After I stumbled over a photo of the former Vancouver Police Headquarters on East Cordova Street, I asked my friend Tom Carter if he knew why it had been destroyed. Was it to make way for the uninspiring three-storey building that took its place? Tom didn’t know, but I thought his comment was interesting—that it had actually survived longer than many of Vancouver’s other Edwardian buildings.
Originally from Edmonton, Raymond Biesinger is a Montreal-based illustrator whose work regularly appears in the New Yorker, Le Monde and the Guardian. In his spare time, he likes to draw lost buildings.
In his down-time, Biesinger is drawing his way through nine of Canada’s largest cities. He’s just finished Vancouver, the sixth city in his Lost Buildings series, and his print depicts 18 important heritage buildings that we’ve either bulldozed, burned down or neglected out of existence.
The thing about the Kingsgate Mall at Broadway and Kingsway is you either love it or you hate it. It’s weird or wonderful, strange or quaint, creepy or quirky, but it rarely goes unnoticed.
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
The cupola (a replica of the one that used to top King Edward School before the fire) has turned the mall into a landmark, but I can’t imagine calling it a destination by any stretch of the imagination.
In the 1970s, the Scotia Tower and the hideous Vancouver Centre—currently home to London Drugs—obliterated a block of beautiful heritage buildings at Granville and Georgia Streets. The development took out the Strand Theatre (built in 1920), and the iconic Birks building, an 11-storey Edwardian where generations of Vancouverites met at the clock.
On May 28, 1989, we blew up the Georgia Medical-Dental Centre, a building on West Georgia designed by McCarter & Nairne, the same architects behind the Marine and the Devonshire Apartments.* What were we thinking?
The Devonshire was first, designed as an apartment building in 1924. Next came the 15-storey art deco medical building.
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
My friend Angus McIntyre was a Vancouver bus driver for 40 years and often took photos of heritage buildings, neon signs, street lamps and everyday life on his various routes. His photos are always so vivid and interesting (see his posts on Birks and elevator operators) and when he sends me one, I stop whatever I’m doing and nag him for the back story.
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
Last week I wrote about the oldest house in Vancouver—well at least that’s what they called it when it burned to the ground in 1946. It was built in 1875, and until 1915, its address was Seaton Street.
Unlike most of Vancouver’s streets that are named after old white men, Lauchlan Hamilton, the CPR surveyor, named this one in 1886 after pulling it at random from a map (the town of Seaton is long gone, but used to be near Hazelton in northern BC).
This is an occasional 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.
Patrick A. Dunae is a Victoria-born historian. A past member of the City of Victoria Heritage Advisory Panel, he is currently president of the Friends of the BC Archives.