Paul Huba and the Canada Post Building

Blair Mercer left a comment on an old blog post of mine this week. He told me that his mother, Beatrice Mary Hayes was the model for the ceramic of a woman and child installed inside the Canada Post Building on West Georgia Street in 1957.

Beatrice was born in 1921, grew up in Jasper, and trained as a nurse. She passed away in 1992 and doesn’t in any way appear to be Greek, but she told her son that she was approached by an artist at a party who told her that he had been commissioned to create a ceramic featuring a Greek woman for the Post Office. She took Blair to see it when he was a boy.

Why the architect wanted a Greek woman depicted in the ceramic is still a mystery, but I’ve managed to uncover a few interesting details.

Don Luxton is the heritage consultant for the Canada Post Building, now marketed as “The Post.” He says Paul Huba designed the ceramic and also made the 16-foot tall bas-relief of the postman which he carved out of Swedish red granite at the southwest corner of the building.

The two identical coats of arms are also by Hungarian-born Huba. These, Don tells me, as well as a mural by Orville Fisher showing mail delivery by land, air and sea, are in storage and will find their way back to the building (which will also stock a few thousand Amazon employees) when finished around 2023.

While there are plans online about the new building, there is frustrating little information about Paul Huba, possibly because he only lived in Vancouver for five years. He died in 1959 from asthma and emphysema at only 46.

He left behind his English wife Sybil and two sons, Dezso 15 and Mark 17.

I managed to track Dezso down this week to ask him what he remembered of his father.

Sybil and the boys arrived in Vancouver in 1957 – three years after Huba – and moved into an apartment at Yew and 6^th in Kitsilano. His father installed his mistress in a room behind his studio, and life went on.

In the ‘50s and ‘60s Kits was filled with artists. Jack Ackroyd lived next door, and Elek Imredy next door to him. Others who lived in the building or across the road included Frank Molnar, Jack Dale, Jock Hearn, George Fertig, Roy Kiyooka, poets John Newlove, Judith Copithorne and bill bissett.

“He was a very jovial fellow and had a lot of friends,” says Dezso of his father.

Frank Molnar told me that Imredy had hired him and Akroyd to help with “Girl in a Wetsuit”—the sculpture that sits in the water off Stanley Park. Copithorne was one of three women who modeled for “the girl”, and Dezso says his father hired George Norris (famous for The Crab outside the Museum of Vancouver) and sculptor David Marshall for 50 cents an hour to help make, glaze and then install the ceramic tiles at the Canada Post building.

Huba had David Lambert (writer and ceramic engineer)  install a kiln in his studio and he supplied the glazes, say Deszo, who would hang out there when he wasn’t at school.

“The tiles were about half an inch thick and 12 x 12 inches,” he says. “They were made by hand and once we fired them my father would paint each tile individually. There were hundreds of tiles and sometimes the colours didn’t come out right after you fired them. All of a sudden you’d have 50 wrecked tiles and you’d have to do them again.”

Deszo says the kiln was quite large—about four by four feet.

I dropped by Huba’s former studio and apartment today. John Taylor, an artist, photographer and set designer has lived there since 1988 and kindly gave me a tour. While Taylor didn’t know of Huba he knew Elek Imredy well. There’s a photo that he took of him in 1990 in his old studio window, four years before he died.

Sources:

• BC Magazine, September 15, 1956

• The Life & Art of Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman and LeRoy Jensen, 2009
• Vancouver Heritage Foundation
• Vital Stats
• Mona Fertig

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