Every Place Has a Story

Emily Carr’s James Bay

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This is an excerpt from Sensational Victoria that 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.

Emily Carr
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 Carr
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.

Emily Carr
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.

So, the next time you’re in the area, grab a copy of Sensational Victoria from Munro’s Books, and take a walk around Emily’s James Bay.

Emily Carr
Carr family, 207 Government St, 1869. Courtesy Royal BC Museum, BC Archives

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

 

 

Wah Wong and the Parrot

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The Chateau Victoria was built in 1974 on the former site of an old white mansion that housed a very old and wealthy parrot. 

Louis the Macaw:

When I stayed in the Chateau Victoria while working on my book Sensational Victoria, I came across this story about Louis. This celebrity parrot, single handedly held up development in the downtown core. Louis, who was profiled in Life Magazine and has a heritage award named after him, lived to the ripe old age of 115 on a diet of hard-boiled eggs, walnuts and brandy fed to him by a Chinese manservant, while he ruled the roost in a white mansion near the Empress Hotel.

As far as I can make out, Louis hatched in the early 1860s in South America. Seems he kicked around there for awhile before ending up in the possession of five-year-old Victoria Jane Wilson.

The Wilsons:

Jane’s mother Mary, the daughter of Alexander Munro, came from well-heeled fur trading stock. Her father, James Keith Wilson, manager of the Bank of BC, dabbled in real estate. Wilson bought a chunk of prime real estate at 730 Burdett Street, built the three-storey mansion, and because he was over protective of Jane to the point of paranoia, surrounded it with high walls.

As Jane grew older and more eccentric, she added 60-odd exotic birds to her collection, keeping them in an aviary that took up the top floor of the house. In 1911, Jane painfully shy, but pleasantly rich, decided that fresh air would benefit Louis, her favourite. She bought a Hupp Yeats electric car and took driving lessons. Unfortunately Louis disliked the noise of the outdoors and the smelly fumes, so the car stayed in the garage.

The Will:

Jane’s mother died in 1917, her father in 1934 and Jane lived on in the house until her own death in 1949. When the lawyers read the will they found that she was worth around $500,000 (about $6.2 million today), with an estate that included over 100 pairs of white gloves, the aviary and a car that had clocked up less than 50 miles and was found sealed inside the garage. While most of her money went to charity, she left Louie with a $200 a week stipend and appointed Wah Wong the Chinese gardener as trustee and parrot keeper.

According to the terms of the Will, the property could be sold, but not developed while the birds remained alive. In other words, the birds stayed on as tenants.

Louis and Wah Wong watched while the mansion changed hands several times, was divided up into apartments and left slowly to rot into a downtown eyesore. They managed to stave off its destruction for 17 years, but eventually got the boot when the developers won and bulldozed the mansion to make room for the 19-storey Chateau Victoria Hotel.

Wah Wong refused to give interviews, but according to newspaper reports, Louis lived with him until he died in 1967. Then, like his owner, Louis turned reclusive and lived out the rest of his life in obscurity until his own death in 1985.

Louis went to live with Wah Wong after developers kicked him out of his mansion
Is this the house where Louis lived out his last days?
Update:

Is the Chateau Victoria haunted? Of course. It’s #9 on Tourism Victoria’s Top 10 Most Haunted Places. According to the story, Victoria Jane used to hang out at the main bar. Guests remembered her because she was dressed in old fashioned clothes and would vanish in front of them. Sometimes Victoria rides up and down the elevator with them, stopping at each floor.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.