St. John's (city, Newfoundland and Labrador) - geography. I INTRODUCTION Harbor of St.

« Standing above the Narrows, at the top of Signal Hill, is Cabot Tower, built in 1897 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the discovery of Newfoundland by John Cabot andthe diamond jubilee marking the 60th anniversary of the accession of Queen Victoria to the British throne.

The tower has been a national historic site since 1958.

In 1901Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi set up a listening post just below the tower and successfully received the first wireless transmission from Europe. St.

John’s is home to the Memorial University of Newfoundland and a number of colleges.

The university was established as a college in 1925 in memory of theNewfoundlanders who died on active service during World War I (1914-1918).

It became a degree-granting university in 1949.

The university incorporated Sir WilfredGrenfell College in Corner Brook, on the island’s west coast, in 1975 and the previously independent Marine Institute in 1992.

With a combined enrollment of approximately16,000 graduate and undergraduate students, it is the largest Canadian university east of Québec.

St.

John’s is also home to the Provincial Museum of Newfoundland andLabrador, with collections that include more than a million artifacts. Every August St.

John’s hosts the St.

John’s Regatta, which takes place on nearby Quidi Vidi Lake.

The regatta features fixed-seat, wooden racing shells rowed by a crew ofsix and a coxswain.

Run annually since 1828, it is the oldest continuously occurring sporting event in North America. IV ECONOMY The economy of St.

John’s is based largely on the administration of government services at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels (15 percent of the labor force);educational services (10 percent); and health and social services (12 percent).

Other service jobs account for 14 percent, trade for 19 percent, and other industries for 16percent.

Manufacturing is relatively unimportant to the city’s economy, involving only 6 percent of the labor force.

An additional 6 percent are employed in construction, andless than 2 percent are engaged in fishing and other primary activities.

These figures are for the experienced labor force; the unemployed include young people looking forwork who have not found it yet and thus cannot be classified. Like the province of Newfoundland and Labrador as a whole, St.

John’s is economically depressed.

In the late 1990s, the official unemployment rate in the city was about 15percent, well above the Canadian average.

St.

John’s has also suffered declines in inner-city population and retail trade.

As people have left the city for newer suburbanhomes, merchants have followed them, setting up shop in suburban shopping malls.

These migrations, combined with the arrival of large-scale retail chains providing lower-priced goods, have changed the face of the city’s downtown area. One of the most serious problems facing the economy of St.

John’s is the decline of the local shipping industry.

When Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, the introductionof cheaper Canadian manufactured goods caused local industries to decline and reduced the volume of commercial activity at the city’s port.

The decline worsened after1965, when a paved highway across Newfoundland Island was completed.

The highway allowed mainland producers to bypass St.

John’s and use cities such as Channel-Portaux Basques on the southeast coast to ship their goods to other island cities. While the St.

John’s port may be able to continue supplying the needs of the Avalon Peninsula for bulky items, many observers believe that the small size of the market thatthe port serves will limit the possibilities for future growth.

St.

John’s has long been referred to as “the service station of the Atlantic”; however, the closing of the city’s drydock (dock in which ships are placed for repairs) in 1994 has threatened this function as well.

Recent discoveries of large oil and natural gas reserves off the coast ofNewfoundland and Labrador have brought some hope of potential economic upturn for the port. St.

John’s has an international airport, which connects the city to mainland Canada and points outside the country.

The city is also the eastern terminus of the Trans-CanadaHighway.

Although traffic through the city’s harbor has diminished considerably, the port of St.

John’s continues to serve as an important Canadian Coast Guard depot andport of call for container ships.

Passenger service on the Newfoundland Railway was terminated in the 1960s due to a long history of financial losses.

The railway wascompletely closed and the tracks torn up in the late 1980s. V GOVERNMENT St.

John’s is governed by the St.

John’s Municipal Council, which consists of a mayor and ten councillors.

The mayor and five of the councillors are elected at large, and theremaining five councillors are elected as representatives of electoral wards.

By tradition, the at-large councillor who receives the largest number of votes is made the deputymayor.

All members of the council serve four-year terms. VI HISTORY St.

John’s Street SceneThese buildings are on Duckworth Street in St.

John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.

A tradition of brightly painted storefrontsdeveloped on the island of Newfoundland when it was relatively isolated from the rest of Canada.George Hunter/ALLSTOCK, INC. It is likely that St.

John’s Harbour was familiar to English fishermen as early as the mid-1500s.

When English navigator Sir Humphrey Gilbert claimed Newfoundland in 1583as England’s first possession in the Americas, the ceremony took place in St.

John’s. In 1605 English colonists began to settle permanently in the area.

Settlement was vigorously opposed by merchants and fishermen in England, however, who feared thatthe colonists’ year-round fishing of local waters would pose a threat to English fishing interests.

Permanent settlement in Newfoundland was tolerated by the Britishgovernment after about 1780; however, it remained prohibited by British law until 1811. St.

John’s was incorporated as a city in 1888 and became the capital of the Canadian province of Newfoundland in 1949.

An important event took place in St.

John’s in1919, when a British aircraft departed from Lester’s Field in what is now the west central part of the city.

The flight landed in Clifden, Ireland, less than 17 hours later,marking the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Because St.

John’s is the North American port that is closest to Europe, it has served at various times as an important military center.

The city was captured and burned bya Dutch fleet in 1665, during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and was also the site of several battles between French and English forces in the 17th and 18th centuries.

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