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L.D. Taylor

From Newspapers to Exotic Escorts: Repurposing old buildings

by Eve Lazarus on August 15, 2015
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426 Homer Street CVA 99-4879 1936
426 Homer Street CVA 99-4879 1936

It’s hard to imagine today, but from the 1930s until the mid 1950s there were three daily newspapers—the Vancouver Sun, the Province and the Vancouver News-Herald operating in Vancouver—all independents fighting for market share in a population of less than 350,000.

The Vancouver News-Herald called itself “Western Canada’s Largest Morning Herald.” When it was founded in 1933 the Herald had a circulation of 10,000. Always the underdog, it was a feisty paper, well laid-out, and staffed with well-known newspaper people such as Pierre Berton, the paper’s city editor when he was just twenty-one, Barry Broadfoot, and Himie Koshevoy, who became managing editor at the Vancouver Sun. In those early years, reporters sat on orange crates and shared typewriters.

Vancouver News-Herald Staff in 1942 CVA 1184-1232
Vancouver News-Herald Staff in 1942 CVA 1184-1232

The Herald was located at 426 Homer Street for most of its existence, which is interesting because, although horribly disfigured, parts of the building still exist. It’s one of the oldest in the city. The building was designed by Samuel Maclure and Richard Sharp in 1892 for the Vancouver World—another independent owned by serial mayor L.D. Taylor. The World built what’s now the Sun Tower on Pender and Beatty Streets, and left its former digs to a series of occupants that included a real estate company, a bowling alley, printing presses and the Army and Navy Vet Association before becoming the Herald’s home in 1935.

The Herald remained on Homer for the next two decades, and in 1954 it moved to a larger building on West Georgia (where the  Shangri-La Vancouver now sits). Shortly after, it went out of business.

426 Homer Street

The Homer Street building is looking a lot worse for wear these days and its current tenant is the Platinum Club, which  advertises “erotic” and  “safe and discreet” services from “sexy escorts.” There’s more information about the building and a great then and now picture at Changing Vancouver.

The Platinum Club, 2015
The Platinum Club, 2015

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

Mayor Gerry McGeer’s $20 Million Tear-Down

by Eve Lazarus on August 2, 2014
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Mayor Gerry McGeer lived at 4812 Belmont Avenue in Point Grey between 1927 and his death there in 1947. At around 10:00 pm on June 17, 2022 the house burned to the ground. It was unoccupied and apparently under renovation after not getting a demolition permit. 

What will $20 million buy you in Vancouver? Mayor Gerry McGeer's former West Side digs.
What will $20 million buy you in Vancouver? Mayor Gerry McGeer’s former West Side digs.
Sixth most expensive listing:

As of August 2014, the property at 4812 Belmont is apparently the 6th most expensive listing in Vancouver. I’m not surprised—it’s a street that’s always attracted big money. According to the listing it’s a “great investment property” with a killer view and over 8,200 sq.ft. of living area including six bedrooms and a conservatory. The listing suggests that new owners either renovate the 1920 property or “build” their own “dream residence.” (The listing shows the view, not the house).

What the listing doesn’t mention is that one of our most colourful Mayors—Gerry McGeer lived in the house from 1927 to his death while still in office in 1947.

As I wrote in Sensational Vancouver, McGeer was a lawyer and later a Member of Parliament, Senator and Member of the Provincial Legislative Assembly. He ran against L.D. Taylor for Mayor in 1934 and won. He’s remembered for reading the Riot Act to a bunch of unemployed men at Victory Square the following year.

Mayor Gerry McGeer, 1932. VPL 6636
Mayor Gerry McGeer, 1932. VPL 6636
Mayor Gerry McGeer:

McGeer pushed for the new site of City Hall at its current Mount Pleasant location and raised much of the $1.5 million through Baby Bonds. In a pitch to investors in June 1935, McGeer told the Vancouver Sun: “Work and wages mean better times and prosperity, and is the correct answer to Communism. In raising $1.5 million for a City Hall, sewers, parks, and lanes, we are providing work and wages…to improve your city.”

McGeer and his wife Charl, daughter of department store magnate David Spencer, paid $25,000 for the house. He parked his Stutz Bearcat—a black, long, low and sleek four-door car with windows made of shatterproof glass in the new garage.

McGeer was a notorious drinker and was said to stash his whiskey in the garden.

McGeer ran again and was elected in 1946.

According to a 1986 biography, Mayor Gerry, McGeer’s daughter Pat recalls that the 59-year-old Mayor had come in to her bedroom to say good night and talk about his recent trip. He reached for a large bottle of eau-de-cologne on her dresser and downed it in one swig. The next morning McGeer’s chauffeur found him dressed in pajamas lying dead on the couch in his Belmont Street study.

Cause of death was massive heart failure.

Vancouver’s Odlum Family and their Fabulous Houses

by Eve Lazarus on April 26, 2014
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Home of Professor Edward Odlum
The Odlum family at 1774 Grant Street ca.1908

It was Anzac Day in Australia yesterday, an important national holiday back home that honours those who fought and were slaughtered at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915. I was thinking of this when John Mackie’s story in the Vancouver Sun today caught my eye. A 12-page letter written by Victor Odlum and dated May 1, 1915 had found its way to MacLeod’s Books almost a century later. In the letter, which included his hand-drawn maps, Victor wrote about the battle of Ypres which took place between April 22 and went on until the end of May.

Victor had sent the letter to his father Professor Edward Odlum via a friend to circumvent the censors. It’s a graphic account of the battle that left 2,000 Canadians dead and another 4,000 wounded.

“Four days without sleep, under too tense a strain to eat, and fighting all the time, day and night, under heavy shellfire, was trying,” wrote Odlum.

Built for Matthew Logan in 1910
2530 Point Grey Road

The Odlums were an interesting family. Odlum Drive in Vancouver’s Grandview area was named after Edward. According to Michael Kluckner’s Vancouver: The Way it Was, Edward helped produce the first electric light and the first public telephone in Canada while still at university. His passion was comparative ethnology and he travelled the world to study tribes in Australia and the South Pacific.

Edward built the fabulous turreted house at 1774 Grant Street around 1908.

Victor was born in 1880, fought in the Boer war at age 19, and on his return to Vancouver went to work for L.D. Taylor at the World. By 1905 he was editor-in-chief. When war broke out in 1914, Victor was in the first wave of Vancouver volunteers who went to France. Kluckner writes that he was a prominent advocate of Prohibition, and earned the nickname Pea Soup Odlum for replacing the soldiers’ rum ration with soup in the trenches.

Victor lived near his father’s house in Grandview before and on his return from WW1. He was also a financial whiz and was the Odlum behind Odlum Brown, a brokerage house founded in 1923. He bought the Vancouver Star around the same time. In the late ‘20s he traded up from his modest house at 2023 Grant Street and moved to Kitsilano. Later he and his wife moved to Rocklands at Whytecliff in West Vancouver.

In 1941 Victor was appointed High Commission to Australia. He died in 1971 aged 90.

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

Meet Tom Carter Artist

by Eve Lazarus on January 8, 2014
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Tom Carter is a Vancouver-based artist known for exploring the city’s gritty urban environments.

by Tom Carter
Harry Carter–Tom’s grandfather outside his East Hastings Street cafe in the 1930s
Heritage Loft:

I visited Tom Carter in his heritage loft a couple of weeks ago. It was the same afternoon that we climbed up to the top of the Sun Tower, in what was in 1912, the tallest building in the British Empire. Tom lives next door in a 100-year-old converted warehouse designed for Storey & Campbell Limited by William Tuff Whiteway, the same architect who designed the Sun Tower for Mayor L.D. Taylor.

His loft looks out onto Pender Street and its floor to ceiling windows give a great view of Victory Square and some of the building stock we’ve managed to hang onto such as the Dominion and the Standard Buildings. The brick walls of the loft make a fitting background for Tom’s paintings of Vancouver’s street scenes and heritage buildings—many now long gone.

"Night falls over the City of Vancouver" by Tom Carter
“Night falls over the City of Vancouver” by Tom Carter
Missing Heritage:

Tom is fascinated by Vancouver’s early theatre industry and has an amazing collection of photographs, books and even some of the original plaster that he managed to salvage on his daily trips to the Pantages Theatre during its destruction two years ago.

Before he starting painting, Tom lived the rock and roll dream. He co-owned and managed a recording studio in Surrey working with artists like Long John Baldry, and members of Chilliwack and Trooper. Tom played keyboard on a lot of the albums, and his beautiful concert grand takes up a prominent position in his loft.

Tom at home with "Warmth at the edge of wilderness"
Tom at home with “Warmth at the edge of wilderness”
Music:

“We did blues albums that were nominated for Juno awards, a lot of roots rock,” says Tom. “I loved it, it was a lot of fun, but then it got to the point it just wasn’t fun anymore.”

Tom bought the loft in 2003, turned 40, stopped drinking, and dabbled in real estate.

“I found myself sitting in this place, I was unemployed, and I didn’t have a clue how I was going to make the next mortgage payment.”

Then he started to research his family history and had a kind of epiphany.

Tom Carter is a Vancouver artist
Plaster from the Pantages Theatre saved from the landfill

“I realized my grandfather was the same age—39—when he moved to Vancouver from the Prairies,” says Tom. “I knew his life from the early 40s on because he had businesses in the Okanagan, he was mayor of Oliver, but I didn’t know much about this transition period, and I was going through the same transition.”

Vancouver Cafe:

Tom learned that his grandfather had owned the Vancouver Cafe and Grill next to the Balmoral Hotel on East Hastings. His father told him about the bombing of the Royal Theatre across the street in 1933, and how a piece of the Royal had smashed into his restaurant.

Tom hit Special Collections at the Vancouver Public Library and the Vancouver Archives and searched through old newspaper articles and photos from the ‘30s and ‘40s. The stories melded with his own memories as a kid in the ‘60s coming into the city to see films at the Orpheum and the Strand.

Tom Carter painting

“There was still Woodwards downtown, we still had the PNE parade—all those Vancouver institutions that are gone now,” he says. “I was trying to find a style—something I really want to paint.”

Tom sold his first painting at a small gallery in West Vancouver for $900, his second for $1,250 and his third for $13,500. Now his sought-after paintings hang on boardroom walls and in private collections all over the city.

RElated:

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

The Sun Tower: On Top of the World

by Eve Lazarus on December 28, 2013
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100 West Pender StreetA 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 17th 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.

100 West Pender Street

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.

100 West Pender Street
View from the Cupola – Eve Lazarus photo 2013

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.

100 West Pender Street
Undated postcard showing what looks like Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders?
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.

Related:

 

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

 

L.D. Taylor and the History of Taylor Manor

by Eve Lazarus on July 1, 2012
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For more stories about L.D. Taylor’s Vancouver see: At Home with History: the secrets of Greater Vancouver’s Heritage Homes

Mayor Gregor Robertson held a press conference Friday announcing the City’s receipt of a $30-million anonymous donation to reopen Taylor Manor. After an extensive renovation and upgrade, the house will provide housing for 56 people with mental health issues who now live on the streets of Vancouver.

The City built the Tudor Revival-style house in 1915 as a dormitory for destitute seniors and named it the Vancouver Old People’s Home. When it opened it had separate entrances for men and women. In 1946, it was renamed Taylor Manor after L.D. Taylor, Vancouver’s serial mayor. L.D. is still the most elected mayor in our history, winning nine elections, losing seven, and serving eight terms between 1910 and 1934.

While a photo of L.D. shows him as a slight looking, bland little man in owlish glasses, he was actually a bigamist and a flamboyant risk taker known for his trademark red tie and cigar. He published and edited the BC Mining Record, the Oil and Mining Record and the Critic, a paper on public issues. In 1905, he bought the Vancouver World newspaper from Sara McLagan, the sister of noted architect Samuel Maclure.

In keeping with his mega ambitions, in 1912 L.D. built a 17-storey Beaux-Arts building to house his newspaper. It was the highest building in the British Empire at the time, and caused a minor scandal for its nine near-naked women sculpted by Charles Marega.

The owners of the Vancouver Sun bought the building in 1937, and it’s been known as the Sun Tower ever since.

The Vancouver Sun Tower

According to Daniel Francis’s highly readable biography, L.D. was an American-born accountant, who left his wife and young son in Chicago and headed for Vancouver in 1896 after he was accused of fraud.

Despite this shaky start, L.D. was a popular mayor. He supported the progressive idea of an eight-hour work day, universal suffrage for women and city planning. During his watch, L.D. oversaw the opening of the Vancouver International Airport and the Burrard Street bridge.

He had a relaxed approach to gambling, bootlegging and prostitution. In 1924, he told a Province reporter he didn’t believe that it was the mayor’s job to make Vancouver a “Sunday school town.”

Although Taylor lends his name to Taylor Manor, he never lived there. In 1917 he lived on the top floor of the Caroline Court at the corner of Thurlow and Nelson in the West End. By 1920, he moved to what was once the Granville Mansions at Robson and Granville, where he lived in rather meagre circumstances until his death in 1946 at age 88.

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

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