Selwyn Pullan

BC Binning’s Secret Mural

by Eve Lazarus on April 10, 2021

The Imperial Bank of Canada opened its new building on April 21, 1958 at Granville and Dunsmuir Streets. It featured this stunning mural by BC Binning. The building is now occupied by a Shoppers Drug Mart, but the mural is still there.

BC Binning’s mural at Shoppers Drug Mart. Eve Lazarus photo, 2020, Vancouver Exposed

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

The Mural:

Next time you’re downtown and have a mascara emergency or need some aspirin, drop into the Shoppers Drug Mart at Granville and Dunsmuir. Once you hit the cosmetics area, you might just forget what you came in there for, because opposite the front entrance and right above the gift cards is one of the hidden wonders of Vancouver—a stunning tile mosaic created by legendary artist BC Binning in 1958.

586 Granville Street (at Dunsmuir) built in 1958 featured a mid-century design by McCarter Nairne architects. Eve Lazarus photo, 2020, Vancouver Exposed

Although it’s probably best not to, if you go up to the second floor, you can actually touch one of the 200,000 pieces of Venetian glass that make up this massive mural that dominates the entire length of the wall. Binning, an artist who taught architecture, was commissioned by the Imperial Bank of Canada to celebrate the province’s booming resource-based economy, from hydroelectricity and forestry to shipping and agriculture, with a “key” to help interpret it.

The key to understanding BC Binning’s mural. Courtesy Illustrated Vancouver.

Made in Italy:

Binning spent more than three months in Venice overseeing its preparation. He climbed a ladder a few times each day to look down at the growing tile and marble mosaic for the overall effect. When the greens weren’t as vibrant as he expected, he had the tiles changed. When the mosaic was finished—all 500 square feet of it—it was shipped to Canada in 12 boxes, to be reassembled on the wall like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

McCarter Nairne (the architects behind the Marine Building, Devonshire Hotel, and Georgia Medical and Dental Building, designed the mid-century building which featured terrazzo floors, polished granite and marble columns.

The Bank of Montreal opened a branch at 586 Granville in 1893. The bank moved out in 1925 and the Imperial Bank of Canada moved in (shown here in 1955). It was demolished in 1958 and replaced with the mid-century building. Photo Vancouver Archives 447-333

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

Tags 586 Granville Street, BC Binning, Imperial Bank of Commerce, McCarter Nairne, Selwyn Pullan

Our Missing Heritage: The Ritz Hotel

by Eve Lazarus on November 24, 2018

Selwyn Pullan shot these photos of the Ritz Hotel in 1956, shortly after it had been renovated into this awesome mid-century modern look.

But while it had a fancy name, the Ritz Hotel at 1040 West Georgia was originally designed as a YMCA in 1912 by Henry Sandham Griffith. Griffith had offices in Vancouver and Victoria and was riding the real estate boom of the time. He made enough money to build himself a castle-like manor he named Fort Garry on Cook Street in Victoria, that later belonged to David Spencer and became known as Spencer’s Castle. It’s now part of a condo development.

St. Julien Apartments, 1924. Designed as a 7-storey reinforced concrete building at a cost of $375,000. Photo: CVA 99-1411

Unfortunately for the YMCA, the economy tanked in 1913, the First World War broke out the following year and the Y couldn’t raise the money to finish the building. It sold, and was completed as the St. Julien Apartments in 1924. Radio Station CJOR launched in 1926, and shared the building for the next three years.

St. Julien Apartments, 1929. Designed by H.S. Griffith in 1912. The only two Vancouver buildings that still exist of his work are the Board of Trade, 402 West Pender and the West End’s Barrymore Apartments on Barclay. Photo: VPL 4759

The St. Julien Apartments didn’t last long. By 1929, it had transformed into the Ritz Apartment Hotel, offering hotel rooms and fully serviced apartments. One of its long-term residents was Mabel Ellen (Springer) Boultbee, a divorcee who is said to be the first white child born on Burrard Inlet. She was born in Moodyville in 1875 and died in her room at the hotel 77 years later. She shared the apartment with her sister Eva.

Mabel and Eva ran a school together in the 1890s, and Mabel wrote for the Vancouver Sun’s women’s pages for 30 years. She was also a member of the swanky women-only Georgian Club which occupied the top floor of the Ritz Hotel from 1947 until the building’s untimely demise in 1982.

One of a series of photos taken from the roof of the Ritz Hotel in 1948. Photo: VPL 80734.

The Devonshire Hotel—our other much loved and storied building just two blocks away on West Georgia, came down in 1981, replaced by the HSBC building.

The Georgia-Medical Dental Building is under construction in this 1929 Leonard Frank photo. The Devonshire is in the middle. Both buildings are long gone.

The Ritz Hotel was replaced by the 22-storey hideous gold Grosvenor building.

With thanks to:

the Vancouver Public Library and BC City Directories
Chuck Davis’s Vancouverhistory.ca
Changing Vancouver blog
Building the West: Early Architects of British Columbia by Don Luxton
Find a Grave

To find out more about fabulous buildings that no longer exist – go to: Our Missing Heritage

Tags Barrymore Apartments, CJOR, Devonshire Hotel, Fort Garry, Henry Sandham Griffith, Mabel Ellen Boultbee, Ritz Apartment Hotel, Ritz Hotel, Selwyn Pullan, Spencer's Castle, St. Julien Apartments, the Georgian Club, Vancouver Board of Trade, YMCA

West Coast Modern Architecture

by Eve Lazarus on June 15, 2018

There is a chapter in Sensational Vancouver called West Coast Modern which explains the connections between artists and architects and the West Coast Modern movement in Vancouver.

Last week I wrote about Selwyn Pullan’s photography exhibition currently on display at the West Vancouver Museum. I focused on his shots of West Coast Modern houses now almost all obliterated from the landscape.

But Selwyn also did a lot of commercial photography and one of his largest clients was Thompson Berwick Pratt, the architecture firm headed up by Ned Pratt who hired and mentored some of our most influential West Coast Modern architects. Arthur Erickson, Ron Thom, Paul Merrick, Barry Downs and Fred Hollingsworth all cut their teeth at TBP, and BC Binning consulted on much of the art that went along with the buildings.

BC Electric from the back cover of Sensational Vancouver. Courtesy Selwyn Pullan, 1957.

Ned Pratt’s crowning achievement was winning the commission to design the BC Electric building on Burrard Street—a game changer in the early 1950s. While the building is still there, now dwarfed by glass towers and repurposed into the Electra—a few of the firm’s other creations are long gone.

There was the Clarke Simpkins car dealership built in 1963 on West Georgia that demonstrated Vancouver’s growing fascination with neon.

CKWX (News 1130) building designed at 1275 Burrard in 1956, demolished 1989. Replaced by The Ellington. Selwyn Pullan photo 1956

Our love for neon also showed up in the former CKWX headquarters at 1275 Burrard Street. According to the Modern Movement Architecture in BC (MOMO) the building won the Massey Silver Medal in 1958. “This skylit concrete bunker was home to one of Vancouver’s major radio stations until the late 1980s. The glassed-in entrance showcased wall mosaics by BC Binning, their blue-gray tile patterns symbolizing the electronic gathering and transmission of information.”

The building is long gone, replaced by a 20-storey condo building called The Ellington in 1990.

The Ritz Hotel at 1040 West Georgia was originally a 1912 apartment building. It was remodeled into a hotel when this photo was taken in 1956 and demolished in 1982. It was replaced by the 22-storey hideous gold Grosvenor building. Selwyn Pullan photo

I wonder what happened to the murals?

The Exhibition runs until July 14.

Top photo: Clarke Simpkins Dealership, 1345 West Georgia. Built 1963, demolished 1993. Selwyn Pullan photo, 1963.

Tags Arthur Erickson, Barry Downs, BC Binning, BC Electric Building, CKWX, Clarke Simpkins, Electra, Fred Hollingsworth, Ned Pratt, Paul Merrick, Ron Thom, Selwyn Pullan, Thompson Berwick Pratt, West Vancouver Museum

Selwyn Pullan Photography: What’s Lost

by Eve Lazarus on June 9, 2018

I finally got a chance to drop by the West Vancouver Museum yesterday to check out the latest exhibition on the photography of Selwyn Pullan. Assistant curator Kiriko Watanabe has done an amazing job, not only pulling out some of Selwyn’s most interesting work, but also displaying the cameras that he used to shoot them with.

After serving in the Canadian Navy during the Second World War, Selwyn moved to Los Angeles to study photography at the Art Center School in Los Angeles where Ansel Adams taught. He worked as a news photographer at the Halifax Chronicle, and when he moved back to Vancouver in 1950 he found a new movement of artists and architects who were reinventing the house.

Selwyn reinvented architectural photography.

When he found that the Speed Graphic was inadequate for the movement needed for photographing West Coast Modern architecture, Selwyn built his own camera. Eve Lazarus photo

Several years ago, I asked him how he went about taking these photos. “I just look at the house and photograph it,” he said. “It’s a journalistic assignment not a photographic one.”

Many of his photos were taken in the 1950s and ‘60s. They evoke a sense of time, optimism for the future, and perhaps even a new way of thinking. He intuitively understood the work of the architects he photographed, emphasizing light and space and often pulling in the homeowners and their children to show how the architectural and interior design fit with family life.

His pictures show Gordon Smith painting in the studio designed by Arthur Erickson; there’s a young Erickson lounging in his own adapted garage; and Jack Shadbolt is photographed painting in his Burnaby studio. His stunning portraits of artists and sculptors include E.J. Hughes, George Norris, Bill Reid and Roy Kiyooka.

While the photos in the exhibition showcase Selwyn’s work, they are also carefully selected to show our missing heritage—building after building both residential and commercial that no longer exist. The loss is particularly apparent in West Coast Modern.

Go see this exhibition—it runs until July 14. There’s a guest talk by Donald Luxton on Saturday June 30 at 2:00 p.m. which will be well worth your time.

Selwyn died last September, after spending 65 years in his North Vancouver house, where he worked in his Fred Hollingsworth-designed studio, and where he parked his jaguar under a Hollingsworth-designed carport.

Fred Hollingsworth designed Selwyn’s North Vancouver home/studio in 1960.

Top photo caption: Birks Building. Architect Somervell and Putnam. Built 1912, demolished 1974.

Tags Arthur Erickson, Bill Reid, E.J. Hughes, Fred Hollingsworth, Geoffrey Massey, George Norris, Gordon Smith, Jack Shadbolt, Kiriko Watanabe, Roy Kiyooka Birks building, Selwyn Pullan, West Vancouver Museum

Vancouver in the Seventies

by Eve Lazarus on February 18, 2017

Vancouver in the Seventies Fred Herzog, Foncie, Selwyn Pullan, Michael de Courcy, Bruce Stewart, and Angus McIntyre were just a few who took up a camera in the Vancouver of the ‘70s, and were documenting images of everything from buildings to the changing skyline, and from neighborhoods to neon. They also put a spotlight on people—the famous, the quirky, the strange and the ordinary.

At the same time, newspaper photography was coming of age. Cameras were more flexible, film was faster, and money was flowing.

An old home on Pacific Street near Thurlow with high-rise apartment building behind. December 28, 1979. George Diack/Vancouver Sun (79-2149)

Kate Bird, a recently retired photo librarian for the Vancouver Sun, has pulled together 149 black and white pictures, shot by Vancouver Sun photogs during that decade.

“We were trying to make it feel like a newspaper collection and show the access that photo journalists had in covering the news, whether that was accidents, crime, politics, business, entertainment or sports,” she says.

Kate moved to Vancouver from Montreal in the ‘70s, studied photography, and knows the city intimately. Many of the photos that she curated for Vancouver in the Seventies, reflect the Vancouver’s dark side.

Vancouver in the Seventies — Vancouver-born Playboy playmate Dorothy Stratten at the Bayshore Inn. July 12, 1979. Bill Keay/Vancouver Sun

There’s the heartbreaking photo of 20-year-old Playboy bunny Dorothy Stratten, taken just months before her murder. Poet Pat Lowther is shown sitting on a desk top shortly before having her head smashed in by her husband. And, there’s the picture of the underground Port Moody bunker that held 12-year-old Abby Drover for 181 days.

The underground bunker in Port Moody where twelve-year-old Abby Drover was held for 181 days after being abducted by her neighbour Donald Alexander Hay. September 7, 1976. Rob Straight/Vancouver Sun (76-2979)

It’s not all dark though. There are some wonderful photos that range from a line of airport telephone booths, to a five-year-old Justin Trudeau, Rod Stewart in his prime, and Muhammad Ali.

With electric trolley buses and neon signs as a backdrop, Granville Street glows at night. January 3, 1975. Ralph Bower/Vancouver Sun (75-0026)

“The city changed so much in the ‘70s,” says Kate. “There was so much building and an unbelievable level of infrastructure with the Pacific Centre, Granville Mall, Harbour Centre, the Bentall Centre, the Museum of Anthropology, and the CBC building. The numbers of new buildings radically changed the skyline by the end of the decade.”

Broadway Street, between Trafalgar Street and Blenheim. The Grin Bin posters and prints, Chris’ Billiards, The Hamburger Joint. October 5, 1972. Steve Bosch/Vancouver Sun (72-3291)

It’s both fascinating and frightening that four decades later, we’re still revisiting a lot of those same themes: demolition of heritage buildings and places (Birks, the Strand Theatre Hogan’s Alley—wiped out during the ‘70s), housing affordability, legalizing marijuana, worker’s rights, gender equity…

Students at Sir William Dawson elementary school in the West End. The 1913 school was demolished at the end of the school year. May 11, 1972. Peter Hulbert/Vancouver Sun (72-1526)

Kate’s currently working on a second photojournalism book called City on Edge: A rebellious century of Vancouver protests, riots and strikes. It will come out this September.

If you’re in Vancouver, I highly recommend the Vancouver in the ‘70s exhibit at the Museum of Vancouver. It runs until July.

The grand opening of Eaton’s department store at Georgia and Granville, anchoring the new Pacific Centre mall. February 8, 1973. Vladimir Keremidschieff/Vancouver Sun (73-0422)

Tags Angus McIntyre, Bill Keay, Bruce Stewart, Foncie, Fred Herzog, George Diack, Kate Bird, Peter Hulbert, Ralph Bower, Rob Straight, Selwyn Pullan, Steve Bosch, Vancouver in the Seventies, Vladimir Keremidschieff

West Coast Modern on Display

by Eve Lazarus on June 28, 2015

There is a chapter on West Coast Modern Artists and Architects in Sensational Vancouver.

If you love West Coast modern like I do, check out the art and architecture exhibit at the West Vancouver Museum this summer.

Work from all the greats is there—Fred Hollingsworth, Arthur Erickson, B.C. Binning, Ned Pratt, Ron Thom, Gordon Smith, Len Norris, Jack Shadbolt, Bill Reid and Zoltan Kiss and documented by photographers Selwyn Pullan and John Fulker.

I had spent time in the houses of Barry Downs, Ned Pratt and Selwyn Pullan while writing Sensational Vancouver and it was great to see their work highlighted. I didn’t know that Hollingsworth and Pratt designed furniture, Kiss made pottery, or that cartoonist Len Norris was originally an architectural draftsman.

Len Norris, 1955. Reproduced from the original

Ned Pratt of Thompson Berwick Pratt, may be the most important architect to come out of Vancouver. He hired and mentored some of the most influential architects of the time—Erickson, Thom, Downs, Hollingsworth all cut their teeth at TBP.

Pratt’s crowning achievement was winning the commission to design the B.C. Electric building on Burrard Street—a game changer in the early 1950s.

Fred Herzog photo of B.C. Electric building in 1959

Pratt built his own home on an acre lot in the British Properties in the ‘50s.

When Peter Pratt, also an architect, took over the house after his father’s death, it had started to leak and rot. “I don’t know how many times I heard ‘it’s a tear down Pratt you can’t save it’,” he said in Sensational Vancouver. “This is our home, it’s not so much an asset, it’s our home. It has a sense of place.”

Peter Pratt in front of the mural designed by Ned Pratt and Ron Thom made from paper, coloured dyes and fibreglass. Eve Lazarus photo, 2015

Peter not only saved much of the family home, he built his own post-and-beam home right next door.

Hollingsworth just died a few months ago at age 98. His wife Phyllis still lives in the North Vancouver house he designed in1946.

Barry Downs, who was recently awarded the Order of Canada, still lives with his wife Mary in the gorgeous West Vancouver house he designed for them in 1979.

Eve Lazarus and Barry Downs. Tom Carter photo, 2015

A huge Gordon Smith painting hangs in the dining room. The artist is a good friend of the Downs’ and lives nearby in a house designed by Arthur Erickson.

Ironically, Erickson, who was probably the most famous of all, chose not to design his own house, but bought a large corner lot with a small cottage and a garage in Point Grey out of which he created a 900-square-foot home, and lived there for 52 years.

Arthur Erickson. Selwyn Pullan photo, 1972

The West Vancouver Museum is at 680-17^th Street in West Vancouver. It’s located inside the Gertrude Lawson House, a 1940 stone house built in the Colonial Revival Style.

Tags Arthur Erickson, B.C. Binning, B.C. Electric building, Barry Downs, Bill Reid, Fred Hollingsworth, Gordon Smith, Jack Shadbolt, John Fulker, Len Norris, Ned Pratt, Ron Thom, Selwyn Pullan, Sensational Vancouver, Thompson Berwick Pratt, West Coast modern, Zoltan Kill

The photographs of Jan de Haas (1914-1967)

by Eve Lazarus on February 21, 2015

Jan de Haas photographer — The New Granville Street Bridge, Jan de Haas photo ca.1955

When I think of photographers working in Vancouver in the 50s and 60s, I think of Foncie Pulice, Selwyn Pullan and Fred Herzog.

Foncie was a street photographer who opened Foncie’s Fotos in 1946 and shot millions of photos of people as they strolled Vancouver’s streets. Vancouver-born Selwyn Pullan, served in the Canadian Navy during the war, worked as a news photographer for the Halifax Chronicle, returned to Vancouver in 1950 and reinvented architectural photography. Fred Herzog immigrated from Germany in 1953 and some of my favourite photos are ones he shot of vacant lots, backyards in Strathcona and ordinary people on ordinary streets.

They didn’t know it at the time, but all three photographers were creating a historical record of Vancouver and revealing intimate details of our changing city.

Last week, Wiebe de Haas sent me some photos that his father Jan de Haas shot during that period. I liked how he’d captured different parts of Vancouver and the neon signs of the day and I wanted to know more about him.

Jan de Haas brought his wife and three children to Canada from the Netherlands in 1952.

“Colour photography was on the rise and he thought coming to North America would give him the opportunity to advance in his field as a photographer,” says Wiebe.

Jan was hired at Photo Arts on Hornby Street, and within a few years had opened a store front business with his wife Ilse on 10th Avenue in West Point Grey. The de Haas’s built up a solid business shooting passport photos, portraits, weddings, grad photos at UBC and some commercial photography.

Jan was a member of the Professional Photographers of Canada, and before he died in 1967, he created a trophy to be awarded to the photographer who shot that year’s most creative image. The trophy was designed by his friend George Norris, a prolific sculptor best known for the giant metal crab that sits in the fountain outside the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vanier Park.

The trophy is a work of art.

“My father wanted to give something to the organization of his peers, whom he respected and relied on,” says Wiebe. “He liked the idea that the trophy was symbolic of birth, the creation of life. It is as much a remembrance of George Norris as it is of my father.”

A globe with five lens windows is mounted on a chrome stem and dome base and held in place by small bolts. The globe represents the womb, and inside is a chrome fetus. “Except for the pin-hole camera, all cameras use a lens to focus the light onto a focal plane,” says Wiebe. “The bolts seem to me to symbolize camera construction. The fetus is a symbol of new creation, of new expression and ideas.”

In 2011 Wiebe had the honour of presenting his father’s trophy to Langara photography student Christoph Prevost. It was the first time a student had won in the history of the memorial trophy.

Tags Alcazar Hotel, Christoph Prevost, Dominion Building, Foncie Pulice, Foncie's Fotos, Fred Herzog, George Norris, H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, Jan de Haas, Professional Photographers of B.C., Selwyn Pullan, Shores Jewelers, Wiebe de Haas

Arthur Erickson’s House and Garden are on the Endangered List

by Eve Lazarus on January 10, 2015

Arthur Erickson is one of Canada’s most famous architects, yet his own house and garden ranks #8 on Heritage Vancouver’s top 10 endangered sites for 2014.

Erickson's house on West 14th. Selwyn Pullan Photo, 1959 — Erickson’s house on West 14th. Selwyn Pullan Photo, 1959

Arthur Erickson’s fingerprints are all over some of Metro Vancouver’s most iconic buildings—the Museum of Anthropology, Simon Fraser University and dozens of residential houses.

Unusual for an architect, Erickson chose not to design his own house, but bought a large corner lot in Point Grey with a 1924 cottage and garage for $11,000 out of which he created the 900-square-foot home where he lived for the next 52 years.

“Architecturally this house is terrible, but it serves as a refuge, a kind of decompression chamber,” he told author Edith Iglauer*.

Museum of Anthropology — Margaret Trudeau with Arthur Erickson and Elvi Whittaker, 1976. Photo John Morris, UBC Library

He replaced the walls with sliding glass and connected the buildings, adding a bathroom and a kitchen. He played with different materials—leather tiles on the bathroom wall, wall tiles in Italian suede in the living room, and Thai silk in the study—and then he turned his attention to the garden.

Erickson bulldozed the English garden, dug a hole for the pond and used the dirt to make a hill high enough to block the view of his house from his neighbours.

“Everybody in the neighbourhood thought I was excavating to build a house, and chatted with me over the picket fence, very happy to believe that they were no longer going to have a nonconformist garage dweller among them,” he told Iglauer*.

He planted grasses and rushes from the Fraser River, pine trees from the forest, put in 10 different species of bamboo, and added rhododendrons, a dogwood, and a persimmon to the existing fruit trees. He was known for throwing lavish garden parties that drew a guest list ranging from Pierre Trudeau to Rudolf Nureyev

Barry Downs lived in the Dunbar area at the time and knew Erickson quite well.

“We both had little ponds full of fish and one day Mary and I gave him a turtle,” said Downs. “He phoned me up and said ‘get over here your turtle is eating my fish!’”

Down’s told him that was impossible, the turtle had a mouth the size of Erickson’s thumb.

“I went over and sure enough there’s a fish sticking out of its mouth,” said Downs, adding that yes he took the turtle back.

“Arthur was ruthless. He had a BB gun and would shoot at the herons that would come in and land and eat his fish. Once he told me that he shot through the neighbour’s window accidently,” says Downs.

Downs says the impressive Japanese-inspired marble terrace panels in the garden are the toilet stalls from the old Hotel Vancouver.

Erickson may have been a talented architect but he was hopeless with finances. By 1992 he had racked up over $10 million in debt and was on the verge of losing his house. A group of friends which included Peter Wall, who took over the $475,000 mortgage, placed the house and garden in the hands of the Arthur Erickson Foundation. Erickson lived there until his death in 2009.

*Iglauer, Edith. Seven Stones: A Portrait of Arthur Erickson, Architect. Harbour Publishing, 1981.

Tags 4195 West 14th, Arthur Erickson, Barry Downs, Edith Iglauer, Elvi Whittaker, Heritage Vancouver, Margaret Trudeau, Mary Downs, Museum of Anthropology, Selwyn Pullan, Sensational Vancouver, Simon Fraser University

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