Every Place Has a Story

Heritage Streeters with Michael Kluckner, Jess Quan, Lani Russwurm and Lisa Anne Smith

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Continuing on with a series I started earlier this year, I’ve asked a few friends to tell me their favourite Vancouver building and the one they miss the most.

Michael Kluckner     

Michael is the author of a dozen books. His most recent is Toshiko, a graphic novel set in BC in 1944. He is the president of the Vancouver Historical Society and a member of the city’s Heritage Commission.

Kerrisdale Grocery burned down in 1989
Kerrisdale Grocery by Michael Kluckner

Michael says that one of his favourite buildings that’s missing from our landscape is the Kerrisdale Grocery which once stood at 49th and Maple next to Magee High School. The 1914 grocery store burned down in 1989 and is captured in Michael’s painting (above) and appeared in his 1990 bestseller, Vanishing Vancouver.
“The Kerrisdale Grocery, and all the rest of the independently run neighbourhood stores in the city, reflected a time that appeared to be less dominated by multinational chains, where people supported local businesses, and where funky architecture was more common,” he says. “Corner stores, aka “Chinese groceries,” are historically important as well as the first businesses of new immigrants, especially Chinese and Japanese, in an earlier Vancouver of racial barriers and homogeneous white neighbourhoods. These stores are a version of the live-work spaces so trendy in the modern city, where a family could live behind or above the store. They are almost all gone now.”

Jessica Quan

Born in Germany, raised in Vancouver with roots in Steveston’s Japanese community and Victoria’s Chinatown, Jess discovered a love for heritage, history and architecture when living in Japan and London, UK. She is the Special Project Coordinator for the Vancouver Heritage Foundation, and her projects include the Heritage Site Finder Interactive Map and the Places That Matter plaque program

Jess Quan at a plaque presentation for King Edward High School
Jess Quan at a plaque presentation for King Edward High School

Jess says that her favourite heritage building is hidden on West 7th Avenue between Spruce and Oak in Fairview Slopes. She’s cagey about the actual address because she’s working on a plaque for it, but will say that it’s an A on the Vancouver Heritage Register. “It’s a wonderful example of the type of tenement buildings built along the Slopes for workers at the sawmills below. It’s hard to believe now how much heavy industry occupied False Creek, and it is a reminder of what life was like 100 years ago for the early immigrant workers who came to Vancouver—in  this case Japanese, but also the Sikh.”

Vancouver City Hospital
Vancouver City Hospital, 1906, CVA BU P369

Jess says if she had to pick one building that we should have kept it would be the original City Hospital (VGH) where the Easy Park Lot now stands at Pender and Cambie.

Lani Russwurm  

Lani Russwurm has been blogging about Vancouver history since 2008 as Past Tense Vancouver. He is the author of Vancouver Was Awesome: A Curious Pictorial History (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013).

20 West Hastings Street
Demolished for a parking lot in 1967. Photo Leonard Frank, Jewish Museum & Archives of BC #LF.00218

Lani says of the long list of buildings that we’ve destroyed, one of the stupidest is the second Pantages Theatre. “It stood at 20 West Hastings, first as the Pantages, then the Beacon, the Majestic, and finally Hastings Odeon before it was demolished in 1967 for a parking lot for Army & Navy. In the 1930s, vaudeville legend Texas Guinan performed for the very last time there and a teenaged Yvonne De Carlo began her showbiz career there with a boxing kangaroo.,” he says. “This city has a rich theatre history, including vaudeville and motion picture houses, and the second Pantages may have been the best of the bunch.”

Marine Building
Photo by Otto F Landauer (1947), City of Vancouver Archives #Bu P346

Lani says his favourite building still standing is the Marine on Burrard. “Today it’s boxed in by taller, shinier towers, but for years it dominated Vancouver’s skyline and was once the tallest in the British Empire. Not only is it a great example of 1920s Art Deco architecture anywhere, but  its maritime theme makes it specific to that place and time in Vancouver’s history.”

Lisa Anne Smith  

Lisa Anne Smith is an education docent at the Museum of Vancouver and the author of Our Friend Joe: the Joe Fortes Story, and Vancouver is Ashes. She also wrote a children’s book about the RCMP ship the St. Roch.

The Old Hastings Mill Store
The Old Hastings Mill Store

As a curator for the Old Hastings Mill Store Museum (the oldest building in Vancouver), picking a favourite isn’t hard for Lisa. “The store dates from 1868 and as a Great Fire survivor, is the oldest building in Vancouver by far. It was barged over to its present site in 1930 and continues to be owned and maintained  as a museum by Native Daughters of B.C. Post #1.”

Lisa Challenger mapLisa says that if she had to pick a building that she misses the most it would be the B.C. Pavilion which housed the Challenger Relief Map at the PNE. “The B.C. Pavilion was torn down in 1997 and the Challenger map was placed in storage,” she says (it’s currently at an Air Canada hangar at YVR. “I had the privilege of conducting gantry tours of the map during the 1976 and 1977 Pacific National Exhibitions. I still can’t believe they had the audacity to dismantle the thing! It’s a sad loss for the city and the province.”

 

 

Lani Russwurm’s Awesome Vancouver

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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.

Vancouver was Awesome
Lani Russwurm at the Paper Hound Book Shop

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

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