Eve Lazarus
The Orillia on Robson:
The Orillia on Robson and Seymour Streets, was just a memory by the time I moved to Vancouver in the mid-1980s, but from time to time I see a mention or a photo of this early mixed-use structure at Robson and Seymour. One particularly poignant photo was taken before its destruction in the 1980s and shows the Orillia boarded up, covered in music handbills, smeared with graffiti, and the words “Save Me!” scrawled across one of the plywood boardings.
Before the Vancouver Art Gallery moved into the old courthouse on West Georgia, its home was a gorgeous art deco building a few blocks away.
If you live in Vancouver, you know that the Vancouver Art Gallery is housed in the old law courts, an imposing neo-classical building designed by celebrity architect Francis Rattenbury in 1906.
At 2:00 pm on Sunday March 24, 1974, a group of about a 100 people, many of them students and professors from the UBC School of Architecture, came together in a mock funeral for the Birks Building, an eleven storey Edwardian masterpiece at Georgia and Granville with a terracotta façade and a curved front corner.
In 2014, the Centennial fountain that sat outside the former Vancouver courthouse was removed after nearly half a century. It had been turned off the year before after a leak was found in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s storage area. While the new, sterile looking plaza hasn’t been wholeheartedly embraced, neither was the fountain when it was designed by Robert Savery, a landscape gardener employed by the provincial government in 1966.
In the late 1980s when I worked at the Vancouver Stock Exchange, we’d sometimes hang out at Trader Vic’s, the Polynesian-style bar and restaurant that sat in the parking lot of the Westin Bayshore Hotel.
1961 – 1999:
It’s been gone since 1999—taken to Vancouver Island and left to rot.
I was reminded of Trader Vic’s again when I was reading Aaron Chapman’s Vancouver After Dark and looking at the photo of the building disappearing on a barge underneath the Lion’s Gate bridge.
An Interview with Jazmin Welch, book designer about working on Vancouver Exposed
I’m excited to tell you that Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History is now in bookstores. And, while the saying goes “don’t judge a book by its cover,” I have to disagree.
Frank Gowen was born in England in 1877. He moved to Vancouver in 1913 and worked as a photographer until his death in 1946.
Chris Stiles kindly sent me this fabulous panoramic photo that she and husband Alan found when they were going through some personal effects of Alan’s father recently.
Firehall #2 was designed by William Blackmore in 1888 at 724 Seymour but it would be another decade before the VFD started paying its firemen.
I’ve been having a lot of fun putting together my new book Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History over the last year or so.
