The first time I call Susan Musgrave at her home in Haida Gwaii, she can’t talk because she’s cooking dinner for John Vaillant, author of The Golden Spruce. The second time I call, she’s busy vacuuming, but is kind enough to spare a few minutes before she has to be at her bed and breakfast—the Copper Beech House.
I’m writing Sensational Victoria–a book about some of Vancouver Island’s oldest, most eccentric and quirkiest houses, and Susan’s North Saanich tree house more than qualifies. “I don’t understand people who move into key ready homes that are devoid of personality,” she tells me.
Susan Musgrave’s Tree House
The internationally renowned poet’s home will nestle in between those of Bruce Hutchison and Alice Munro. This chapter, Bright Lights, also includes the childhood home so important to David Foster and his six sisters, the home that Spoony Sundher built before East Indians were allowed to own property, and the James Bay house where silent movie star Nell Shipman was born in 1892.
Last October the Feds designated Vancouver’s Chinatown a National Historical Site. In November, the National Geographic named the Dr. Sun yat-sen Gardens one of the top 10 city gardens in the world. It’s long overdue recognition for one of the largest and oldest Chinatowns in North America.
I took a walk around Chinatown last week. On the surface, not a lot has changed in the last 20 years or so. There are the dim sum restaurants, herbal shops, tacky ornament shops and the in-your-face production of food—duck and pig carcasses, live bullfrogs in buckets on the sidewalk, tanks full of exotic fish and an array of fruit and vegetables still a long way from mainstream.
The Wing Sang Company Building, 51 East Pender Street
Yet for all the traditional elements, Chinatown is an area in transition. Condos are going up, bars, coffee shops and trendy clothes stores are nudging up against traditional grocery stores, and new business is moving in.
The Wing Sang Building in 2011
Bob Rennie was one of the first to see the potential when he bought the Wing Sang Building for a million bucks in 2004. He spent another $10 million turning the back of the building, where Yip Sang’s three wives once raised their 23 children, into a private art space to house his massive collection. Past exhibits by Mona Hatoum and Richard Jackson are edgy and interesting, but my favourite was Martin Creed’s where you walked through an office filled with pink balloons, dodged runners on the main floor and sipped champagne while looking at broccoli. Creed is also behind the controversial “everything is going to be alright” neon sign on the building’s rooftop garden which is clearly visible from the Sun yat-sen Gardens, and a good chunk of Vancouver. Rennie regularly holds free public tours of the building and art gallery, but next year he turns into a satellite gallery for the Royal BC Museum with an exhibit of the young Emily Carr.
The roof top of the Wing Sang Building
Boutique agencies like St. Bernadine Mission Communications are finding costs are cheaper in Chinatown. David Walker and Andrew Samuel bought a newish space at East Georgia and Main, a block away from the oddly garish Jimi Hendrix shrine. In keeping with the heritage—it was once a Chinese Laundry—the partners installed the Kee’s Laundry Gallery with photography and art displays from other agency creatives in the city.
It’s transforming yes, but there’s a strong sense of community. Residents of Strathcona and Chinatown were asked to vote on the kind of business they wanted to see open at 243 Union Street—what was once Hogan’s Alley—the black part of town before city planners replaced it with the Georgia Viaduct in the 1960s. Locals decided they wanted a local grocery store on Union and named it Harvest. They even got to choose the graphic designer who’d brand it—Naomi Macdougall from a list of six.
When I was mapping out a walking tour of James Bay for Sensational Victoria not too long ago, I came across the Coach House, an early carriage-style residence tucked away at the point where Marifield Avenue runs into St. Andrews Street. It’s built on land that was once owned by Emily Carr’s father Richard, and a stone’s throw from Carr House on Government Street where Emily was born, her own house and the subject of her book “the House of All Sorts,” and the two houses owned by her sisters. I couldn’t find any mention of the house in any of the heritage inventory books, so decided to do a bit of research of my own.
The Coach House in the 1970s
Current owners Jackie and Martin Somers named it the Coach House and Jackie says that she’d always thought of it as belonging to a coachman because the story went that it was used as the coach house for a mansion on Douglas Street—in those days Douglas was called Katherine Street. As Jackie notes, what you see from St Andrews Street was originally the back of the house. The front has a pretty Tudor-style trim, which is now hidden by an ugly parkade. When the house was built pre-1900, Marifield Avenue didn’t exist—it would have been the driveway to Bishop Cridge’s house of the same name.
If you’re wandering around Victoria, check out the ghosts of James Bay at the two Bent Mast and the James Bay Inn.
The James Bay Hotel
I was in Victoria recently researching my book Sensational Victoria and spent time in James Bay. 150 years ago the area housed huge mansions with large tracts of land owned by people who live on in street names like James Douglas, J.S. Helmcken and Robert Dunsmuir. Even though a lot of these heritage houses became ugly apartment buildings in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Victoria Heritage Foundation still lists over 150 buildings on its heritage inventory, some dating back to the 1860s.
Quite a few operate as either restaurants, pubs or B&Bs and are worth a look for both architectural merit and fascinating social histories.
The Bent Mast
I had dinner one night at the Bent Mast, a restaurant in an 1884 house on Simcoe Street. According to the menu I swiped, the house was once a rooming home, a brothel, four different restaurants and an erotic art gallery. Apparently a number of ghosts haunt the house. There’s the happy child, a cranky old man who likes to hide things in the kitchen (did have to wait a while for the wine) and an older woman. Female staff report being felt up by a guy in a red fedora who disappears before they can take his order. I’m pretty sure I saw him by the bar when I first came in. The second floor, where the washrooms are, is definitely creepy. There’s a staircase that goes down to the back of the house and a bunch of locked rooms that I wouldn’t want to explore by myself after dark.
James Bay Inn
The next morning I had coffee at the James Bay Inn on Government Street. The hotel was designed by architect Charles Elwood Watkins in 1911 and is the third oldest in Victoria. It sold to Mother Cecilia’s religious order during the Second World War, and its claim to fame is that Emily Carr died there in 1945, a block from where she was born. The artist would be mortified to learn that the room where she died is now the men’s room in the pub.
