Update: In February 2022 it was announced that the Wing Sang Building at 51 East Pender Street and reportedly the oldest in Chinatown, is going to be the new home of the Chinese Canadian Museum.
In 2006, I wrote a story for Marketing Magazine featuring Bob Rennie and his move into Chinatown. Just two years before, Rennie paid a million dollars for the Wing Sang Building. He bought it sight unseen and didn’t go inside for the first six months. “People think I’m crazy,” he told me. “Do you want to go for a walk around inside? It’s scary.”
Yip Sang with children and family members in front of 51 East Pender ca.1890s. CVA 2008-010.4050
And it was, in a dilapidated, kind of fascinating way. I followed Rennie and his constantly ringing mobile into the bowels of the building. When we came to a boarded-up door, Rennie looked around, rolled up his expensive shirt sleeves, and found a shovel to lever off the bar. Then we were climbing up six flights of stairs, past rat traps, broken windows and old stoves.
Yip Sang and family members in front of the Wing Sang building, ca.1902. Courtesy Henry Yip
Built in 1889:
The original building, a two-storey Victorian Italianate structure went up in 1889. That was back when the population of Vancouver was around 15,000 and extremely hostile to the Chinese. Yip Sang operated an import/export business, a bank and a travel agency and sold everything from Chinese silks and curios to opium—which was legal until 1908. He added a third storey in 1901, and in 1912, a six-storey building went up across the alley. It was connected by an elevated passageway to include a warehouse, a meeting place, and a floor for each of his three wives and their 23 children. Because there were so many offspring, they were each given a number in order of their birth.
Wing Sang Building, Eve Lazarus photo, 2020
Henry Yip, son of Kew Mow, number three son of first wife, was born in 1917 on the fourth floor of the building. He was only 10 when his grandfather died, but when I talked to him in 2006, he told me he remembered Yip Sang as a “Disciplinarian.” “He used to sit beside a potbelly stove next to the doorway of at the front of the building smoking his pipe and watching everybody go in and out.” Yip Sang had a strict curfew and would lock out family members not home by 10 p.m.
Chinese schoolroom in the Wing Sang Building where Nellie studied Chinese. Courtesy Rennie.com
$10 million renovation:
Shortly after my tour, Bob Rennie spent $10 million to turn the back of the building into a private art space to house his massive art collection. He left the original Chinese schoolroom untouched and put a neon sign that says “EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT” on the building’s rooftop garden. Bob regularly holds free public tours of the building and art gallery, and at one point it became a satellite gallery for the Royal BC Museum with an exhibit by a young Emily Carr.
The Wong Wing family on Keefer Street. Yucho Chow photo, 1914. Yucho Chow Community Archive
I had the pleasure of visiting Griffin Art Projects with Tom Carter last Saturday. It’s a gallery of sorts hidden in an industrial building on Welch Street in North Vancouver. The exhibit features stories, photos, videos and paintings about Chinatowns in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, many from private collections.
The Band at the W.K. Gardens, ca.1950. Tom Carter collection
Some of Tom’s personal collection is featured and includes everything from scrapbooks from the Marco Polo, to postcards from Ming’s and Bamboo Terrace in the late ‘50s to souvenir photos from Mandarin Gardens and Forbidden City. These Chinatown nightclubs offered revues, dance bands and floor shows.
Tom Carter with some of his collection from the Marco Polo. Eve Lazarus photo.
Emily Carr’s sketch of a Chinese boy in 1908 is included as is a terrific display from the Vancouver School of Art. Yitkon Ho was in the first graduating class in 1929 along with Beatrice Lennie, Vera Weatherbie (Fred Varley’s young mistress), Fred Amess and Irene Hoffar. There are also some sketches and information about Eugene Bond, a Chinese student and one of two Asian models at the art school.
There are also some fabulous photos by Fred Herzog and Jim Wong-Chu, several of which I was seeing for the first time. And, Yucho Chow also has photos ranging from the Dominion Produce Company in the 1930s and the Ming Wo store in the early 1920s to the wonderful portraits of Chinese families that Catherine Clement drew attention to in her book: Chinatown Through a Wide Lens.
A banner tells the story of Gim Foon Wong. In 2005 when he was 82 he rode his motorcycle to Ottawa with a dozen other bikers in what became known as Gim Wong’s Ride for Redress so he could have a chat with the PM about the Chinese head tax. The banner, which Tom tells me was created by our friend Elwin Xie, was auctioned off at a Montreal dinner to raise enough money so Wong could get home. He received the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012.
The exhibition runs until May 1. You can book online—Tom and I were the only visitors in our half hour slot which made the whole visit quite magical.
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.
1145 West Georgia Street, 1931. Courtesy Vancouver Art Gallery
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. What you may not know, was that the VAG started out in a gorgeous art deco building at 1145 West Georgia, a few blocks west from its current location.
The original 1931 building—the same year the VAG was founded—was designed by local architects Sharp and Thompson. George Sharp, a respected artist and founding faculty member of the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts designed the building to fit perfectly into the largely residential West End neighborhood. It had a main hall, two large galleries and two smaller ones with a sculpture hall, library and lecture hall.
VAG Sculpture Court, 1931. CVA Bu-P400.8
Charles Marega won the commission to sculpt the heads of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci that flanked the front door. Marega carved the names of those who were considered great painters of the times (none were Canadian and all were men).
After the war, Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris, who lived on ritzy Belmont Avenue, raised $300,000, and the building was expanded to three times its original size to accommodate the works of Emily Carr and some of Harris’s own paintings. The Art Deco façade disappeared and Marega’s sculptures were no longer considered appropriate for the new sleeker modern building.
Vancouver School of Art exhibit, June 1931. CVA 99-3952
The VAG ran a classified ad in the Province in July 1951 offering the sculptures for sale. If they didn’t sell, the plan was to throw them out. Rumour has it that they found a home somewhere in the Lower Mainland – and if you happen to have them in your backyard, please let me know!
The newly renovated version, 1958. Courtesy Vancouver Art Gallery
In 1983, the VAG moved into its current digs at the old courthouse taking with it $15 million in art. Two years later the original building was demolished. Now the Paradox Hotel (former Trump tower) and the FortisBC Centre straddle its old space.
Last week we left off at the Shipyards Coffee at Lonsdale Quay. Grab your bike and we’ll ride the Spirit Trail down Cates court, loop around Waterfront Park and enter Squamish Nation land.
The Coast Salish aboriginal people established a permanent village called Slah-ahn (also known as Ustlawn or Eslha7an), meaning “head bay” in the 1860s. The village was located along a stretch of mudflat at the mouth of Mosquito Creek.
Mission Reserve 1908. Courtesy CVA SGN 52
With the arrival of European settlers, it became known as Mission Indian Reserve No. 1—the first permanent settlement on the north shore of Burrard Inlet.
Emily Carr used to visit her friend Sophie Frank, a Squamish basket maker who lived at Mission Reserve and both she and E.J. Hughes painted the area.
Emily Carr painting, 1908. Courtesy BC Archives
In 1932, the Mission Reserve Lacrosse team won the BC Championship—they were that good. The team consisted mostly of members from the Baker, Paull, and George families, who took up the game, because as Simon Baker told a North Shore Press writer, they had nothing else to do during the Depression. “We used to practice and practice and that’s how we became famous in lacrosse. We used to pass that ball, push it in circles real fast. We were good stick handlers,” he said. The team was disbanded after the win because they couldn’t get a sponsor.
Eve Lazarus photo
You’ll notice a vibrant community of houseboats. A diner called the High Boat Cafe, and some great art. You can also see the 1884 St. Paul’s Church with its twin spires and gothic revival style.
Eve Lazarus photo.
Over the years, the natural course of Mosquito creek has been altered by logging, landfills, and new subdivisions, destroying much of the natural habitat and salmon. Much of that is being restored and rehabilitated.
The most recent portion of the Spirit Trail was just finished this year. It runs below sea level and dips under the boat lifts at the marina. Each time we’ve been there so has a ‘haggle’ of harbour seals, sunning themselves on the wood (behind me) or swimming by the trail.
Watching the harbour seals at Mosquito Creek
With thanks to the NVMA which makes all this research possible.
This is an excerpt from Sensational Victoriathat includes a map of James Bay, then and now photos, and a walking tour of Emily Carr’s neighbourhood in 1913.
More than 12,000 people visit Emily Carr House every year. Eve Lazarus photo, 2011
Her name adorns a university, a school, a bridge, and a library. She is the subject of several documentaries, museum exhibits, books and plays. In 2009, her painting Wind in the Tree Tops sold for more than $2.1 million, one of the highest-priced Canadian paintings ever sold at auction. Tourists visit her family home, seek out her sketching places along Dallas Road and Beacon Hill Park and walk over the memorial bridge paid for by her sister Alice. Her grave is the most sought-after in the Ross Bay Cemetery.
Emily Carr’s presence in Victoria is pervasive. Yet for most of her life, she was shunned by the Victoria of her day, and for all of her fame, locals still seem a bit stunned by the attention. It wasn’t until the fall of 2010—65 years after her death—that Victoria honoured the artist with a $400,000 statue on the lawn of the Fairmont Empress Hotel.
Emily was born at Carr House in 1871, and died a few blocks away at the James Bay Inn, 74 years later. For most of her life, she lived in James Bay and wrote extensively about the area and her family’s homes.
James Bay is the oldest residential area of Victoria and takes its name from Governor James Douglas. Douglas built his house in the 1850s on the current site of the Royal BC Museum. Dr. John Sebastian Helmcken married Douglas’s daughter and built his house next door. His house is still there and is now a provincial museum.
Map of James Bay walking tour created for Sensational Victoria by Ross Nelson, 2012
Until a causeway was completed in the early 1900s, Government Street was made up of Carr Street (named after Emily’s father Richard), Birdcage Walk, and the James Bay Bridge—a wooden bridge that crossed the mud flats and continued downtown.
In 1908, the James Bay mud flats were hidden underneath the spanking new $13-million Empress Hotel. By the 1940s, houses had taken over all the land. Postwar development hit in the 1950s, and then in the 1960s and ‘70s—as in Vancouver’s West End—many of Victoria’s superb heritage houses were bulldozed to make room for apartment buildings.
Emily with her animals in 1918. Courtesy Royal BC Museum, BC Archives
Yet with all these changes, the Victoria Heritage Foundation still lists over 150 buildings on its heritage inventory, some like Helmcken’s, that date back to the 1850s.
Emily started writing in the late 1920s and had seven books published during her lifetime and after her death. She wrote extensively about James Bay and her family house in The Book of Small, and about how much she hated being a landlady in The house of All Sorts.
Mother Cecilia bought the hotel in 1942 and ran it as St. Mary’s Priory. Emily died here in 1945. Eve Lazarus photo, 2011
What was great, at least in 2012 when I was putting this tour together, was that most of the houses that involve Emily—including the home where she was born on Government Street, the “House of All Sorts,” known for all the different people who boarded there, two of her sister’s houses, and James Bay Hotel (Inn) built in 1911, are all still there.
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.
603 Manchester Road in Victoria’s Burnside-Gorge neighbourhood
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.
Favourite Building:
One of my favourite houses is an unprepossessing, colonial-style bungalow on Manchester Road. The house was built in 1908 by Charles Deacon, who had emigrated from England with his family six years earlier, and became the foreman of a Rock Bay sawmill. I like the design and proportions of the house; and I applaud the current owners for painting the exterior a warm yellow, a colour that was popular when the house was built. This is an unfashionable part of Victoria and old houses like this are at risk. Kudos to City of Victoria Heritage Planners, who have recommended that the 600 block of Manchester and adjacent Dunedin Street, be designated as a Heritage Conservation Area. The proposal still needs to be approved by homeowners. Fingers crossed.
The Coburn family home at 2640 Blanshard, an Italianate-style house built in 1898.
The one that got away:
In the 1960s when “urban renewal” was popular and local authorities were eradicating “blighted areas,” Victoria City council used the program to demolish nearly 160 houses in its Rose-Blanshard Renewal Scheme. This “blighted” area consisted of houses built in the 1890s and early 1900s. Rose Street was its centre and North Ward School (1894), a four-storey brick structure, was a landmark. The school and neighbouring residences were demolished so that Blanshard Street could be widened to benefit motorists travelling from the new BC ferry terminal. Properties were expropriated, and occupants who refused to leave their homes were forcibly evicted. The Coburn family home was the last house standing when it was bulldozed in March 1969. It was replaced with Blanshard Court, a “low income housing estate,” now called Evergreen Terrace.
The Royal Bank building at 1108 Government St. in Victoria photographed in 1949 (BC Archives I-02169). The building was in disrepair when purchased by bookseller Jim Munro in 1984. The carved lettering in the granite facade above the entrance now read Munro’s Books of Victoria.
My daily workplace is a magnificent former bank building. The Edwardian-era former Royal Bank of Canada at 1108 Government St. was in terrible disrepair when purchased (against his banker’s advice) by Jim Munro in 1984. He returned the structure to its former glory, notably removing a suspended ceiling added as part of a modernizing renovation in the 1950s. Today, tapered pilasters and a cast-plaster coffer ceiling attract tourists from around the globe eager to visit a bookstore co-founded in 1963 by future Nobel laureate Alice Munro. Designed in 1909 by local architect Thomas Hooper as a Temple Bank in the Classical Revival style, with an all-granite facade including two impressive Doric columns, Munro’s Books remains a temple to a commerce less pecuniary than literary.
Exhibition Building, Willows Fairgrounds, Oak Bay (Victoria) (BCArchives H-02390)
The one that got away:
In 1899, a grand exhibition hall with an adjacent horse racing track was built on farmland in Oak Bay. The roof stood 56 feet above the ground with central octagonal towers reaching to a height of 100 feet. An open cupola topped the impressive building, which dominated the Willows Fairgrounds like a manor house amid verdant lawns.
Among the visitors to the exhibition hall, which boasted 20,000 square feet of floor space surrounded by galleries, was the future King George V.
The building and the streetcar connection, that now extended from Royal Jubilee Hospital to the fairgrounds, spurred the growth of Oak Bay, which incorporated as a municipality in 1906. Alas, the building was destroyed by fire in 1907, to be replaced by a warehouse structure of little merit. The site of the fairgrounds was subdivided into housing after the Second World War with 10 acres reserved for Carnarvon Park.
Emily Carr’s Oak Bay cabin on Foul Bay Road. Eve Lazarus photo, 2012
Eve Lazarus is a journalist, author and blogger who has a passion for unconventional history and a fascination with murder. She is the author of Cold Case Vancouver.
Favourite Building:
Emily Carr paid $900 for a plot of land on Victoria Avenue in 1913, and according to a story built the cottage “nail by nail” with the help of “one old carpenter.” After a bit of digging it turns out the carpenter was Thomas Cattarall, who built Craigdarroch for the Dunsmuir family and worked on Hatley Castle. In 1995, new owners wanted to build a house on the property but didn’t want to destroy the little cottage. Terry Tallentire stepped in, paid the city $1.00, spent another $4,000 to move it to her house, and it now lives behind a Samuel Maclure designed house on Foul Bay Road. (The full story is in Sensational Victoria).
The Wilson mansion at 730 Burdett Avenue, Victoria
The one that got away:
There are many reasons why Victoria should have saved the Wilson Mansion, but perhaps the best one is because its social history is just so eccentric. There’s the overprotective father who surrounded it with high walls, Jane, the daughter who kept exotic birds in the attic and owned a 100 pairs of white gloves. And there’s the beneficiary of her will in 1949—Louis, a macaw parrot from South America, who was then in his eighties. Jane named Wah Wong, the Chinese gardener as trustee and parrot keeper, and the terms of the will stated that the property could not be sold while the birds were still alive. The feathered tenants managed to stave off developers until 1966, when it was bulldozed to make way for the Chateau Victoria Hotel.
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. The result is a really interesting look at how industry, infrastructure and development have changed the coastline all the way from Indian Arm to Ambleside.
Flotsam and Jetsam wall for making your own art assemblage on set-up day.
The sound effects add to the whole experience, as does a floor to ceiling slide show of the blue cabin and accompanying video, as well as a wall of flotsam and jetsam. One of my favourite touches is the two benches from the old ferry building at the bottom of Lonsdale.
Carole Itter outside the blue cabin where she lived with Artist Al Neil for nearly 50 years. Photo courtesy North Shore News
North Van has so many stories that it wasn’t hard to come up with close to 100.
In 1906, Joe Capilano headed up a delegation and sailed off to England to meet the King. They are at the North Vancouver ferry dock. CVA In P41.1
One of my favourite stories is the streetcar that hurtled down Lonsdale in 1909 dumping all of its passengers, including the mayor’s wife, into the water.
Several stories came out of Maplewood, which has seen its coastline change from mudflats to a sand and gravel quarry to squatter shacks. Public protest saved the area from becoming another shopping centre, and it’s now a wild bird reserve that’s home to 246 different bird species.
Early morning at the Dollarton Pleasure Faire, 1972. Bruce Stewart photo
Indian Arm has a plethora of stories. There’s the Wigwam Inn built by Alvo von Alvensleben in 1909. Canada’s only floating post office operated from 1908 to 1970 up and down Burrard Inlet, as did a floating grocery store which visited 25 different wharves five days a week in summer and three in winter. In 1891 Sarah Bernhardt took some time off from her performances at the long defunct Vancouver Opera House and went duck shooting at Indian Arm.
Wigwam Inn, 1910. Built by Alvo Alvensleben the Inn attracted people like John Rockefeller and John Jacob Astor. CVA OUT P991.2
There’s stories from what was once Moodyville, named after Sewell P. Moody who went down on a ship in 1875, but not before leaving a message on some driftwood that said “S.P. Moody all lost.” And there’s the fire at the grain elevators 100 years later that claimed five lives.
Moodyville in 1890. CVA 1376-75.10
Many stories come from the Mission Reserve. Their lacrosse team won the 1932 BC Championship. Emily Carr visited several times, painted and wrote about the area, and there are the very unpleasant stories that came out of the Residential School that sat near St. Paul’s Church until its demolition in 1959.
Some of the really amazing stories were the ones that didn’t happen—the aborted plans such as the Capilano Airfield, and if that had gone ahead, would have turned North Van into a very different place than it is today.
Do you know this strange cement structure in Little Cates Park? That’s the remains of a waste burner from a mill that closed in 1929.
Ever stood in front of an old house and wondered what went on inside those walls? Who lived there, how they lived their lives and what events happened behind the front door? I admit it’s a weird kind of voyeurism, but I’ve spent a lot of the last decade skulking around in people’s hedgerows asking those questions. Because in my view, a house has a genealogy, much like a person, and comes alive through the stories and mysteries that took place inside its walls.
Alice Munro, 1968
I’m fascinated by the deep connection people have to their houses. David Foster grew up with his six sisters in a modest house in Saanich that his father built. Spoony Sundher built a house on Bellevue Road before going on to open the Hollywood Wax Museum and found a family dynasty. Alice Munro wrote two of her best selling books from her Rockland house, and Susan Musgrave’s North Saanich house has a 190-foot Douglas Fir tree growing out of the living room. Susan says she doesn’t understand people who move into “key ready houses devoid of personality.”
I’ve talked to home owners who have unearthed everything from a murder in the family kitchen, to resident ghosts and celebrities. Others have found evidence of brothels and bootlegging, and one woman found that her house was once a Chinese sausage factory.
My father’s childhood home in Ballarat, Australia had its own odd history. My eccentric grandmother physically had the bedrooms lopped off the house when her children left home. I never found out why, but at least the current owners eventually learned who left them a number of doors that led nowhere.
I’m delighted that Sensational Victoria is getting a good reception with the locals. I hoped it would, but I really wrote it with mainlanders in mind, people like me who are not from there, but love the city, love history, old houses and Victoria’s quirky characters and eccentricities.
Clarence Street, James Bay
Emily Carr figures prominently in the book. That wasn’t intentional she just kept getting in my head, and I was intrigued with her Oak Bay cabin, a tiny house that she kept to herself for all those years. It’s Emily who shows readers what James Bay would have been like in 1913 and she shares another chapter with other formidable women from Victoria’s past. There’s a chapter on madams and their brothels, another on gardens, murders that span a century, haunted houses and some of the writers, entertainers and artists who come from Victoria.
Much of the information comes from their relatives and the current owners, who are all fiercely proud of their homes. They are the custodians—sometimes for just a few years, other times for decades—who add their own stories to the homes and in turn play a vital part in the ongoing story of Victoria.
Emily Carr’s presence in Victoria is pervasive. Yet for most of her life, she was shunned by the Victoria of her day, and for all of her fame, locals still seem a bit stunned by the attention. It wasn’t until the fall of 2010—65 years after her death—that Victoria honoured the artist with a $400,000 statue on the lawn of the Fairmont Empress Hotel.
