Harry Gardiner Archives

When Lani Russwurm jumped online in 2008 he was one of the first to write about history in his blog Past Tense. The blog morphed into a weekly writing gig with Bob Kronbauer’s Vancouver is Awesome and last year he published Vancouver was Awesome: a curious pictorial history, a hugely popular local history book which has sat on the best seller list for the past several weeks.

“I did my Masters degree at SFU on a local subject,” he says. “I’d find out all these interesting things that were not directly related to my thesis, but I collected them anyway and after I was done I had all this material that I wanted to share, so I started blogging.”

There are a lot of great stories in Vancouver was Awesome, but one that caught my attention was a photo of 500 Alexander Street, a one-time brothel built and owned by Dolly Darlington in 1912. For years it was the headquarters for the British Seaman’s Mission and today it’s run by the Atira Women’s Resource Society as housing for at-risk teens.

What I learned from Lani is that back in the 1950s, the building also played a role in Vancouver’s drug history as the mailing address for Al Hubbard, an eccentric American millionaire with a penchant for LSD. Hubbard, writes Lani, became the biggest North American supplier of LSD through his Uranium Corporation. Hubbard apparently turned a number of people onto LSD including Aldous Huxley, the head of Vancouver’s Holy Rosary Cathedral, and then partnered up with Ross MacLean, a high profile psychiatrist who for a time owned Casa Mia and ran the Hollywood Hospital in New Westminster.

There’s a great picture of Harry Gardiner “The Human Fly” climbing the Sun Tower in 1918, and a photo of a 17-year-old Yvonne de Carlo with a boxing kangaroo. Lani tells the story of Percy Williams, a skinny little guy, who for 11 years, was the fastest man alive; and the story of George Paris, a one-time heavyweight boxing champion of Western Canada, personal trainer to Jack Johnson, boxing trainer for the Vancouver Police Department and a jazz musician at the Patricia Hotel.

When he’s not blogging or writing books, Lani lives on the edge of Chinatown with his daughter Sophia and works at a DTES hotel for Atira.

Tree Stump House 1900s, now 4230 Prince Edward Street in Mount Pleasant

A couple of weeks ago my friend Tom Carter and I climbed to the top of the Sun Tower, one of my favourite buildings in Vancouver.

Sun Tower cupola

It’s also one of our most familiar landmarks, and at one time the tallest building in the British Empire when mayor, L.D. Taylor had it built over a century ago to house his newspaper—the Vancouver World.

100 West Pender Street

The building has a unique L shape with eight stories that runs along West Pender and Beatty Streets, topped by a nine-storey tower, capped by a Beaux-arts dome and cupola.

View from the Cupola:

We took the lift to the 17^th floor, climbed up a couple of flights of stairs into the dome, and then up a ladder to the cupola. Even with all the high-rises that have popped up around to overshadow it, the view from the cupola is breathtaking.

100 West Pender Street — The building’s elevator machinery is housed inside the dome. Eve Lazarus photo

One of the biggest misconceptions about the Sun Tower is its copper roof. Turns out it’s not copper at all, just concrete painted green.

Sculptures by Charles Marega:

Designed by William Tuff Whiteway in 1911, details include a marble staircase and nine topless maidens created by Charles Marega, who also sculpted the two lions at the Stanley Park end of the Lions Gate Bridge, the George Vancouver statue at City Hall and the Joe Fortes Memorial Fountain at English Bay. The “caryatids” support a cornice line halfway up the building, and so shocked the city’s elite they hindered leasing of the building.

LD Taylor still holds the record as the most elected mayor in the City of Vancouver. He won nine elections, lost seven, and served eight terms between 1910 and 1934. He looks like a nerdy little man in his trademark red tie and owlish glasses, but he was actually a flamboyant risk taker. In 1905, he bought the World, one of four daily newspapers in Vancouver, from Sara McLagan, the sister of noted architect Samuel Maclure, and rode the real estate boom so that The World carried the most display advertising of any daily in North America.

The newspaper was a huge success for LD, but his mega building couldn’t withstand the crash of 1913 and LD sold after only three years.

The Human Fly:

In 1918, the building attracted masses to watch Harry Gardiner “the human fly” scale the tower and climb through one of the top floor windows.

For a time the building was owned by Bekins, a Seattle-based moving company, and in 1937, became home to the Vancouver Sun for the next three decades. Laura Anderson tells me that Artists E.J. Hughes, Paul Goranson and Orville Fisher once had a studio in the tower, and Sun photographers set up a lair in the dome, but today, instead of the clattering of typewriters in the offices and the rumbling of presses, the basement holds a sleek new gym.

Meet Tom Carter

Lani Russwurm’s Awesome Vancouver

The Sun Tower: On Top of the World

View from the Cupola:

Sculptures by Charles Marega:

The Human Fly:

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View from the Cupola:

Sculptures by Charles Marega:

The Human Fly:

Related:

Click to read posts about:

Subscribe to Our Newsletter