Presentation House

Behind the Stone Wall on Lynn Valley Road

by Eve Lazarus on March 6, 2021

I was driving along Lynn Valley Road for probably the hundredth time this year, stopped at the traffic lights at Fromme. The Lynn Valley Care Centre is on the corner there, sitting behind a stone fence and a very big monkey tree.

For more stories like this one, check out Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History, there’s a section on North Vancouver.

The site of the former North Vancouver District Hall, now only part of the stone fence and the monkey tree remain. Eve Lazarus photo, March 2021

The stone fence looks really old, much older than the care home. I wanted to know what was originally behind it.

After hitting some local history books and the city directories, I found out that it was the North Vancouver District Municipal Hall.

District:

When the District of North Vancouver was incorporated in 1891 it was huge. It went all the way from Deep Cove to Horseshoe Bay.

And, when the City and District split 16 years later, they needed new headquarters.

North Vancouver District Hall now has a stone fence, ca.1912. NVMA #6646

“The District had to cede quite a lot to its little offspring: the Municipal hall, other municipal buildings and lots, several parks, street ends and water frontage, a ferry, wharves and slips, the whole water system, office furniture, fire-fighting and road-making equipment, street lamps and posts, even the cemetery,” writes Chuck Davis in Reflections -100 Years. “In return the city paid several outstanding liabilities of the District.”

North Vancouver District Hall now has a stone fence and a monkey tree, ca.1920. NVMA #13061

Moodyville:

More change was to come for the District when West Vancouver was incorporated in 1912 and Moodyville became part of the City in 1915.

According to a story in the Vancouver Daily World, the new North Vancouver District Municipal Hall was opened on October 25, 1911 by the Hon. F. Carter-Cotton in fancy new Lynn Valley digs with more than 200 people in attendance.

Fighting about amalgamation was old even in 1968. Province, September 13, 1968

The City moved into a school on Chesterfield and Fourth Avenue that was built in 1902. The building became a “temporary city hall” for the next 62 years. You’ll know it now as Presentation House.

The stately old Lynn Valley building became a private hospital and District Hall moved to its current location on Queens Road.

Judging by the classified ads, it looks like the old District Hall building was replaced with a “modern 50-bed hospital” in the early 1970s.

With special thanks to North Vancouver Museum and Archives and archival rock star Daien Ide.

Tags Hon F. Carter-Cotton, Lynn Valley Care Centre, North Vancouver District Hall, Presentation House

The Photography of Svend-Erik Eriksen

by Eve Lazarus on June 19, 2020

I’m a big fan of Svend-Erik Eriksen’s photography of Vancouver in the ’70s. Last week I called him up and asked how he got started.

Pantages Theatre on East Hastings Street, 1973 (demolished 2011)
Photo: Svend-Erik Eriksen

Erik, is an animator by trade, but his interest in photography goes back to the 1950s when he was a kid in Namu, BC. His parents had immigrated from Denmark and sponsored a Hungarian refugee family who lived with them for a year. “Mr. Frank had a dark room and when I saw pictures emerging in the developer tray, I was just gob smacked. I thought this was incredible.” When Erik was about 12 he moved to the Lower Mainland and saved up and bought a Nikon camera.

Erik’s studio was above Frank’s Cabaret on East Hastings in the 1970s. Photo: Svend-Erik Eriksen

Vancouver School of Art:

In 1969, Erik was a first-year student focusing on photography, painting and animation at the Vancouver School of Art. “In those days animation was very laborious and required a lot of technical skill, the technical end of photography came naturally,” he says.

East Hastings and Columbia from Erik’s studio. Svend-Erik Eriksen photo

After he graduated, an animation project he was working on needed backgrounds of city streets. Erik got up one early Sunday morning in July 1973 and walked from Main to Columbia taking photos.

“I walked all the way down to Woodwards turned and walked all the way back taking photos every ten feet or so,” he says. The NFB film was never aired and the negatives languished in Erik’s drawer for the next couple of decades until he found that someone was doing an analysis of the deterioration of Hastings Street and was looking for photos.

“I had to dig for them. They were all scratched up and full of dust and mildew because they were never meant to be art, they were meant to be utilitarian.”

East Hastings Street, 1973. Svend-Erik Eriksen photo

Unfinished Business:

Erik scanned the negatives, cleaned them up and started stitching them together. When Bill Jeffries, curator at Presentation House in North Vancouver heard about them he asked if he could include them in his upcoming group show: Unfinished Business: Vancouver Street Photographers 1955 to 1985.

Unfortunately, I missed the show in 2003, but I do have the book and it’s filled with some of my favourite photographers: Michael de Courcy, Greg Girard, Curt Lang, Jeff Wall, Paul Wong, Bruce Stewart, Tony Westman and Henri Robideau. Erik’s beautiful panoramas are prominently placed between Fred Herzog and Ian Wallace.

Woolworths on Hastings Street. Svend-Erik Eriksen photo

I asked Erik if he thought of himself as a street photographer.

“No, not really, I consider myself a very eclectic photographer. I work mostly by intuition, I walk around and I take pictures. I don’t actually analyze it too much. It’s very organic, I don’t try and make art.”

1970s Strathcona. Svend-Erik Eriksen photo

Street Photography

Tags Bill Jeffries, Bruce Stewart, Curt Lang, Fred Herzog, Greg Girard, Henri Robideau, Ian Wallace, Jeff Wall, Paul Wong, Presentation House, Svend-Erik Eriksen, Tony Westman

Water’s Edge at Presentation House

by Eve Lazarus on April 16, 2016

Next time you’re in the Lower Lonsdale area, drop by Presentation House and check out Water’s Edge. It’s a new interactive exhibit developed by the North Vancouver Museum that shows how the waterfront has changed over the last couple of hundred years. I did the research and wrote the stories, archivist Janet Turner sourced hundreds of photos and maps, and Juan Tanus and his team at Kei Space added the magic. The result is a really interesting look at how industry, infrastructure and development have changed the coastline all the way from Indian Arm to Ambleside.

Water's Edge at Presentation House — Flotsam and Jetsam wall for making your own art assemblage on set-up day.

The sound effects add to the whole experience, as does a floor to ceiling slide show of the blue cabin and accompanying video, as well as a wall of flotsam and jetsam. One of my favourite touches is the two benches from the old ferry building at the bottom of Lonsdale.

North Van has so many stories that it wasn’t hard to come up with close to 100.

One of my favourite stories is the streetcar that hurtled down Lonsdale in 1909 dumping all of its passengers, including the mayor’s wife, into the water.

Several stories came out of Maplewood, which has seen its coastline change from mudflats to a sand and gravel quarry to squatter shacks. Public protest saved the area from becoming another shopping centre, and it’s now a wild bird reserve that’s home to 246 different bird species.

Indian Arm has a plethora of stories. There’s the Wigwam Inn built by Alvo von Alvensleben in 1909. Canada’s only floating post office operated from 1908 to 1970 up and down Burrard Inlet, as did a floating grocery store which visited 25 different wharves five days a week in summer and three in winter. In 1891 Sarah Bernhardt took some time off from her performances at the long defunct Vancouver Opera House and went duck shooting at Indian Arm.

Water's Edge — Wigwam Inn, 1910. Built by Alvo Alvensleben the Inn attracted people like John Rockefeller and John Jacob Astor. CVA OUT P991.2

There’s stories from what was once Moodyville, named after Sewell P. Moody who went down on a ship in 1875, but not before leaving a message on some driftwood that said “S.P. Moody all lost.” And there’s the fire at the grain elevators 100 years later that claimed five lives.

Many stories come from the Mission Reserve. Their lacrosse team won the 1932 BC Championship. Emily Carr visited several times, painted and wrote about the area, and there are the very unpleasant stories that came out of the Residential School that sat near St. Paul’s Church until its demolition in 1959.

Some of the really amazing stories were the ones that didn’t happen—the aborted plans such as the Capilano Airfield, and if that had gone ahead, would have turned North Van into a very different place than it is today.

Tags Al Neil, Alvo von Alvensleben, Capilano Airfield, Carole Itter, Dollarton Pleasure Faire, emily carr, Joe Capilano, Juan Tanus, Kei Space, North Vancouver Museum and Archives, Presentation House, Sarah Bernhardt, Sewell P. Moody, Vancouver Opera House, Water's Edge, Wigwam Inn

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