The St. John's you know would look a lot different, if not for the Great Fire of 1892

St. John's was left in ruins after a devastating fire 125 years ago, and the capital city would look very different if most of its buildings hadn't burned to the ground.

July 7 marks the 125th anniversary of the Great Fire of 1892, and the city has a number of events planned to commemorate the event.

But walking around the St. John's you know today is a stark difference to how St. John's could have looked, says historian Dale Jarvis.

"The reason why St. John's looks the way it does today is largely because of the great fire," he said.

"We think of St. John's as kind of being a historic place, we think about the historic architecture. Because the town was destroyed in 1892, the town that arose like a phoenix from those ashes was a very, very modern city."

The Great Fire razed the city, destroying hundreds of homes and leaving anywhere from 10,000 to 12,000 people homeless and causing millions of dollars in damage.

We complain about the streets in St. John's, but they're a lot better than they were in 1892.- Dale Jarvis

But that levelling of the city brought in repairs, Jarvis said, and with it, new architectural styles that made downtown St. John's roomier and more spaced out.

"The fact that we have streets that aren't narrow and close together like you would see in European cities, it's because after the fire the city planners were able to straighten out some of the streets, widen them and kind of make St. John's the city it is today," Jarvis said.

For anyone trying to get around downtown St. John's now, Jarvis admits that it might be hard for people to believe it could get more crowded and condensed.

'It led to mass destruction'

But Jarvis said the congestion of homes before the 1892 fire was the reason the devastation reached such a height.

"There had been a fire in 1846 and there were recommendations that said we need to build the houses further apart, we need fire breaks, the streets need to be a minimum width, and people said, 'Ah we're never going to have a great fire, it doesn't matter,'" he told CBC's Here & Now.

"They built the houses back close together, [with] narrow streets, so when the fire swept down the hill it just led to mass destruction. So yeah, we complain about the streets in St. John's, but they're a lot better than they were in 1892."

Of the few things that survived the great fire, Jarvis highlights a specific bit of decoration on the Kirk, or St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, on Queen's Road.

That item is the sandstone medallion that is still seen on the church's face.

"It's the symbol of the burning bush — a bush which was not consumed by the fire. The medallion was actually part of the old Presbyterian church, which was down at the bottom of Cathedral Street," he said.

"It was destroyed in the fire. The Presbyterians saw this as a symbol of St. John's kind of rising from the ashes and they brought it back up here when they rebuilt their church. They incorporated it into their new building."

Jarvis will highlight the medallion during a walking tour of the main sites of the Great Fire taking place on Saturday.

The walk starts at the Basilica Cathedral of St. John the Baptist on Military Road around 3:45 p.m. and follows the same route down Long's Hill the fire took to sweep through and devastate the downtown core.