City of Vancouver

From Vancouver City Hall to Bryan Adams’ Recording Studio: repurposing old buildings

by Eve Lazarus on May 31, 2014

Powell and Columbia Streets — Oppenheimer Bros Wholesale Grocers building 1898

From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

Bryan Adams has collected a ton of hardware over the years, but the one I find the most interesting is the City of Vancouver Heritage Award he was given in 1998 for transforming a derelict Gastown warehouse into a world class recording studio.

Bryan Adams When Adams bought the brick building at the corner of Powell and Columbia Streets in 1991 it was abandoned and abused. Likely it would have gone the way of other historical Gastown buildings if he hadn’t seen its potential.

The building restoration took seven years and cost $5 million including the purchase price. The three-storey building has large windows to let in lots of natural light, a massive main studio on the second floor and a mixing suite on the third floor.

“I always leaned toward having a studio in an eccentric neighborhood,” Adams told Mix. “It reminds me a little of New York.”

The Victorian-style warehouse is the oldest brick building in the city. Built by David Oppenheimer, a German immigrant and Vancouver’s second Mayor (1888-1891) the building survived the Great Fire of 1886 and served as the Oppenheimer Brother’s growing wholesale grocery business.

The warehouse also served as Vancouver City Hall while Oppenheimer was mayor.

Today it hosts bands and rock stars that include AC/DC, Elton John, Bon Jovie, Tragically Hip, Metallica and Michael Bublé.

100 Powell Street

Tags Bryan Adams, City of Vancouver, City of Vancouver Heritage Award, David Oppenheimer, Sensational Vancouver, the Warehouse

L.D. Taylor and the History of Taylor Manor

by Eve Lazarus on July 1, 2012

For more stories about L.D. Taylor’s Vancouver see: At Home with History: the secrets of Greater Vancouver’s Heritage Homes

Mayor Gregor Robertson held a press conference Friday announcing the City’s receipt of a $30-million anonymous donation to reopen Taylor Manor. After an extensive renovation and upgrade, the house will provide housing for 56 people with mental health issues who now live on the streets of Vancouver.

The City built the Tudor Revival-style house in 1915 as a dormitory for destitute seniors and named it the Vancouver Old People’s Home. When it opened it had separate entrances for men and women. In 1946, it was renamed Taylor Manor after L.D. Taylor, Vancouver’s serial mayor. L.D. is still the most elected mayor in our history, winning nine elections, losing seven, and serving eight terms between 1910 and 1934.

While a photo of L.D. shows him as a slight looking, bland little man in owlish glasses, he was actually a bigamist and a flamboyant risk taker known for his trademark red tie and cigar. He published and edited the BC Mining Record, the Oil and Mining Record and the Critic, a paper on public issues. In 1905, he bought the Vancouver World newspaper from Sara McLagan, the sister of noted architect Samuel Maclure.

In keeping with his mega ambitions, in 1912 L.D. built a 17-storey Beaux-Arts building to house his newspaper. It was the highest building in the British Empire at the time, and caused a minor scandal for its nine near-naked women sculpted by Charles Marega.

The owners of the Vancouver Sun bought the building in 1937, and it’s been known as the Sun Tower ever since.

100 West Pender Street — The Vancouver Sun Tower

According to Daniel Francis’s highly readable biography, L.D. was an American-born accountant, who left his wife and young son in Chicago and headed for Vancouver in 1896 after he was accused of fraud.

Despite this shaky start, L.D. was a popular mayor. He supported the progressive idea of an eight-hour work day, universal suffrage for women and city planning. During his watch, L.D. oversaw the opening of the Vancouver International Airport and the Burrard Street bridge.

He had a relaxed approach to gambling, bootlegging and prostitution. In 1924, he told a Province reporter he didn’t believe that it was the mayor’s job to make Vancouver a “Sunday school town.”

Although Taylor lends his name to Taylor Manor, he never lived there. In 1917 he lived on the top floor of the Caroline Court at the corner of Thurlow and Nelson in the West End. By 1920, he moved to what was once the Granville Mansions at Robson and Granville, where he lived in rather meagre circumstances until his death in 1946 at age 88.

Tags 100 West Pender Street, 851 Boundary Road, Charles Marega, City of Vancouver, Daniel Francis, Gregor Robertson, L.D. Taylor, Samuel Maclure, Sara McLagan, Taylor Manor, the Sun Tower, The World

2400 Motel: Vancouver’s 10th most endangered heritage site

by Eve Lazarus on June 7, 2011

The 2400 Motel on Kingsway opened in 1946. It still has an old fashioned, retro feel and its huge red and blue neon sign.

I discovered the 2400 Motel on Kingsway when I wrote Frommer’s With Kids Vancouver about a decade or so ago. Loved the old fashioned, retro feel of the place and its huge red and blue neon sign. The freshly painted green and white bungalows had the feel of a country cabin. Kids could play on the lawn outside, the rooms were clean and functional, and staying there was inexpensive.

Endangered List:

The 18 bungalows and the office have made Heritage Vancouver’s Top 10 Endangered hit list for 2011. “It’s really hard to isolate 10 sites in the city that are in danger—there are hundreds and hundreds that we could put on our list,” says Don Luxton, president of Heritage Vancouver.

People, says Luxton, are always surprised to find that a 1946 building is considered heritage. “Our city is only 125 years old,” he says. “Why would it not be a heritage site?”

Post-war car culture:

The heritage case for the 2400 Motel is that as an auto court, it is one of the last and best examples of post-war car culture. The 2007 Statement of Significance by Birmingham & Wood Architects for the City of Vancouver describes it as “a rare place of shared memories.”

“Not only did the 2400 function as a home-away-from-home for many travelers…but it has entered Vancouverite’s collective imagination as a seemingly immutable part of the city—a whole, miniature world from an earlier simpler time.”

The City of Vancouver bought the 2400 its three-acre site in 1989 as part of the proposed Norquay Village neighbourhood centre. But the plan, released earlier this year, lacks any heritage retention. Luxton says that while it’s unrealistic to expect the entire site be preserved, he’d like to see certain elements such as the neon sign and maybe one or two of the bungalows remain.

“Will that happen or will this turn into a high-rise? We don’t know, but we’re sounding the alarm,” he says.

The other sites on the list in order of most endangered are: Carleton, Kitchener and Sexsmith Schools, Shannon Estate, Strathcona North of Hastings, Gordon T. Legg Residence, Collingwood Library, Lower Mount Pleasant and several Granville Street buildings from the 1880s.

A short history on the 2400 motel

Tags 2011 Top Ten Endangered Sites, 2400 Kingsway, 2400 Motel, Birmingham & Wood Architects, Carleton School, City of Vancouver, Collingwood Library, Don Luxton, Frommer's with kids Vancouver, Gordon T. Legg residence, Heritage Vancouver, Kitchener School, Norquay Village, Sexsmith School, Shannon Estate

The Shannon Estate: Fourth most endangered heritage site

by Eve Lazarus on February 27, 2011

Last week Heritage Vancouver released its annual top ten list of endangered heritage sites in Vancouver. Three schools topped the list, but the residence considered most in danger is the four-hectare Shannon Estate at the corner of Granville and 57^th. Note that it’s not the 40-room mansion that’s under threat, it’s Shannon Mews, the infill townhouse development designed by Arthur Erickson, that’s on the block.

The Shannon Estate is valued at $43 million and because the estate is a huge chunk of land in a sought after area, it’s not going to stay the way it is now. It’s also under the allowable density and that’s a problem because loading up the density on the site with glass and steel towers will most definitely impact the context of the estate, which at the moment, still feels like an estate.

Shannon Mews–Erickson Massey designed townhouse development, 2011

The City of Vancouver gives developers density bonuses to preserve and maintain heritage in Vancouver. In other words, instead of levelling an old mansion for a 20-storey skyscraper, a developer would incorporate the mansion into the development in exchange for a 22-storey skyscraper. The 1899 mansion at the corner of Georgia and Jervis Streets that sits next to two 37-storey towers is an example. For saving the house and turning it into five condos, Wall Financial Corp (which also owns Shannon) got two extra floors on each tower as their heritage density bonus.

The problem, says Donald Luxton, president of Heritage Vancouver, is that the City has stopped using density bonuses strictly for heritage, but is now using them for everything from daycare to social housing. “What we are asking,” Luxton told the Vancouver Historical Society, “is how much is too much?”

B.T. Rogers

I wrote the story of Shannon in At Home with History, and it’s a fascinating one. B.T. Rogers, Vancouver’s first millionaire industrialist and founder of BC Sugar, built the Samuel Maclure-designed Gabriola on Davie Street in 1900. A decade later, Rogers bought 10 acres in the country and had Somervell & Putnam architects design a house that would be the largest west of Toronto. Unfortunately, the economy tanked in 1913 and war broke out the following year, delaying construction until 1915. Three years later, Rogers, 52, died from a cerebral haemorrhage leaving his widow Mary to raise seven children at Gabriola. Mary finished Shannon in 1925 and lived there for 11 years until selling Shannon to Austin C Taylor, president of Bralorne gold mine for $105,600. Taylor stayed until his death in 1965. Developer Peter Wall bought Shannon and hired architect Arthur Erickson to turn the property into a housing development.

Wall Financial Corp's proposal to replace Shannon Mews — The proposed development at 57th and Granville

The 14-storey Tower Proposal

At present there are 162 suites in the two-storey buildings designed by Erickson Massey in 1974. The current proposal leaves the mansion, coach and gate house intact, retains some of the landscaping, but razes the entire townhouse development and most of the surrounding trees. In place of the townhouses are two towers of 13 and 14-stories and several smaller ones scattered about that bring the total count of suites to 891 and increase the number of residents from 340 to 1,600.

Tags 7255 Granville Street, Arthur Erickson, Austin C. Taylor, Benjamin Tingley Rogers, City of Vancouver, Donald Luxton, Erickson Massey, Gabriola, Heritage density bonuses, Heritage Vancouver Society, Mary Rogers, Peter Wall, Samuel Maclure, Shannon Mews, Somervell & Putnam, Wall Financial Corp

BC Binning and the Heritage Inventory

by Eve Lazarus on September 28, 2010

The full story of B.C. Binning’s house is in Sensational Vancouver

Most municipalities have a heritage inventory that includes houses built before 1940. Makes sense doesn’t it? When you think heritage you think old. But actually heritage can be 20 years old, and that can surprise a new home owner wanting to renovate or demolish who is suddenly hauled in front of a heritage commission.

When the City of Vancouver introduced the Heritage Register in 1986, the foremost concern was saving buildings deemed architecturally important. The register identified prominent Shaughnessy houses such as Glen Brae and Hycroft, Roedde House in the West End, as well as various churches, schools, and public buildings. Recently, the city added 22 modern buildings to the register. Five of these are protected through designation: the former BC Hydro building, the former Vancouver Public Library, the Gardner House in Southlands, the Dodek House in Oakridge and the Evergreen Building.

In 1997, the District of North Vancouver published a modern inventory for houses built between 1930 and 1965. Many are modest looking post and beams designed by local legends Arthur Erickson, Ron Thom, Fred T. Hollingsworth and Ned Pratt.

Designed by Ned Pratt in 1941 — BC Binning House

The Binning Residence at 2968 Mathers Crescent, in West Vancouver and built by Ned Pratt, is maintained by The Land Conservancy and it’s well worth checking out on one of the public tours.

Built in 1941 for $5,000, the house is credited with launching the West Coast modernism movement. Unlike the massive multi-million dollar mansions that surround it, Binning responded to the social and economic condition of the time by using local materials and efficient construction materials to create an affordable house that harmonizes art and architecture, form and function.

A prominent artist who studied under Frederick Varley and Henry Moore, Binning founded the University of B.C.’s department of fine arts. His interest in architecture led him to design large mosaic murals for public buildings such as the B.C. Electric Substation and the series of murals which he painted directly onto the walls of his house.

Support

Click to read posts about:

Subscribe to Our Newsletter