Frits Jacobsen arrived in Vancouver in 1968. He was a prolific artist and captured some of Vancouver’s iconic and long-gone buildings such as Birks, the Englesea Lodge, and the Orillia on Robson Street. He also drew some that have survived. Two that I’ve seen are the Manhattan Apartments on Thurlow and Main Street’s Heritage Hall.
Frits also sketched modest family residences, and it’s always a thrill when one of these drawings lands in my inbox.
Frits Jacobsen studio, 522 Shanghai Alley. Harold H Johnston photo, 1974
1117 East 10th:
Sean Johnston sent me Frits’s 1974 drawing of his grandparent’s house on East 10th Avenue. Francois and Denise Coulombe, a couple of francophones, moved to Vancouver via Edmonton in the 1950s. Coulombe is first listed in the city directories as the owner of the house in 1953. The house had surprisingly few owners over the years. Margaret Mills lived there from 1910 until 1920, after which Mary Clancy and her son Walter – a bartender at the Castle Hotel – owned the house until 1939. It changed hands a few more times before the Coulombe’s took up residence.
1117 East 10th Avenue, Harold H Johnston photo, 1950s
Sean, who is Emeritus Professor at the University of Glasgow, says his parents bought the house from his grandparents in the 1970s.
East 10th Avenue, 1974. Harold H Johnston photo
“My dad and mom began renovating the house in August 1974,” says Sean. “He was a plasterer by trade, and they did extensive repairs, plastering and converting the house to separate flats at that time. I was only peripherally involved but remember us collecting and using a 1910s console gramophone that had been in the basement.”
1117 East 10th after a renovation in the 1970s. Harold H Johnston photo
Sean’s dad, Harold, was a talented photographer and documented quite a bit of Vancouver and Burnaby in the 1960s and ‘70s. He became good friends with Frits, and often took Sean to visit the artist in his Chinatown studio.
1117 East 10th, 2023
Sean doesn’t think his parents ever lived in the house, and says it was likely sold after his father’s death in 1985. Amazingly, the house is still there and assessed at just under $2 million dollars.
Frits Jacobsen illustration for the Alcuin Society book, ca. 1970
The Imperial Roller Skating Rink opened in 1907 at English Bay and boasted the largest skating floor in North America.
Imperial Roller Skating Rink (1907-1914) Photo courtesy Vancouver Archives
Morton Park:
In 1907, more than 100 years before the famous laughing statues appeared at English Bay, the Imperial Roller Skating Rink opened in Morton Park at Denman and Davie Streets. Roller skating was surging in popularity and the rink was housed in a big wood framed building with a huge tower that looked out over Beach Avenue and boasted the “largest skating floor on the continent.”
In 1912 for instance, you could go skating at the Roller Rink and wander across the road, past the Englesea Lodge and out along the English Bay Pier. If you continued back along Beach Avenue, you’d pass Joe Forte’s home at the foot of Bidwell Street, and you’d find more than 30 houses ringing the water side of Beach Avenue.
English Bay Pier with the Roller Rink in the background. CVA 71-17 1912
Burned down in 1914:
What happened to all those amazing structures you ask? Well they either burned down or we pulled them down. The Roller Rink was the first to go—it burned in 1914. Joe Forte died in 1922 and his sweet little cottage was burned to the ground—the standard practice for demolition in the 1920s.
Joe Fortes in front of his cabin at the foot of Bidwell Street, ca.1910. CVA BuP111, colourized by Canadian Colour
The English Bay Pier, considered an eyesore by many, was demolished in 1939. Following a plan to rid the shoreline of bricks and mortar, the City gradually purchased all of the houses, and by the 1950s Beach Avenue was bulldozed back to nature. The only hold-out was the Englesea Lodge, and arson took care of that problem in 1981.
Paul Dixon photo, February 1, 1981
A-maze-ing Laughter:
At least we get to keep the sculptures. They were designed by Yue Minjun and installed in 2009. Each of the 14 bronze statues stands over nine feet and weighs more than 500 pounds. They were installed as part of the Vancouver Biennale, a program that puts international art in public spaces for two years. The inscription that’s carved into the concrete reads “May this sculpture inspire laughter playfulness and joy in all who experience it.”
To give credit where it’s due, A-maze-ing Laughter is now a permanent exhibit because Chip Wilson forked over US$1.5 million to keep it here. And, just maybe because he can see it from his $67 million house across the water–still the pricest digs in British Columbia.
Frits Jacobsen arrived in Vancouver in 1968 and drew many of Vancouver’s long since demolished heritage houses.
By Jason Vanderhill
I first heard about Frits Jacobsen, and saw his beautiful drawings in a post by Jason Vanderhill on his Illustrated Vancouver blog. Jason kindly allowed me to repost it here.
522 Shanghai Alley:
Frits Jacobsen studied at the Free Academy of Fine Arts in the Hague before arriving in Canada in 1959. He moved to Vancouver in 1968. I met him in East Vancouver a few years before his death in 2015 and was able to show him a photograph of the door to his studio at 522 Shanghai Alley taken in 1974. His studio was next door, just above the Sam Kee Building. Both buildings are still there.
Courtesy Harold Henry (Hal) Johnston, 1974
The photo reminded Frits of his hostility towards the postal code movement, though when I showed it to him, he shrugged it off as rather comical.
In December 1979, Vancouver Magazine ran a feature titled “Now you see them” by Ian Bateson and featuring some of Vancouver’s threatened heritage buildings. The drawings that accompanied the article were not credited but I was able to confirm with Frits that he drew them.
Englesea Lodge:
The Englesea Lodge, at the entrance to Stanley Park was the first to go, destroyed by fire in 1981.
Manhattan Apartments:
In 1979, the Manhattan Apartments at 784 Thurlow Street was also under threat, but fortunately has managed to survive.
Built in 1908 for industrialist W.L. Tait, the Manhattan was one of the city’s first apartment blocks and served as a model for many that came after. The building contains attractive stained-glass windows designed by A.P. Bogardus and made in Vancouver. Three of the windows overlook the ornate, pilastered main entrance to the building, although the two smaller ones that sat above both the main and Robson Street entrances are missing. Hopefully, they have been stored somewhere and not destroyed by vandals.
Orillia:
The VanMag article included Jacobsen’s drawing of the Orillia on Robson and Seymour—demolished in 1985 to make way for a new tower.
Heritage Hall:
Heritage Hall on Main Street rounds out the article. At the time, it had stood empty and neglected for two years and was in serious jeopardy. Thankfully, this was one battle that the heritage advocates won, and the hall survives to this day.
Frits was a remarkable artist and a true Vancouver character. If you happen to be going through the MCC thrift store in Surrey, you might just find his drawing of the missing Birks Building.
This is an ongoing series that asks people who love history and heritage to tell us their favourite existing building and the one that never should have been torn down.
Bill Allman is a “recovering lawyer” and instructor of Entertainment Law at UBC. Bill has been a theatre manager (the Vogue), president of Theatre Under the Stars, and a concert promoter through his company, Famous Artists Limited. He is no longer willing to move your piano.
Favourite existing building: The Jericho Sailing Club because the main club building, along with the hostel, Jericho Arts Centre and the City works yard, is the only remaining structure from the RCAF Station Jericho Beach. In its latter years, the RCAF Station was home to several army units including 156 Company Royal Canadian Army Service Corps. That was my father, Major Arthur Allman’s unit. Dad’s office was housed in one of four massive hangers that stood on the site until the ’90s. It was in one of those hangars that, as the young child of a Militia officer, I sat on the knee of my very first Santa Claus and I played on the private DND-owned beach. I learned to swim in the ocean water outside what is now the Sailing Club.
Vancouver Opera House on Granville Street in 1909. Vancouver Archives 64-2
The building that should never have been torn down: I want my opera house back. The Vancouver Opera House, opened in 1891 and hosted a wide variety of “legitimate” dramas as well as vaudeville and music; but not much opera. The theatre was elegantly appointed and intended by the CPR to add to Vancouver’s status as a world class city. Over the years, the theatre often changed hands and, after a complete renovation in 1913, had a life as the “New Orpheum.”. The old Vancouver Opera House survived until 1969 when they ripped it down in favour of that effing Pacific Centre Mall. Nothing says “culture” like a shoe sale.
Kristin Hardie is the curator for the Vancouver Police Museum.
240 East Cordova Street in 1977. Vancouver Archives 1135-25
Favourite existing building: I can’t help but choose 240 East Cordova, now the home of the Vancouver Police Museum and once the Coroner’s Services and the City Analyst Laboratory. Built in 1932, it was the last project architect Arthur J. Bird worked on in Vancouver. Fitting that he ended his career with the Morgue, no? The two-story building is made up of a wonderful mixture of classic Georgian Revival and Art Deco styles . The original design elements inside include the Georgian banister up the front stairs and the unique arched wooden roof in what was once the courtroom—oh and not to mention the actual rooms and autopsy tables used by the pathologist and the Coroner’s Services during 50 years of death investigations.
City Hall on Westminster (Main Street) in 1928 . Vancouver Archives 1376-88
The building that should never have been torn down: The City Hall on Westminster (now Main) street was a robust turreted building that acted as Vancouver’s municipal and political hub for 30 years. It was built in 1890 to house a market on the lower level and a community gathering space above. It became City Hall eight years later. I love that it was nestled deep within the bustling east side neighbourhood–the busiest part of the city before big businesses started to move downtown. There, it was accessible and stood face-to-face with the regular people of the city. That in-and-of-itself should have guaranteed its longevity. I mean really, who tears down their own City Hall? The wrecking ball came in 1958 and in its place is a squat, single story brick eyesore.
Pamela Post is an award-winning Vancouver journalist, broadcaster and part-time journalism instructor/mentor at Langara College. She was born in the West End and now lives next door to the Sylvia Hotel.
“Swathed in its cloak of resplendent Virginia Creeper vine (planted by Mrs. Kenvyn, an original tenant of the Sylvia Court Apts.),” Pamela Post photo, 2016
Favourite existing building: This stately brick and terracotta building stands proudly as a vestige of a long-vanished Vancouver. Designed by architect William P. White and built in 1912 as an apartment building before being converted to a hotel in 1936, it’s named for the owner’s daughter Sylvia Goldstein. GM Ross Dyck tells me that in the autumn, the hotel used to get calls from the Coast Guard station in Kitsilano, saying boaters in English Bay were confusing the bright reds and yellows of the vine with a building on fire. The same family has owned the Sylvia since 1960 and steadfastly celebrated its heritage while regularly refusing lucrative offers to sell. A family recently celebrated its fifth generation of family members married at the Sylvia. The first was a young soldier, heading off to war in 1914. I often say to my friends ‘ahh, the Sylvia Hotel – where it’s always 1947.’
Janet Hobbs has worked at the Sylvia Hotel for 43 years, and she was working the morning the Englesea burned. “I remember it so well,” she told Pamela. “All the people from Englesea came and gathered in the Sylvia.” CVA 2009-001-006, 1960s
The building that should never have been torn down: The Englesea Lodge which once sat on Beach Avenue, was also designed by the same architect as the Sylvia Hotel in 1911. Throughout the ‘70s, the seven-storey building was a pawn in a civic battleroyale between the Vancouver Park Board that viewed it as an ‘eyesore and blight’ at the entrance to Stanley Park, and a city council which was facing a severe housing shortage (sound familiar?) and pressure from the heritage-loving ‘Save the Englesea’ movement. The latter which proposed a rent-controlled residence for seniors with a tea/coffee house and educational facility in the lobby. In the end arson took care of the problem and the Englesea was removed from the landscape in 1981.
Every year Ross Dyck, general manager of the Sylvia Hotel opens about 600 handwritten letters from fans of Mister Got to Go, mostly kids in Grades one and two. And every year he personally answers every one of them.
Dyck has worked in the hotel industry for the past 25 years, before that he taught drama and stage craft to high school kids.
The two Mr. Got to Go books about a cat that moved into the Sylvia Hotel, are so popular he says, that it’s not uncommon to stumble across a bus load of little tykes in the hotel lobby enroute to the Vancouver Aquarium.
“They force the bus driver to stop here so they can come in and find the cat,” he says. “Course the cat hasn’t been around for about 12 years, but we love the fact they still come.”
A third book in the Mr. Got to Go series is due out in the fall
Dyck is likely the only hotel boss who would say that—but the Sylvia Hotel that celebrates its 100th anniversary this year is a special kind of hotel.
“When I first got here I was horrified. I’d walk into the lobby at 5:30 am and I’d see people walking around in their housecoats and slippers,” he says. “But I can’t think of any other hotel in Vancouver that can say that.”
Last year the Sylvia hosted a fifth generation wedding. The first family member was married there in 1913.
A woman in her 90s came to stay at the hotel for a night. Her mother had stayed at the Sylvia years ago and she showed Dyck the invoice. In those days, two nights accommodation, two breakfasts, and seven phone calls came to $7.14. When the woman checked out the next morning, Dyck charged her $7.14.
The same family has booked room 801, the same room that once housed the Dine in the Sky restaurant–for a month in the summer every year since 1990.
Over the years the hotel has hosted people like Pierre Trudeau and Errol Flynn. Like a good hotel manager, Dyck doesn’t like to name his famous guests, but he’s comfortable telling me that singer songwriters Jane Siberry and Jennifer Warnes are both regulars.
The Sylvia Hotel received Heritage Designation in 1975. Six years before the Englesea Lodge (seen in the photo below) burned to the ground.
Dyck, who likens his job to that of mayor of a small town, says that the best part of his job is that in the five years he has worked at the Sylvia he’s never had the same two days in a row.
The Sylvia Hotel was designed by William P. White, the Seattle architect who designed the Englesea Lodge (at the far left) and the Del Mar Hotel on Hamilton Street.
On Sunday February 1, 1981 shortly before 9:00 a.m., George Wright, a 70-something caretaker was working at the Englesea Lodge when he spotted fire coming from the building’s basement storage area.
“There was a big boom and the fire rushed out at me. It threw me back against the wall,” he told a reporter. Wright barely managed to escape through the rear basement door, but flames were already tearing up through two light shafts and up the elevator shaft and spreading through the floors of the seven-storey apartment building.
February 1, 1981. Michael Cox photo
Former Vancouver Fire Department Captain Steve Webb was one of 90 firefighters called out that day to fight the fire with the help of an aerial ladder and 13 trucks. There’s no doubt in his mind that it was arson.
“The fire was not only obviously set in the basement next to the elevator shaft, but the fire ‘operations and command’ was also suspicious to us firefighters. The higher-ups wanted it to burn,” he told me this week. “Soon as we had a good grip on the seat of the fire, we were called out and the fire was allowed to rekindle and spread.”
Michael Cox photo, 1981
The fire left a smoke-blackened, gutted building just two days before Vancouver City Council was scheduled to meet and discuss the Englesea’s future.
When I blogged about the 1913 photo of the houses on Beach Avenue last week I hadn’t heard of the Englesea Lodge. Many of you wrote and told me stories about the building and the fire that caused its destruction.
It’s a fascinating story that spans half-a-century—features the parks board as villain, the city as wishy washy and a group called the Save-Englesea Committee who had the radical idea that the building was part of our heritage and could co-exist perfectly well with the shoreline.
The Plan
Around the turn of the century, the water side of Beach Avenue was ringed with more than 30 houses and bookended by the Englesea Lodge and what’s now the Burrard Street Bridge. Some were fine old ivy-covered manors, others were more like Joe Fortes’s sweet little cabin at the foot of Bidwell.
Joe Fortes outside his cottage at 1700 Beach Avenue. Vancouver Archives photo
In 1926 the Vancouver Town Planning Commission hired Harland Bartholomew, an American urban planner, to design a blue print for Vancouver’s growth. The 300-plus page book (now online thanks to Vancouver Archives) was the catalyst behind shedding the shoreline of bricks and mortar.
The first part of the plan involved the city expropriating 14 houses to make way for a “pleasure drive” in 1929. But the Depression and then the War got in the way and the houses became rentals for the next two decades.
Over the years the city bought up more properties until the only hold-out was the Englesea Lodge.
Englesea Lodge, Sylvia Hotel and English Bay Pier, 1913. Vancouver Archives
The Fight
The city paid $375,000 for the Englesea in 1967, and the battle to save it began.
Rents from the building had covered its cost by 1975 and supporters argued that future revenue would generate enough for renovations. But in 1979 Council voted to demolish the building anyway, issued eviction notices and locked up suites as they emptied. Later that year, the Englesea received another stay-of-execution when councillors voted 6-5 to delay further eviction notices until they found more justification than the parks board’s whim to destroy the building.
In 1980, the year before the fire, 29 of the 45 apartments remained occupied, and there was talk from the city of investing $1.3 million to turn the building into senior’s housing.
But to the parks board, the building which sat kitty corner from its offices, remained a blight on the shoreline—and their view—and they were determined to bulldoze English Bay back to sand and grass.
Englesea Lodge was designed by William White, the same architect who designed the Sylvia Hotel (then the Sylvia Courts Apartments) in 1912. White also designed the Del Mar Hotel on Hamilton Street.
The End
Strangely, the building’s fire alarm didn’t sound when fire broke out, and fortunately no one died in the fire. The parks board got its way, and we lost another charming old heritage building.
The day after the fire, Alderman Don Bellamy—who favoured demolition—told a Province reporter that the fire was “like fate itself has taken hold.”
And then he added: “It’s a hell of a shallow victory. If we’re going to have our way, I hope to hell we don’t have to fry people to do it.”
