When a photo of three men - two in smudged working clothes and the third in a three-piece suit - was taken in the Silver Bros. Garage on Kingsway in 1918, automobiles may have been all the rage, but they were still sharing the roads with horse-drawn wagons.
Photographs taken in the city's early days and now preserved in the City of Burnaby archives show a water wagon at work in 1913, a lumber company delivering wood by wagon in 1915, and grocery and milk wagons in 1918, all on city streets.
With Canada at war - and thousands of men overseas - the boom in growth that would come to Burnaby in the 1920s was still a ways off.
Burnaby was still largely undeveloped, with pockets of growth - there were only 16 schools throughout the community, compared to today's 49. Many of the streets at that time were still hard-packed dirt roads and, in some areas, not easily passable by vehicles at all.
On the farms in the area, the wagon was still, for many families, the primary vehicle for carrying out work, harvesting hay, transporting goods and animals, and for personal travel.
But the age of the automobile had arrived, despite the war - by 1918, there were Packards, Fords, Stanleys and Chevrolets, to name just a few, and they were in high demand for those who could afford them.
Just like today, they all needed tune-ups and repairs from time to time, giving birth to the earliest repair garages.
The Silver Bros. Garage was one of the city's first such shops. Located at 3900 Kingsway - later renumbered as the 4500 block of Kingsway - it was run by brothers William and Oliver Silver, both of whom were machinists.
The site is now, most likely, somewhere underneath Metropolis at Metrotown, but a few blocks away from where it stood - and many decades later - cars are still being repaired in the heart of Burnaby.
Victoria Chan opened up Norwescan Motors, near the corner of Imperial and Royal Oak, in 2005. She and her crew of two mechanics work on a variety of vehicles manufactured around the globe; her mother helps out with office work.
"We specialize in Mercedes, Smart Car, Sprinter vans, VW, Audi, Porsche, BMW and New Mini - typically all German vehicles. We do take in other makes occasionally, like Land Rover, Jaguar and the odd Japanese or domestic," she told the NOW.
Chan, who was born in Singapore, says the business has changed a lot over the years - these days, computers are hooked up to the cars to run diagnostics and determine problems before repair work even begins.
But one thing is still the same: many new customers come through the door thanks to old-fashioned word-of-mouth referrals.
Still, the changing times help boost the business through a virtual "word-of-mouth" - some of her customers find their way to her shop thanks to specialty online forums aimed at Mercedes Benz drivers, where fans of the car can swap photos, advice and vehicle information while being logged in at computers around the world.
DATELINE 1918
With the First World War - the Great War - about to come to a close, 1918 was a time of change for Burnaby. During the war years, some local residents worked at a submarine works yard in Barnet; others travelled to nearby New Westminster to work at a munitions factory. In all, the city lost more than 90 "heroic dead" to the war effort overseas. But in the years that would follow, the post-war boom would bring plenty of growth in the pioneer city - by 1924, the population had grown to 24,000. In 1917, the city had marked its 25th anniversary since incorporation, and Hugh M. Fraser was reeve of the city from 1914 to 1918. In May of that year, women across the country gained the right to vote in federal elections. In December, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck Vancouver Island.
