At 2:00 pm on Sunday March 24, 1974, a group of about a 100 people, many of them students and professors from the UBC School of Architecture, came together in a mock funeral for the Birks Building, an eleven storey Edwardian masterpiece at Georgia and Granville with a terracotta façade and a curved front corner.
Story from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History (also the cover photo). Photos by Angus McIntyre
And the band played:
They marched from the old Vancouver Art Gallery at Georgia and Thurlow, led by a police escort and accompanied by a New Orleans funeral band playing a sombre dirge. The mourners assembled under the “meet me at the Birk’s clock,” an ornate iron timepiece that stood more than 20 feet tall and for decades had been a local landmark and familiar meeting place. For generations of Vancouverites, “Meet you at the Birks clock” was a common phrase.
An act of architectural vanalism:
On this day, it was too late to stop the demolition—it had already begun—but not too late to protest what author and artist Michael Kluckner and others have called an egregious act of architectural vandalism.
The crew working on the new building across the road shut off the air compressors and laid down their tools. Reverend Jack Kent, chaplain of the Vancouver Mariners Club officiated. He was accompanied by a choir.
Angus McIntyre then 26, grabbed his Konica Autoreflex T2 35mm camera and rode his bike downtown to record the event.
Ceremony:
“There was a Gathering, a Sharing of Ideas, a Choir performance and a Laying of the Wreaths,” Angus told me. “A small group of people wearing recycled videotape clothing put hexes on new buildings nearby. As soon as it came time to return to the Art Gallery, the band switched to Dixieland jazz, and the mood became slightly more upbeat.”
And just like that, the beautiful old Birks Building—well not that old really—only 61 in 1974—was killed off to make way for the Scotia Tower and Vancouver Centre mall.
The only positive thing to come out of the loss of this much-loved building was that it mobilized the heritage preservation community in Vancouver and saved many of our other fine old buildings such as the Orpheum Theatre, Hudson’s Bay, Waterfront Station, the Hotel Vancouver and the Marine Building—from a similar fate.
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