明治中期(11,12年大火後)函館の中心市街とその建築

抄録

In the historic quarter of Hakodate, a port city of Hokkaido, there remain only scarce buildings before the big fire in 1907, in contrast with plenty ones after it. 108 earlier buildings, about 30 % of all, along the Odori and the Wharf Streets could be reconstructed by the sources of engravings and photographs from the Middle Meiji Era. Almost of them are conjectured to have been built in a few years immediately after the fires in 1878 and 1879. These serial fires were, although utterly destructive, a capital opportunity to improve the city from the old and spontaneous to the modern one with a grid system of widened and straightened streets and fire proof buildings. Reconstructed buildings tell that about two thirds of them along the Odori were improved to be fire proof, but ones in Benten-cho, west part of the Odori Street, were of the traditional godown type, while ones in east Suyehiro-cho, at least several of them, were of the new type, that is of brick construction and plaster finishing to express the western fashion, arched openings, corner stones and so on. Urban center of Hakodate, that once in the earlier time had been at the westernmost Benten-cho, gradually moved eastward along the Odori. Since the serial fires in 1878 and 1879, Suyehiro-cho established itself as the most flourishing trading center with the neibouring main wharf and administration offices.