Il Giardino: The last time we were here, the server was so overcome by the beauty of a group of women sitting near us that he broke into an aria. Turns out that when he wasn’t waiting tables he was singing in an opera. Just one of the pleasant surprises at this downtown restaurant, which doesn’t have a view but does have a fabulous outdoor garden terrace in the summer and, in winter, a cozy villa atmosphere….” Eve Lazarus, Frommer’s with Kids Vancouver, 2001 “Get a Babysitter.”
The Leslie House on Pacific. Eve Lazarus photo, June 2023
Hornby Street:
Umberto Menghi turned Leslie House into an Italian restaurant in 1973. The following year he created La Cantina next door, and in 1976, he opened Il Giardino on the other side, and somehow managed to operate all three restaurants.
The yellow house was built in 1888 as a family home by and for George Washington Leslie, a plasterer and transplant from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Leslie moved to Vancouver to help rebuild the city after the Great Fire two years earlier, and built the Queen Anne for his wife and five children.
Leslie House on Hornby Street in 1975. Courtesy Vancouver Archives.
And, as a man who was more than a century ahead of his time, in 1903, George added a sweet little lane house to the back of his property.
The Leslie family lived on Hornby Street until 1947. For the next 20 years the house operated as Wilhemina Meilicke’s interior designer studio and home. Later, it became a fashion studio called Mano Designs and received its bright yellow coat of paint. Umberto Menghi bought the house in 1972 and operated Il Giardino until 2013.
This house sat in the lane behind 1380 Hornby from 1903 until 2002. It’s new home is 1117 Pendrell Street. Courtesy Vancouver Heritage Foundation
Menghi donated the lane house to the Vancouver Heritage Foundation, and it’s been part of the Mole Hill heritage house landscape on Pendrell Street near Thurlow since 2002. Menghi’s former restaurant was replaced by a 39-storey condo tower called the Pacific. Miraculously, the Leslie House survives among a sea of condo buildings around the corner from its original location. It’s now the home for Blenheim Realty and a couple of property developers.
Babies Cottage is now the Cottage Hospice. Eve Lazarus photo, 2020
Hastings Sunrise:
At just shy of three acres, Burrard View is not a big park. It runs between North Slocan, North Penticton, Yale and Wall Street. The park slopes down to the water and is shaped like half a house.
The building on the west side of the park has been the Cottage Hospice since 1999. Built in 1924 as the “Babies Cottage” for kids under six, the site was likely chosen because of the nearby Wall Street Orphanage. That building came to live in the park in 1906.
Babies Cottage in the 1920s for kids under 6. CVA Bu 330.2
Orphanage:
If you wander through the middle of the park, you’ll find yourself on a grassed-over brick terrace where you can sit and stare at Burrard Inlet and the North Shore mountains. You might even hear the ghosts. This was the foundation of the notorious Juvenile Detention Hall built in 1930 on the site of the Wall Street Orphanage.
Wall Street Orphanage, 2650 Wall Street, 1920s. CVA Bu 330.3
According to Vancouver Heritage Foundation, Wall Street Orphanage had about 200 kids crammed in together and was closed after it was condemned as a fire risk in a 1927 child welfare report.
Juvie:
After the kids were shipped off to foster homes, the building was torn down. The city hired architect Arthur Julius Bird to design the new Vancouver Juvenile Detention Home for “incorrigible” teens. Incorrigibility included drunkenness, runaways and just bad behaviour.
Vancouver Juvenile Detention Home and Babies Cottage in 1934. CVA 99-4698
The Last Gang:
Aaron Chapman writes in The Last Gang in Town that by the 1940s, Juvie Hall was notorious for its overcrowded cells. As late as the mid-1970s children were still being sent there and “Juvie would be where many future gang members first met,” says Aaron.
Vancouver’s first family court was also in Burrard View Park, between Juvie Hall and what is now Cottage Hospice. Justice Thomas Gove told Aaron that as a young lawyer he spent a lot of time there and that youth facing charges would be taken through a tunnel that connected the cells of the JDH to the courthouse.
Juvenile Detention Hall being demolished in 1976. Courtesy Vancouver Heritage Foundation
Gove told Aaron: “One day I was there for a case, and a kid ran, just bolted for the front door, and one of the guards chased and tackled him outside in the parking lot. The kid had got a little bloodied up getting tackled and wanted to go to the hospital, but the guards just dusted him off, told him he was fine, and marched him back into the courthouse” from The Last Gang in Town.
The building incarcerated those under 18 behind a high industrial wire fence. It was demolished in 1976.
The Old Residence ca.1947. Courtesy Crofton House School
The Vancouver Heritage House tour is coming up Sunday June 2, and I haven’t been this excited since Casa Mia was featured in 2014. Don’t get me wrong, the VHF works hard all year to curate a great mix of architectural styles, neighbourhoods and house sizes, but unless you work at, or have a daughter at Crofton House School, you likely won’t get inside the Old Residence.
Alvo von Alvensleben, 1913. Courtesy CVA Port P1082
I was lucky to get a tour when I wrote At Home with History in 2007. What makes the house special for me is that it was owned by Alvo von Alvensleben, one of my favourite historical characters.
Alvensleben arrived in Vancouver in 1904 with $4 in his pocket, but he was hardly a rags-to-riches immigrant. He was the third son of a German count and had the connections, the education, and the charm to convince people like Emma Mumm, the champagne heiress, Bertha Krupp, heir to the Krupp fortune, General von Mackensen, and even the Kaiser himself to open up their bank accounts.
Crofton House ca. 1911
Alvensleben lived in Vancouver less than a decade, yet he was one of the biggest movers and shakers in the city. He brought millions of dollars of German investment into Vancouver and bought up large tracts of land and huge houses. Before going fabulously broke in 1913, he had a personal fortune of around $25 million. His business interests included mining, forestry, and fishing. He financed the Dominion Trust Building, and it was Alvensleben’s capital that built and developed the Wigwam Inn into a luxury resort.
Old Residence, 2019. Courtesy Crofton House School
In 1909, he paid $30,000 for the Kerrisdale house and 20 acres, made a number of additions, and he and his Canadian wife Edith moved in the following year. He bought a string of thoroughbred horses, and by 1912, it took 13 servants to run the household and cater the parties.
The parties stopped at the outbreak of war in 1914. Alvensleben, in Germany at the time, read the signs and stayed in the States. Edith packed up the three kids and everything she could fit into the car and fled to Seattle before the Custodian of Enemy Alien Property stripped all their assets.
You could stare at this ceiling for hours and not see everything. Alvensleben hired Charles Marega the sculptor, and there are gargoyles, bats, rabbits and assorted weird faces in the white plaster of his dining room ceiling. There are mice carved into the sides, owls, frogs and a horse shoe. I think Marega may have even carved his own face into one of the columns. Courtesy Crofton House School
The Kerrisdale house stood empty until 1919 when it sold to Robert J. Cromie, publisher of the Vancouver Sun. The original 20 acres had been reduced to about 13 after the rest had been sold to pay off Alvensleben’s creditors. In 1942, Bernadette Cromie, now a widow, sold the house and property to the Crofton House School for $15,000.
Dining in 1967. Courtesy Crofton House School
Alvensleben died in Seattle. And over half-a-century later, no one really knows if he was a savvy businessman, a shady salesman, or a German James Bond.
There are two vastly different West End housing proposals going before Vancouver council this week and both have implications about how we view heritage in our development-mad city. One, in Mole Hill, involves the community’s desire to designate Mole Hill as a Heritage Conservation Area; while the other is a way to redevelop and save a deteriorating 1920s West End apartment building.
Henry Mole House, 1025 Comox St in 1895. CVA BuP697
I discovered Mole Hill about 10 years ago when I was writing At Home with History. It’s a small enclave in the West End that’s tucked in behind St. Paul’s Hospital, opposite Nelson Park and bounded by Comox, Bute, Thurlow and Pendrell Streets. The houses date back to 1889 and are swarming with social history. While the name sounds like something from the pages of Wind in the Willows, the area is actually named after Henry Mole, a retired farmer who was one of the first people to settle in the area. Anything left of his house now sits under the hospital.
Photo Courtesy Mole Hill Community Housing Society, 2015
The vast majority of the heritage homes are owned by the City of Vancouver and comprise 170 social housing units, a group home for eight youth, the Dr. Peter Centre which has 24 health care units, three daycares and community gardens. Public walkways full of shrubs and flowers spill over into lanes that wander between the houses. There’s a funky little Victorian cottage in the laneway at 1117 Pendrell that was saved from demolition in 2002 when the Vancouver Heritage Foundation had it moved a few blocks from Hornby Street.
George Leslie Laneway cottage. Photo courtesy Vancouver Heritage Foundation
Depending on who you talk to, the area’s heritage is either under threat or it’s being thoughtfully brought up to date.
Quentin Wright is the executive director at the Mole Hill Community Housing Society which provides affordable housing through a 60-year lease with the city. The problem, he says, is that three of the houses on Comox Street are privately owned, two have applied for redevelopment and it’s expected the third, which recently changed hands, will as well.
1150 Comox Street (on the right)
The immediate concern involves #1150, a 1903 cottage.
According to Michael Kluckner of the Vancouver Heritage Commission, zoning allows the owner to add density to his lot, and he has chosen to add an infill building in the back lane. Mole Hill residents were horrified by the size of the building in the first drawing and the city sent the architects back to the drawing board.
The proposed infill for 1150 Comox Street
“The Heritage Commission rejected [the second drawing], as the cottage is the heritage item, and adding a huge addition onto its back (in the middle of the lot, as it were), wasn’t good,” says Kluckner. “The design was too glaringly modern. So the architect and owner came back to the Heritage Commission with this design (pictured above).”
The rejected plans for 1150 Comox
Local civic historian John Atkin reckons the Commission made the right call. “In a situation like this, an infill should be in a contrasting design,” he says. “A faux heritage design would muddy the visual record. New should always stand out.”
Wright would like to see the laneway be recognized as part of the heritage landscape and be given legal protection.
The Florida, 1170 Barclay Street
After I blogged about Charles Marega, I received an email from Lyn Guy saying that Marega’s old home—a 1920s two-storey apartment building called the Florida, was ringed with fencing and looked like it might be going the way of many older buildings in Vancouver.
Photo courtesy Lyn Guy
Turns out that it’s good news. The owners want to work under a Heritage Revitalization Agreement to redevelop the building, add a couple of storeys to the back and increase the rental stock from 16 to 28 units.
You have until this Friday June 17 to tell the city what you think of the plan.
When I was researching my 2007 book At Home with History I spent most of my life at the Vancouver Archives and on the 7th floor of the Vancouver Public Library. Now, instead of trekking downtown, much of the information is available to me here at home.
Today, the digital world just got a bit better with the launch of three very cool new online toys.
Goad’s Fire Insurance Map 1912 showing the DTES
Goad’s Fire Insurance Map
Vancouver Archives has made the Vanmap even more exciting by adding a layer from a 1912 Fire Insurance Plan. Once onto Vanmap click on aerial imagery and you’ll see Goad’s Fire Insurance map. Michael Kluckner took me for a digital tour of his Grandview neighbourhood of 1912 where we found an “Isolation Hospital,” a huge estate called Wilga, and Brook House, complete with its turret. I zoomed into the DTES with CVA archivist Heather Gordon and we could see all the 1912 businesses and brothels along Alexander Street as well as a sawmill and police station, and the original shoreline shown in dashed lines.
The map is colour coded—yellow represents wood framed buildings and the pink are brick and stone—mostly in the downtown area. See Sue Bigelow’s post for a clear description of all its uses.
Heritage Site Finder Map
Heritage Site Finder Interactive Map
I’ve spent hours playing on this interactive map by the Vancouver Heritage Foundation. The map lists buildings and landmarks found on the Heritage Register—(and eventually other buildings not on the register) and there are around 2,300, many with photos and descriptions. It’s incredibly easy to navigate and you can search by address, zoom into an area, or just click on houses at random. This is a work in progress, so if you click on a building and can’t find a photo, keep trying. Better still if you have old photos of the building and information, send them to the VHF so they can add them. Eventually it will also be possible to add long demolished buildings so we can see how Vancouver looked through a historical filter.
Historic Building Permits online database
You’d think answering a question like ‘when was my house built?’ would be simple. It’s not. Or at least it wasn’t until Heritage Vancouver Society started to transcribe thousands of building permits (currently at 33,000) from the Vancouver Archives prior to 1929—the year Point Grey and South Vancouver amalgamated into the City of Vancouver. Before these permits were online—and it is a volunteer-dependent work-in-progress—you would have to go to the Archives and look through pages and pages of handwritten ledgers brought out to you in huge bound books. With the online database you can pull up every house built in a block, you can search for every building designed by a certain architect, or most impressive and simplest of all, you can find out when your house was built.
In February heritage men told us their favourite building and the one building we should have saved. To keep the world in balance, I’ve asked the same question of women working in and with heritage—our answers may surprise you.
My current favourite house is 3825 West 39th Avenue, built in 1937 by Jack Wood, who was the builder responsible for all the Dunbar castle houses. The house he built for himself next door and featured in the Vancouver Sun at 3815 West 39th Avenue was demolished in early March with almost no reclamation of materials. In the article John Atkin describes the style of the Dunbar castles as “a variation of the French Normandy style popular after World War I. The turret is the grain silo of the original (French) farm house repurposed to make a grand entrance.”
I’d argue that 3825 West 39th is the prettier of the sisters because of the shingle roof and the Tudor elements. Like the Dorothies, which were saved from demolition last year, this house just lights up the street. It seems to exude stories. But not for long. As I was walking past the house this morning, I met a pair of surveyors who confirmed it’s slated for demolition.
Caroline’s runner-up for favourite “house” still standing is 3492 ½ West 35th. It’s a sort of rondavel constructed out of firewood, driftwood, plywood, cinderblocks, tarpaper and stones, with fanciful ornamentation. “I haven’t been inside because, as you can see, no “gurls” are “aloud”.
The one building that never should have been destroyed?
The Beaconsfield at 884 Bute Street is one of a number of West End apartment buildings built in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Every one of these blocks has its own idiosyncrasies and surprises, but I love the Arts and Crafts balconies on the otherwise very-Victorian Beaconsfield, and the way the building integrates with the park-like traffic-calmed block of Bute outside its entrance.
The one building that never should have been destroyed?”
Glencoe Lodge in 1932 CVA Hot N3
The Glencoe Lodge at Georgia and Burrard was a residential hotel built by B.T. Rogers in 1906 and managed by Jean Mollison, who was known a the “grand Chatelaine,” because according to a 1951 newspaper article, she had previously managed the Chateau Lake Louise. Under her guidance, Glencoe Lodge attracted a highly exclusive clientele, even more so than the C.P.R.’s Hotel Vancouver. The Lodge was demolished in the early 1930s, but if it had lasted longer, I can’t help but wonder if it might have become part of a really interesting development on that corner.
Eve Lazarus is the author of Sensational Vancouver and the person behind Every Place has a Story.
Favourite Vancouver building?
With Aaron Chapman on the 2014 VHF heritage house tour
It was a huge thrill to get inside Casa Mia on the Vancouver Heritage Foundation’s house tour last year. Built smack in the middle of the Depression from the proceeds of rum running, this old girl still has the nursery with original drawings from Walt Disney artists, it’s own gold leaf covered ballroom with a spring dance floor, a gold swan for a faucet, and art deco his and hers washrooms.
The one building that never should have been destroyed?
Joe Fortes Beach Avenue cottage CVA BuP111
We honoured Joe Fortes with a fountain in Alexandra Park, but how much more awesome would it have been, if we’d kept his house? Not only would it have been one of the oldest structures in Vancouver, it could have made both a great little museum for black history in Vancouver and for the houses that once dotted the water side of Beach Avenue. Instead it went up in flames in 1928.
The hidden courtyard in Chinatown is an enclosure created by the five historic buildings that surround it, two of which were once opium factories. Chinatown is going through a tremendous amount of change right now, but when you walk into the courtyard, it’s as though time has stopped. The courtyard is not accessible to the public, but you can see it if you take the Sins of the City Vice, Dice and Opium Pipes tour.
The one building that never should have been destroyed?
502 Alexander Street, ca.1905 CVA 152-124
502 Alexander St. Aside from the fact that the glass-and-steel monstrosity that replaced it is completely jarring in that particular location, 502 Alexander Street was the second-oldest residence in the city. The historic East End buildings that survived the slum clearances of the 1960s are once again being lost at an astonishing rate, and it is shocking that one of the earliest remaining buildings from the post-fire period was demolished without city council making any effort to preserve it.
Stevie Wilson is a writer and historical researcher specializing in public history. She is a contributor to Vancouver Confidential, and a regular columnist for Scout Magazine
Favourite Vancouver building?
Stevie Wilson at the Bloedel Conservatory
Bloedel Conservatory in Queen Elizabeth Park is a stunning example of 60s modernism (so space-age!) and a fun, interactive place to visit all year round. It also boasts the title of being the first large triodetic dome conservatory in the country, with a design that was influenced heavily by Buckminster Fuller’s larger Biosphere from Expo ’67 in Montreal. It’s definitely one of our city’s most unique structures.
The one building that never should have been destroyed?
The second Hotel Vancouver demolished in 1949. Although the current iteration is beautiful, there was just something so elegant and ornate about the second version – it featured a completely different architectural style in keeping with the sensibilities of the time.
Its location at Georgia and Granville remains one of the biggest intersections in the city, so it’s interesting to imagine how the hotel’s presence might have affected the modern architectural culture of the downtown core if it were still standing.
Photo of Nellie Yip Quong, courtesy of Starlet Lum
Eleanor Lum
Wayne Avery knew nothing about the history of his house until one day he saw an elderly Chinese woman peering through his front room window.
He invited her inside and discovered that she was Eleanor (Yip) Lum, and that she had been born in one of the bedrooms of his Strathcona house in 1928 by Nellie Yip Quong who later adopted her.
Eleanor (Yip) Lum in front of 783 East Pender ca.1940s
Nellie was not Chinese as her name suggests, but a white Roman Catholic, born Nellie Towers in Saint John, New Brunswick and educated in the United States. It was while she was teaching English in New York City that she met and fell in love with Charles Yip, a jeweler from Vancouver.
Nellie on the steps of her East Pender Street house. Courtesy Places that Matter
Yip Sang
Charles was the nephew of Yip Sang, a wealthy merchant who built the Wing Sang Building on East Pender Street in 1889. The building was erected to house Yip Sang’s growing import/export operation, an opium production plant, and his family–three wives and 23 children–one wife per floor.
Wing Sang Building. Eve Lazarus photo.
When they married in 1900, Nellie was disowned by her family and spurned by the church. The couple lived in China for a few years, then moved to Vancouver in 1904 to live with Charles’s uncle Yip Sang at the Wing Sang building.
Chinese schoolroom in the Wing Sang Building where Nellie mastered five different Chinese dialects. Courtesy Rennie.com
Advocate
Nellie learned how to communicate with the Chinese and with the authorities who ignored them. She fought on the behalf of the Chinese. She challenged the justice system and shamed the Vancouver General Hospital into moving non-white patients out of the basement. When the White Lunch restaurant put up a sign saying “No Indians, Chinese or dogs allowed,” Nellie made them take it down. She arranged care for the elderly, brokered adoptions, acted as an interpreter, and became the first public health nurse hired by the Chinese Benevolent Association.
Places that Matter presentation with Eleanor (Yip) Lum and Starlet Lum, 2013
Nellie and Charles moved into their East Pender Street house in 1917.
Nine decades later, Wayne took Eleanor through the house where she had grown up. She’d stop here and there and point out something from her past. She told Wayne that Charles did the cooking and the gardening, and one of her favourite memories of Nellie—a large imposing woman—was her wearing a wide hat with a feather in the side and reading a Chinese newspaper on the bus.
During the renovation, Wayne had discovered that at different times his house was once a bootlegging joint and a brothel. He found old Finnish newspapers beneath the floor, cartons of cigarettes stashed in the ceiling, booze in a secret hideout in the garden, and locks on the inside of the bedroom doors. He found that in 1911 Nora and Ross Hendrix, grandparents of rock star Jimi Hendrix, lived in his home.
John Atkin can be a bit of a kill joy, always squashing rumours about secret tunnels in Chinatown, ghosts in the Dominion Building, and well, blood in Blood Alley. John squashes another rumour in his story about a tunnel that supposedly connected a sugar baron to a brothel, but in doing so he uncovered some fascinating information about Maxine MacGilvray, a successful businesswoman who moved to Vancouver in 1914. This article originally ran on John’s blog What Floats to the Top of My Desk.
By John Atkin
I recently had the pleasure of leading a walk in the West End for the Vancouver Heritage Foundation as part of their Sunday coffee series at JJ Bean.
The cafe’s newest location on Bidwell sits behind the preserved facade of Maxine’s Beauty School. The question that’s most often asked is if there was a tunnel that connected the Rogers’ mansion Gabriola on Davie with a bootlegging operation and/or brothel based out of Maxine’s.
CVA 99-4477 Stuart Thomson photo, 1936
Apart from the general absurdity of the idea – the elevation change between Gabriola and Maxine’s would have made a tunnel an incredibly expensive engineering feat—Maxine’s was built in 1936—long after prohibition ended in BC and three years after it was repealed south of the border. There was no need for a bootlegging operation, let alone tunnels in the building, and the idea that a tunnel was used by sugar magnate B.T. Rogers to access a bordello from his home makes no sense because Rogers died in 1918.
Gabriola, 1904 VPL 7161. Philip Timms photo.
The idea of the brothel probably stems from the sexy sounding name Maxine’s, but while sexy, it was still just a beauty school. Instead of a silly cliche, what we do have is a story of an enterprising woman who built a successful series of businesses here and in Vancouver and Seattle. I think she deserves some recognition.
So who was Maxine?
Maxine MacGilvray, 1918
Maxine’s was named after Maxine E. MacGilvray from Wisconsin. Her name first appears here in connection with beauty products sold by Spencer’s department store in 1914. Trained in California, she gave talks on skin care at the store and would later open the first of her parlors in the store.
Maxine started with a hair salon in the 600 block of Dunsmuir, opened her second location in the 1920s on the ground floor of a house at 1211 Bidwell Street, and followed this with the opening of the Maxine College of Beauty Culture next door. Maxine manufactured her own beauty products in a small factory at 999 East Georgia Street called the Max Chemical Company.
She hired Ivor Ewan Bebb, a young Welshman who came to Canada in 1924 as her apprentice. Four years later Maxine, 36, and Ivor, 26, were married in Washington State. In 1931 the company moved to 1223 Bidwell to join her other enterprises and was renamed the Max-Ivor Company.
The couple hired architect Thomas B. McArravy to design a new building to replace the original school on Bidwell in 1935. The design is a cute Mission Revival building which was expanded in 1940 by architect Ross Lort. This is the preserved facade we see today.
The Vancouver beauty school closed in 1942 and the couple converted it into the Maxine Apartments. By the late 1940s, advertisements show it as an apartment hotel, and later as a full blown motel. In 1943, Maxine and Ivor opened the Max-Ivor Motel at 4th Avenue South in Seattle. The motel had 20 rooms, maid service and steam heat. Maxine died in 1952 and Ivor moved to Seattle to run an expanded Max-Ivor motel.
Sources: 1940 US Census, Skagit County marriage licences, immigration records, Vancouver World newspaper, BC Directories and Chuck Flood’s book, Washington’s Highway 99
