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Marine Building

The Georgia Medical-Dental Building

by Eve Lazarus on May 27, 2017
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On May 28, 1989, we blew up the Georgia Medical-Dental Centre, a building on West Georgia designed by McCarter & Nairne, the same architects behind the Marine and the Devonshire Apartments.* What were we thinking?

The Devonshire was first, designed as an apartment building in 1924. Next came the 15-storey art deco medical building. The Marine Building was completed in 1930—the only one left standing.

 

Leonard Frank Photo, 1929
Leonard Frank photo in 1929 showing the Georgia Medical-Dental Building under construction, next to the Devonshire and the Georgia Hotel.
What were we thinking?

As this more recent photo shows, the HSBC Building now sits where the elegant Devonshire Hotel used to be. The GMDB was blown up or perhaps blown down is more accurate—to make way for the twenty-three-storey Cathedral Place.

Cathedral Place replaced the Georgia Medical Dental Building

Paul Merrick, designed Cathedral Place, renovated the Marine Building, the Orpheum Theatre, and converted the old BC Hydro Building to the Electra. I quite like Cathedral Place. It’s nicely tiered, the roof fits in with the Hotel Vancouver across the street, and it even has a few nurses, gargoyles and lions pasted about as a reminder of the former building. Everyone over 35 likely remembers the three nurses in their starchy World War 1 uniforms looking down from their 11th storey parapets. Known as the Rhea Sisters, the terra-cotta statues weighed several tonnes each. Later restored, the nurses are part of the Technology Enterprise Facility building at UBC.

But here’s a thought. Instead of honouring a heritage building by sticking fibreglass casts on a new building, why not keep the original one! The Georgia Medical-Dental Building was only sixty after all—hardly old enough for its unseemly demise, but old enough to represent a significant part of our history.

Cathedral Place designed by Paul Merrick
Fibre glass nurse at Cathedral Place
The Devonshire:

I never saw the Devonshire, but I love one of its stories. According to newspaper reports, after being kicked out of the snotty Hotel Vancouver in 1951, Louis Armstrong and his All Stars walked across the street and stayed at the Devonshire. Walter Fred Evans, a one-time member of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra built the Devonshire, and supposedly Duke Ellington, Lena Horne and the Mills Brothers wouldn’t stay anywhere else.

The Devonshire Hotel, West Georgia, CVA LGN 1060 ca.1925

* McCarter & Nairne also designed the Patricia Hotel, 403 East Hastings; Spencer’s Department Store (now SFU at Harbour Centre); the Livestock Building at the PNE, and the General Post Office on West Georgia.

For more posts see: Our Missing Heritage

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

The Marine Building and the Little House Next Door

by Eve Lazarus on April 15, 2017
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It’s hard to imagine today, but when the Marine Building opened in 1930 it was the tallest building in Vancouver and stayed that way for more than a decade. If you look at the photo (below), you can see that when architects McCarter and Nairne, designed it, four of the 22 floors were built into the cliff above the CPR railway tracks. You can also see the second version of the Quadra Club and then what looks like an old shack perched on the edge of the cliff.

W.J. Moore’s 1935 photo of the Marine Building, the Quadra Club and Frank Holt’s cabin. CVA BU N7

From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

I recently came across this war-time newspaper advertorial by Vancouver Breweries Limited. It shows the same 1935 photo, and circled is “the oldest building in Vancouver.”

Do you know Vancouver?

According to the story, part of a series called “Do you know Vancouver!” the tiny house was used by CPR land commissioner Lauchlan Hamilton when he was surveying Vancouver in 1885. “Using the old cottage as a mark, Hamilton set the lines of our present Hastings Street, on which the street system of Vancouver is based,” goes the story. “When John Buchan, Baron Tweedsmuir visited Vancouver for the last time as Governor General of Canada, his attention was called to this shabby little relic of our past. ‘I hope the people of Vancouver will preserve it!’ he exclaimed, fervently.”

Well, no sir, we did not.

Spratt’s Oilery:

The little house was built in 1875 as a mess hall for Spratt’s Oilery and originally had five rooms. It survived the Great Fire, and in 1894, Frank Holt moved in. When the cannery moved out, Holt stayed on. When Frank found out that four of the rooms were taxable because they were on city property, he tore them down, and stayed in the one-room shack. He was still living there in 1943 when the foundations started to give way and the front porch fell down the embankment. Frank, who was 90 at the time, helped workers install a new foundation.

Then in 1946 a fire broke out and trapped Frank in the house. Miraculously, firefighters found Frank in the debris and carried him to safety. The house was not so lucky.

Marine Building, photo courtesy Pricetags blog

Frank came to Vancouver on the first transcontinental train. He was one of the founders of Christ Church Cathedral, and lived as a squatter in the one-room house in the shadow of the Marine Building for over half a century.

He died in December 1946, less than two months after his home burned down.

Related:

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

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

by Eve Lazarus on September 26, 2015
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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.”

 

 

Michael Kluckner’s Toshiko: a graphic novel

by Eve Lazarus on July 11, 2015
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If you are like me and have a couple of Michael Kluckner’s books at home, you might be surprised to learn that his latest effort is a graphic novel.

In his latest book, Toshiko, Michael has replaced his paint brush with a pencil, and he’s taken a leap into fiction.

Tosh cover

Turns out, Michael kicked off his career as a cartoonist back in the ‘70s, and in many ways, this is a return to his roots.

As expected, Toshiko is steeped in historical detail. Michael says inspiration for the graphic novel came from his 2011 book Vanishing British Columbia. In that book, he describes a farm near Shuswap Lake run by Henry and Hilda Calhoun, who when the Japanese were declared enemy aliens during the war years, the couple welcomed a group of Japanese-Canadian families onto their property.

Tosh 1

Toshiko is the name of the protagonist, a Japanese Canadian teen sent with her family to the Shuswap to work on a farm during the Second World War. In Michael’s story, Toshiko falls for a local boy called Cowboy, and in a Romeo-Juliet type scenario, his father kicks him out, and the kids take off for Vancouver.

Tosh 2“I thought I’d have a romance develop and see how that played out as a way of describing all of the social class issues and the race issues and the war time issues,” he says. “I didn’t really know what was going to happen when I started, but I knew they were going to go to Vancouver and that would give me the opportunity to get some Vancouver stuff in and create that whole world around the Chinatown hotel and the squatter’s camp at False Creek.”

Other Vancouver landmarks to look out for include the Marine Building, Strathcona Elementary School and the Burrard Bridge.

It’s not necessarily a kid’s book, although it certainly could appeal to teens, and Michael likes the idea that it might help young people make a connection to a time in our history that may feel remote.

Tosh 3

“I wanted to put some important historical facts in there,” he says. “For example the National Selective Service for him, and then the reality of her life, and that really bizarre thing that if Toshiko had married Cowboy she would have been reclassified as white.”

The book launch for Toshiko is at 3:00 p.m. on Saturday July 18 at the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre in Burnaby.

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

The Orpheum Theatre and a conversation with Paul Merrick

by Eve Lazarus on August 23, 2014
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Dan Rickard photo. www.danrickard.ca

Dan Rickard photography

A couple of weeks ago, Judy Graves, Tom Carter and I took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Orpheum Theatre.

The “new” Orpheum was designed in 1927 by Marcus Priteca, a Seattle-based architect who fashioned the theatre in a Spanish renaissance style and gave it an opulent air with some sleight of hand tricks.

For instance, if you tap on a colonnade it’s hollow, made from precast plaster. The ornate Baroque ceiling is made from plaster and chicken wire.

Priteca introduced a range of different influences including Italian-inspired terrazzo floors and travertine walls, crests of British heraldry and 145 Czechoslovakian crystal chandeliers.

Judy Graves photo
Judy Graves photo

We got to climb up on a catwalk way above the domed ceiling, visit the projection booth—and we went up on the stage—the same one where Jack Benny and W.C. Fields once performed.

Tom played the original organ.

I didn’t realize how close we came to losing the theatre. In 1973 Famous Players wanted to replace the Orpheum with a Multiplex cinema and it sparked off what was probably the biggest heritage protest in Vancouver’s history. City Hall received 8,000 letters from angry citizens and petitions with thousands of signatures. Ivan Ackery, the Orpheum’s long-time manager bounced back from retirement and joined impresario Hugh Pickett to stage a benefit concert.

The City bought the Orpheum for $3.9 million and poured another $3.2 million into a renovation by Paul Merrick, the same architect who designed Cathedral Place, renovated the Marine Building and converted the BC Electric building into the Electra.

“The Orpheum is a good example of a building that has begged, borrowed and stolen characteristics from all over the world,” Merrick told me. “There’s a dozen different styles going on top of each other, from Spanish to late Edwardian to who knows what, it was just a case of playing some more with it.”

Merrick said the Orpheum was one of “the earliest large adaptive reuse projects” and was more extensive then it appears because the whole of the Vaudeville stage entrance was taken out and redone using a larger version of Priteca’s original design to accommodate a 100-plus orchestra.

“Adapting buildings involves paying all the respect and every respect you can to what it is and what it was and why it’s worth taking trouble with, but that doesn’t mean being stultified or precious about it,” he said. “The focus of architecture is to make a building and when it’s all said and done, buildings need to be objects of utility, to service the people’s uses and needs inside them. They are there to provide shelter, but they are also concerned with affording delight. I always thought if you could make pieces of the city—which is all a building is just another piece of the city—if we can make an environment that we’re happy to leave to our descendants, then that’s as good as you can do.”

VPL 11034, 1928
VPL 11034, 1928

 

 

Our Missing Heritage — What were we thinking? (Part 1)

by Eve Lazarus on September 8, 2013
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The Marine Building is one of Vancouver’s most treasured buildings, a gorgeous example of Art Deco. So why did we destroy our other one? 

From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

The Devonshire Apartments, the Georgia Medical-Dental Building and the Marine Building were all designed by McCarter & Nairne architects.* The Devonshire was first, designed as an apartment building in 1923. Next came the 15-storey Art Deco medical building—and the only one left standing—the Marine Building completed in 1930.

Leonard Frank Photo, 1929
Leonard Frank photo in 1929 showing the Georgia Medical-Dental Building under construction, next to the Devonshire and the Georgia Hotel.

As this more recent photo shows, the HSBC Building now sits where the elegant Devonshire Hotel used to be, and the medical building was blown up or perhaps blown down is more accurate—to make way for the 23-storey Cathedral Place.

I quite like Cathedral Place. It’s nicely tiered, the roof fits in with the Hotel Vancouver across the street, and it even has a few nurses, gargoyles and lions pasted about as a reminder of the former building. Everyone over 35 likely remembers the three nurses in their starchy World War 1 uniforms looking down from their 11th storey parapets. The Rhea Sisters, as they were known, were made from terra-cotta and weighed several tonnes each. The nurses were restored and are now part of the Technology Enterprise Facility building at UBC.

Cathedral Place designed by Paul Merrick
Fibre glass nurse at Cathedral Place

But here’s a thought. Instead of honouring a heritage building by sticking fibreglass casts on a new building, why not just keep the original one!

Paul Merrick, the architect who designed Cathedral Place, and who did such a nice job renovating the Marine Building, converting the old BC Hydro Building to the Electra, and fixing up the Pennsylvania Hotel on Hastings, could have easily designed Cathedral Place someplace else. The Georgia Medical-Dental Building was only 60 after all—hardly old enough for its unseemly demise, but old enough to represent a significant part of our history.

I never saw the Devonshire, it came down in 1981, but I love one of its story. According to newspaper reports after being kicked out of the snotty Hotel Vancouver in 1951, Louis Armstrong and his All Stars walked across the street and were immediately given rooms in the Devonshire. Walter Fred Evans, a one-time member of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra built the Devonshire, and supposedly Duke Ellington, Lena Horne and the Mills Brothers wouldn’t stay anywhere else.

* McCarter & Nairne also designed the Patricia Hotel, 403 East Hastings; Spencer’s Department Store (now SFU at Harbour Centre); the Livestock Building at the PNE, and the General Post Office on West Georgia.

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

Our Missing Heritage is an ongoing series. Please also see:

Our Missing Heritage (part two) Mid Century Modern North Vancouver

Our Missing Heritage (part three) The Empress Theatre

Our Missing Heritage (part four) The Strand Theatre, Birks Building and the second Hotel Vancouver

Our Missing Heritage (part five) The Hastings Street Theatre District

The Marine Building – Built on Rum

by Eve Lazarus on August 9, 2013
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I thought the Marine Building was built by the Guinness family until I started doing some research on this Art Deco icon—one of my favourite buildings in Vancouver.  And while the Guinness family did eventually own it, the developer was a local guy who made a fortune during Prohibition.

Marine Building
Marine Building in 1947. CVA #Bu P346

From Sensational Vancouver

Joe Hobbs:

Joe Hobbs arrived in Vancouver around 1920—the start of US Prohibition. He founded Hobbs Bros, a ship holding company and front for his smuggling activities, and went about converting luxury yachts into rum running vessels.

Joe Hobbs house on Laurier. Eve Lazarus photo

By 1925 Hobbs had made enough money to build a Shaughnessy mansion at 1656 Laurier Street, and three years later he went legit and became the vice-president of Toronto-based G.A. Stimson and Co. Ltd., Canada’s oldest bond company.

Hobbs wanted to build a monument to the city. Stimson’s saw it as an opportunity to expand the company into Western Canada. With the financing in place they secured the land at the foot of Burrard and Hastings Street.

The Elevator operators of the Marine Building. Art Grice photo, 1972 CVA 677-915
First High rise:

McCarter and Nairne, the same architects that designed the Devonshire Hotel, Georgia Medical and Dental Centre and the Livestock building, designed the Marine Building—the first high rise office tower in the city. The architect’s plans called for a “great crag rising from the sea clinging with sea flora and fauna, tinted in sea-green, touched with gold.”

After spending half a day crawling around the inside and outside (unfortunately not the penthouse) I’d say they accomplished what they set out to do. The details are amazing—from the five-foot King Neptune that stands guard from the 16th floor, to the three-dimensional ships carved into the building’s main entrance.

Grand concourse:

When the building opened visitors found it so posh that they couldn’t get beyond the Grand Concourse—the 90-foot long entrance hall. They’d see a floor inlaid with signs of the Zodiac, tiles with whales and Viking ships, and a clock with sea creatures instead of numbers. The five elevators have intricate bronze starbursts on their doors, and when built, were the fastest on the continent outside of New York.

Art Grice photo, 1972 CVA

McCarter and Nairne moved into the 19th floor and stayed for the next 50 years. Directory listings read like a who’s who of business, with tenants that include the Vancouver Board of Trade, Merchants’ Exchange, Lloyds Register of Ships, and the American, Ecuadorian, Venezuela and Costa Rican Consulates. In 1933 there was even a birth control clinic, sharing the 16th floor with a number of shipping, grain and manufacturing companies.

December 16, 1930, CVA Str P20
Million Dollar Folly:

It was too late for Hobbs. People called it the “million dollar folly” because it went $1.1 million over budget, and it bankrupted Stimson’s. Hobbs offered his building to the City of Vancouver for $1 million, but they turned him down, and in 1933 the building sold to the Guinness family for $900,000. Company representative AJT Taylor converted what had been an observation deck into his luxury penthouse, opened an office in the building, bought what’s now the British Properties, and in 1937 opened the Lion’s Gate Bridge.

Related:

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

Shopping for Vancouver Real Estate in 1909

by Eve Lazarus on July 14, 2013
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From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
View of the 300 block West Hastings Street
It turns out that standing in line to buy real estate isn`t some recent Vancouver phenomena—we`ve always done it. Philip T. Timms took this picture in 1909 as hundreds of Vancouver`s wealthiest citizens lined up to buy lots in Shaughnessy Heights from the CPR offices all the way down at the foot of Granville Street. The photo shows the corner of West Hastings and Hamilton Street.

 

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