Heritage Vancouver hosted its 16th annual bus tour today, taking people to the buildings, streets and landscapes that the Society believes have the most perilous survival rate. And, it’s not just the mansions—but also schools, churches, streets, and areas—all the things that make a community rich.
Not all the buildings are that old either.
Love this photo taken in 1921 from Howe Street looking down West Hastings. The big building closest to the photographer is the Metropolitan at 837 West Hastings. It was built in 1912 to house the Metropolitan Club which then became the Terminal City Club and the building lasted until 1998. It was replaced with a 30-storey building called the Terminal City Tower.
Next time you’re in the Lower Lonsdale area, drop by Presentation House and check out Water’s Edge. It’s a new interactive exhibit developed by the North Vancouver Museum that shows how the waterfront has changed over the last couple of hundred years. I did the research and wrote the stories, archivist Janet Turner sourced hundreds of photos and maps, and Juan Tanus and his team at Kei Space added the magic.
Charles Marega died on March 27, 1939.
And, while you may not know his name you will know his work. Those are his two lion statues at the south end of the Lions Gate Bridge. And while the lions may be his most well known work, Charles (or Carlos as he was christened) was a prolific sculptor in Vancouver.
I went to the District of North Vancouver offices to pick up some money owed and was promptly redirected to the City of North Vancouver offices five minutes down the road. It made me wonder yet again why we are running two completely separate bureaucracies for a relatively small population. It also made me think about Warnett Kennedy’s plan to turn North Vancouver into a second downtown Vancouver.
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
A few people that I know have sold their large houses and downsized to Norgate, one of the few flat areas of North Vancouver just to the east of the Lions Gate Bridge. Norgate is also one of the few areas that hasn’t seen massive change to its housing stock—a collection of modest-sized, tidy mid-century ranchers with big gardens.
This is part four in an occasional series that asks people who work in and around heritage to tell us their favourite buildings and the one that we should never have destroyed.
Anne Banner is the proprietress of Salmagundi, an antiques, oddities and novelties shop located in the J.W.Horne Block.
I spent the last three months of 2015 working on an interactive project called Water’s Edge for the North Vancouver Museum and Archives. We started at Indian Arm and went a little west of Ambleside to find the stories that would show the massive changes that have happened to the shoreline and to Burrard Inlet.