around a harbour that looked nothing like today's polished waterfront.
That first Hakai office was a modest fit. The organization shared the building with a law firm occupying the middle floors, and the basement and attic space needed considerable work before it was usable. That arrangement held until late 2023, when Hakai moved up into the middle floors and the law firm left the building for good. Hakai gave up the attic around the same time; a whale watching company, Prince of Whales, moved in instead. Hakai kept part of the basement, which today serves mainly as meeting space, though Hakai's own archaeology lab still works out of it. By the time Hakai moved into the middle floors, much of the renovation there was already complete, and Eric describes that walk-through in far warmer terms than the first. An open house on March 23, 2024, marked the space's official opening.
"Happy coincidence," Eric says of the building's history, "but the history of the place is a huge asset to us now."
The sign says Hakai. The building behind it has been looking toward the sea for 150 years.
