From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
The Stuart Building was a landmark that sat at the southeast corner of Georgia and Chilco Streets, marking the border between the city and Stanley Park from 1909 until its demise in 1982.
Painted Sky Blue:
It didn’t have the elegance of the Birks Building, the grandeur of the second Hotel Vancouver or the presence of the Georgia Medical-Dental Building. It was simply a modest three-storey wood-frame building painted sky blue and capped with a turret.
There was a store that rented bikes and a craft shop on the ground floor and accommodation above, and I imagine it was this simplicity that appealed to the many people who petitioned so hard to try and save it.
Bought by Billionaire:
Macau billionaire Stanley Ho, aka “the King of Gambling” bought the Stuart building and its lot in 1974 for $275,000. Ho offered to upgrade the building and give the city a 30-year lease in exchange for zoning incentives on another property. But in 1982, council members Don Bellamy, Harry Rankin, Bruce Eriksen and Bruce Yorke decided to follow George Puil’s suggestion to “get rid of it once and for all” (Mayor Mike Harcourt, Marguerite Ford and May Brown voted to save it).
Bulldozed:
Angus photographed the building in the 1970s, and he was there to record its untimely end at dawn one July morning, the earliness of the hour chosen presumably to get there before the protestors. Angus says that, at the time, Chilco was a through Street from Beach Avenue. “The West End had no diverters or barriers or stop signs for that matter. There was a stop sign at Georgia, and it was a legal but dicey left turn to head to the Lion’s Gate Bridge. The cars on Chilco would back up all the way to Beach but were kept moving by a policeman. He also stopped all the traffic to let the trolleybuses turn into and out of Chilco and Georgia.”
Barb Wood painted the Stuart Building on the cover of a Vancouver centennial engagement calendar in 1986. After witnessing the demolition, she told Jason Vanderhill: “We were told it was too frail to stand, so it should come down. When they drove the first bulldozer through it, the results were like a Bugs Bunny cartoon—the structure was so sound, that the machine left a bulldozer shaped hole, side to side.”
For more stories like this: Our Missing Heritage and Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
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