Sensational Vancouver

In and out of Vogue: A Vancouver art deco story

by Eve Lazarus on February 14, 2015

The Vogue Theatre opened in April 1941 and was designated as a national historic site in 1993.

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

Dal Richards opened:

On April 15, 1941 the Dal Richards Big Band was the opening act for the Vogue Theatre, a combination vaudeville and movie house located on Granville Street near the Commodore. A screening of the movie “I See Ice,” followed, and nearly 1,400 people filled the Odeon Theatre that night, with almost as many again gathered outside attracted by the spotlights, the lighted marquee, and the huge neon sign.

The day after the opening the Vancouver Sun captured some of the excitement: “Swinging searchlights cut the sky above a gleaming modernistic façade swathed with flags and banners, floodlights glared and hissed, crowds surged against lines held by police and commissionaires, motion-picture cameras whirred and flashbulbs flared, as the guests passed into the theatre, notables among them paused, bowed and spoke brief acknowledgements of introductions into waiting microphones.”

Missing mural:

While sleuthing through the files at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Jason Vanderhill found this photo of Jack Shadbolt and Paul Goranson painting a mural on one of the walls of the Vogue in 1940, a little before it opened. My other pal Aaron Chapman searched the building, its plans and old photos, but if the mural still exists, it’s well hidden.

Toronto-based Kaplan and Sprachan architects designed the art deco building for Harry Reifel. Inside, the auditorium ceiling was tiered and back lit with neon tubing to resemble waves, and when it first opened, giant golden mermaids were painted on the walls, and the washrooms sported art deco aquamarine and orange tiles.

Outside the Vogue’s distinctive neon sign is topped by a 12-foot figure of a kneeling goddess Diana that looks suspiciously like a car hood ornament. She’s the second Diana, the first was made of sheet metal and covered in gold leaf by artist Bud Graves and commissioned by Harry Reifel for $500.

When Odeon Theatres renovated the Vogue in the 1960s the goddess was in rough shape and sent to the scrap heap. A distraught Reifel immediately commissioned a second statue at ten times the price.

“The front of the theatre without her was like a Jersey cow without horns,” he told a Vancouver Sun reporter at the time.

The sign—one of the largest on theatre row’s sea of neon—has changed colours over the years, but is now back to its original red and yellow colour scheme.

Vogue Theatre 1959

Tags Aaron Chapman, Bud Graves, Commodore Ballroom, Dal Richards, Harry Reifel, Jack Shadbolt, Jason Vanderhill, Kaplan and Sprachan Architects, Odeon Theatres, Paul Goranson, Sensational Vancouver, Vogue Theatre

Black History Month: Valerie Jerome

by Eve Lazarus on February 1, 2015

Most people have heard of Harry Jerome. His name adorns recreation centres and his statue is in Stanley Park. At one time he was the fastest man alive, setting a total of seven world records. In 1970 he was made an officer of the Order of Canada. Fewer people remember his sister Valerie, yet she is just as amazing.

The following is an excerpt from Sensational Vancouver’s Legendary Women chapter.

In November 2012 friends and former students of Valerie Jerome dedicated a bench in her honour

Valerie Jerome had just turned seven when she moved with her family from Winnipeg to North Vancouver. Along with her sister Carolyn, 10, and brothers Harry, 11 and Barton, 6, they moved in across the road from Ridgeway Elementary.

Valerie still vividly remembers her first day at that school.

“It seemed like every kid in the school was lined up with rocks,” she says. “I can still remember the feeling of the first rock that hit my back as we ran.”

Valerie Jerome — Lyon Place, North Vancouver

Valerie doesn’t like to think much about those days, but every February, for more than a decade, she drove across the bridge from Vancouver, returned to her old elementary school and talked to the kids about those early days for Black History month.

She started by pointing to the house on Lyons Place where they lived, and where in 1953, fire broke out during the middle of the night when the sawdust burner caught fire. Valerie was sent to ask a neighbour to call the fire department, not because she was the oldest—she wasn’t—but because she was the whitest.

The family were left out on the street while the neighbours watched from behind their curtains.

“Nobody came out to help us. My mother was pregnant with my youngest sister and we finally got a cab to the Salvation Army Hall on Lonsdale,” says Valerie. The family spent the night on chairs on the sidewalk.

In 1954 the Jeromes bought a small rancher on East 17^th near their next school Sutherland Junior Secondary. Valerie worked in the school cafeteria at lunch time, rather than sit alone at a table or go home.

The year she turned 15 everything changed. She set Canadian records at the 1959 Canadian Track and Field National Championships in her running events, broke her age group record for long jump, and helped her team win the relay. She won bronze at the Pan American games in Chicago, and the following year, she joined her brother Harry to represent Canada at the Summer Olympics in Rome.

The media of the day called them the “dusky brother and sister athletes.”

Harry and Valerie Jerome at the airport. SFU Special Collections photo

“After I had been to the Olympics I was invited to eat with everybody,” she says. “We had a little bit of celebrity and somehow our brown skins turned white.”

The City of North Vancouver held a dance in their honour and gave them $500 each to spend.

Sport made everything bearable, she says.

“When the stopwatch gave you a great time, it didn’t matter what colour you were.”

Harry died from a brain aneurysm in 1982. He was 42.

Valerie went to university, became a teacher and taught in Vancouver for 35 years. She spent three decades as a track and field official. Valerie ran in eight elections for the Green Party, federally, provincially and civically. She did all that without any expectation of being elected, but as a way of getting green ideas out. “Nobody was talking about the environment at all in those days,” she says. Her son, Stuart Parker, led the BC Green Party from 1993 to 2000.

In November 2010 dozen of her former students gathered in Stanley Park to see a bench dedicated in her honour. It sits in Stanley Park right next to the statue of her brother Harry.

Tags Black History Month, harry jerome, Ridgeway Elementary, Sensational Vancouver, valerie jerome

Arthur Erickson’s House and Garden are on the Endangered List

by Eve Lazarus on January 10, 2015

Arthur Erickson is one of Canada’s most famous architects, yet his own house and garden ranks #8 on Heritage Vancouver’s top 10 endangered sites for 2014.

Erickson's house on West 14th. Selwyn Pullan Photo, 1959 — Erickson’s house on West 14th. Selwyn Pullan Photo, 1959

Arthur Erickson’s fingerprints are all over some of Metro Vancouver’s most iconic buildings—the Museum of Anthropology, Simon Fraser University and dozens of residential houses.

Unusual for an architect, Erickson chose not to design his own house, but bought a large corner lot in Point Grey with a 1924 cottage and garage for $11,000 out of which he created the 900-square-foot home where he lived for the next 52 years.

“Architecturally this house is terrible, but it serves as a refuge, a kind of decompression chamber,” he told author Edith Iglauer*.

Museum of Anthropology — Margaret Trudeau with Arthur Erickson and Elvi Whittaker, 1976. Photo John Morris, UBC Library

He replaced the walls with sliding glass and connected the buildings, adding a bathroom and a kitchen. He played with different materials—leather tiles on the bathroom wall, wall tiles in Italian suede in the living room, and Thai silk in the study—and then he turned his attention to the garden.

Erickson bulldozed the English garden, dug a hole for the pond and used the dirt to make a hill high enough to block the view of his house from his neighbours.

“Everybody in the neighbourhood thought I was excavating to build a house, and chatted with me over the picket fence, very happy to believe that they were no longer going to have a nonconformist garage dweller among them,” he told Iglauer*.

He planted grasses and rushes from the Fraser River, pine trees from the forest, put in 10 different species of bamboo, and added rhododendrons, a dogwood, and a persimmon to the existing fruit trees. He was known for throwing lavish garden parties that drew a guest list ranging from Pierre Trudeau to Rudolf Nureyev

Barry Downs lived in the Dunbar area at the time and knew Erickson quite well.

“We both had little ponds full of fish and one day Mary and I gave him a turtle,” said Downs. “He phoned me up and said ‘get over here your turtle is eating my fish!’”

Down’s told him that was impossible, the turtle had a mouth the size of Erickson’s thumb.

“I went over and sure enough there’s a fish sticking out of its mouth,” said Downs, adding that yes he took the turtle back.

“Arthur was ruthless. He had a BB gun and would shoot at the herons that would come in and land and eat his fish. Once he told me that he shot through the neighbour’s window accidently,” says Downs.

Arthur Erickson. Selwyn Pullan photo, 1972

Downs says the impressive Japanese-inspired marble terrace panels in the garden are the toilet stalls from the old Hotel Vancouver.

Erickson may have been a talented architect but he was hopeless with finances. By 1992 he had racked up over $10 million in debt and was on the verge of losing his house. A group of friends which included Peter Wall, who took over the $475,000 mortgage, placed the house and garden in the hands of the Arthur Erickson Foundation. Erickson lived there until his death in 2009.

*Iglauer, Edith. Seven Stones: A Portrait of Arthur Erickson, Architect. Harbour Publishing, 1981.

Tags 4195 West 14th, Arthur Erickson, Barry Downs, Edith Iglauer, Elvi Whittaker, Heritage Vancouver, Margaret Trudeau, Mary Downs, Museum of Anthropology, Selwyn Pullan, Sensational Vancouver, Simon Fraser University

Frederick Horsman Varley’s Lynn Valley (1881-1969)

by Eve Lazarus on December 6, 2014

One of the best things about messing with history is finding connections, and it’s always exciting when they’re right under your nose. When I found out that Group of Seven artist Fred Varley once lived in an old brown house on Rice Lake road, just minutes from my own, I started poking about in his life and how the few years that he spent teaching and working in Vancouver helped shape art and architecture.

This is an excerpt from Sensational Vancouver’s West Coast Modern chapter:

In 1932 Fred Varley was sketching in North Vancouver when he noticed a small house high up on the bank of Lynn Creek. He walked around the place, peered in the windows and saw that it was deserted. The boxy little house was in rough condition. It had porches tacked on to the front and back and an unfinished room on the main floor. He climbed up on the verandah and looked out over the valley and saw Mt. Seymour and Lynn Peak. When he looked down he saw a deep narrow canyon below.

To his delight the house came with a piano and was available for $8 a month. He could commute to Vancouver by street car and ferry.

“That was the happiest time,” Varley told a reporter 20 years later. “The only place in the world that I truly felt was mine.”

Varley was a talented artist, he was more than a decent teacher, and as a founder of the Group of Seven, he was a Canadian icon. He was also an irresponsible alcoholic who loved women, and with his handsome face, clear blue eyes and shock of copper-red hair—women loved him back.

None of this was much consolation to his wife Maud and their four children Dorothy, John, Jim and Peter. The family were evicted from two rented Kitsilano homes in the short time they’d lived in Vancouver, and were about to be abandoned for 19-year-old Vera Weatherbie.

Varley had moved out to B.C. in 1926 to teach at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts—the forerunner to Emily Carr University of Art + Design. For a while he taught at his own school, but his school failed in the Depression, and leaving his family to fend for themselves, Varley moved to Lynn Valley.

The next three years were supposedly his spiritual high. Varley painted Dharana, Birth of Clouds, Lynn Creek, the Trail to Rice Lake and Weather-Lynn Valley—many from the second story window of his house.

When Varley moved to Ottawa, Maud bought the house from a small heritance. The house stayed in the family until 1974.

Varley’s grandson, Chris spent time there in the ‘60s. “It was a magical spot, although in seriously dilapidated condition,” he says. “At that time it was still stuffed with Varley’s paintings and drawings. Church at Yale, now in the B.C. Archives, hung in the stairwell.”

Chris remembers an unframed portrait of his Aunt Dorothy wrapped in a green garbage bag and stored under the kitchen sink.

“There was an old bureau with a drawer full of scattered, unmatted drawings,” he says. “An early Tom Thomson sketch was reputedly used to patch a leak in the ceiling of the attic.”

Frederick Varley, Group of Seven — Varley’s house. Eve Lazarus photo, 2013

Tags Frederick Varley, Group of Seven, Lynn Valley, Maud Varley, Rice Lake Road, Sensational Vancouver, Tom Thomson, Vera Weatherbie

The Ghosts of Mole Hill

by Eve Lazarus on October 18, 2014

This totally true ghost story took place in the West End’s Mole Hill. The full story, and those of other haunted houses appeared in Sensational Vancouver

Mole Hill

Mole Hill:

In the 1960s, the City of Vancouver started buying up a mixture of Queen Anne and Edwardian houses along Comox Street in the West End, intending to bulldoze them and double the size of Nelson Park.

If the idea of demolition wasn’t enough to rattle a few ghosts, one of the living residents, Blair Petrie set about spearheading a five-year campaign to save the houses in Mole Hill an area that stretches in a square around Comox, Thurlow, Bute and Pendrell Streets. As part of his research, he made a couple of ghostly discoveries.

Mole Hill

Built in 1903:

The Thurlow Street house was one of four built in 1903 by a doctor who went into real estate speculation, the favourite sideline of almost anyone with a few bucks at the time. He likely flipped it right away, and it changed hands over the years to a number of different, mostly working class residents.

When Blair started his research, the house was a bed and breakfast where strange things happened. The two young guys who ran it would find lights turned on after they had turned them off, and once found a room locked from the inside.

Most convincing though, were the actual sightings. “They had both witnessed this ghost and had many of their customers over the years come down to breakfast totally freaked out,” said Blair.

The Ghost:

The ghost only showed herself in one bedroom and always wore a high-necked nightgown. The owners found old markings on the floor and figured out where the original furniture sat. From the placing they could imagine her brushing her long blonde hair in front of the dresser mirror.

Most of the sightings were by women who generally chose to stay in that particular room. Once the ghost asked a guest: “Are you being taken care of here?”

Blair couldn’t find anything in the house’s history to explain the ghost. Now that the house has changed owners, been stripped to its studs, and remodelled into rental suites, he says he doesn’t know whether the ghost stayed or moved somewhere more accommodating.

1025 Comox Street — Mole Hill is named for Henry Mole who built a house on Comox in 1895 CVA BuP697

For more ghostly stories check out these podcasts:

S1 E9 Three Ghost Stories and a Murder

S2 E24 Halloween Special 2021

Victoria’s Ghost

Tags 1025 Comox Street, Blair Petrie, Henry Mole, Mole Hill, Sensational Vancouver

The Georgia Viaduct

by Eve Lazarus on September 27, 2014

Rebuilding of the Georgia Viaduct, 1971 — Vancouver Archives 216-1.23, 1971

The Georgia Viaduct knocked out a lot of buildings in 1971 including Hogan’s Alley and Vie’s Chicken and Steakhouse.

Urban Renewal:

The photo (above) was shot in 1971 and appears in Sensational Vancouver’s Walk on the Wild Side chapter to illustrate “urban renewal”—the City of Vancouver’s excuse for trying to demolish Strathcona and Chinatown.

It’s also one of the few photos that I’ve been able to find that shows that corner of Main and Union Street.

CVA 216-1.23 Vancouver Archives allows you to zoom into the photo which I’ve done in the inset. The building on the corner is still there. The little building next door at 207 Union (recently re-numbered 209) now houses the Jimi Hendrix shrine. Before it was levelled into a parking lot and later turned into an extension of the shrine—the real 209 Union Street had a fascinating history.

Mattlo’s Bootlegging Joint:

In 1937 the house was Louis Mattlo’s bootlegging joint. There’s a great photo in the Vancouver Sun showing Mattlo arrested and hauled off to jail after trying to break into his padlocked house with a screwdriver.

A city magistrate had come up with an innovative idea of ordering police to padlock three of the homes of the most notorious bootleggers. Unfortunately, police had locked in the Mattlo family’s tabby and had to go back in to rescue the cat. And what they didn’t bank on, was that the families would elect to stay inside the padlocked homes. Eve Lazarus photo

Uniformed officers were posted outside each of the homes to help facilitate the departure of the family members should they change their mind. It took over two weeks.

In the late 1940s, the house became Vie’s Chicken and Steak House, a famous Hogan Alley landmark operated by Vie and Robert Moore for more than 30 years.

Vie’s became a favourite destination for visiting black performers including Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong. Local legend has it that Nora Hendrix worked at Vie’s and that her grandson, rocker Jimi Hendrix played there.

Tags 209 Union Street, City of Vancouver Archives, Jimi Hendrix, Louis Mattlo, Nora Hendrix, Sensational Vancouver, Vie Moore, Vie's Chicken and Steak House

The Curve of Time: national bestseller after more than 50 years

by Eve Lazarus on August 30, 2014

It’s been incredibly exciting seeing Sensational Vancouver claim the top spot on the Best of BC list for the past four weeks, and it’s made me pay close attention to the book section in the Vancouver Sun.

What I’ve noticed is that M. Wylie Blanchet’s The Curve of Time, has ranked in the top 10 on the National Bestsellers list for the past seven weeks.

This is absolutely phenomenal. Not only is the book written about Vancouver Island, but it was first published over half a century ago.

Whitecap Books published a 50^th Anniversary edition in 2011. Steph Hill, publicist, was equally mystified, and couldn’t tell me why a regional book is doing so well on the national scene after such a long time in print.

If you haven’t had the pleasure, it’s certainly worth a read. In 1922 “Capi,” her husband Geoffrey and their five kids moved out to Vancouver Island from Montreal. They bought a house on property near the Swartz Bay Ferry.

Five years later Geoffrey took out their boat one day and never returned.

Widowed at 33, and the sole support for five children aged between two and 14 in an economy teetering on the brink of the Depression, Capi survived by renting out her house for the summers, packing up the kids and Pam the Irish Setter and sailing around B.C.’s rugged coastline.

Vancouver Sun's National Bestseller List for non-fiction August 30, 2014 — Vancouver Sun’s National Bestseller List for non-fiction August 30, 2014

The book is an account of those trips.

“Destiny rarely follows the pattern we would choose for it and the legacy of death often shapes our lives in ways we could not image,” she writes in The Curve of Time.

In 1949, Capi and her son David built a small house on the cliff of their property.

I wrote about Capi, her house, her boat and her kids in Sensational Victoria in 2012. The current owner bought the property in the early 1990s and gave me a tour of her house. It’s a beautiful place with an amazing view, but what I loved is that while the house has been remodeled and enlarged over the years, they have built the house around Capi’s livingroom and two bedrooms. The cedar that she and David hand-hewn to make the cathedral ceiling and the walls, as well as the original rock fireplace, remain unaltered.

Capi's house on Tyron Road, Eve Lazarus photo, 2012 — Capi’s house on Tyron Road, Eve Lazarus photo, 2012

The truly tragic thing was that Capi Blanchet was found dead at her typewriter shortly after her book was published, never knowing the success that her book would enjoy.

Tags Capi Blanchet, Sensational Vancouver, Sensational Victoria, The Curve of Time, Whitecap Books

The incredible photography of Selwyn Pullan

by Eve Lazarus on August 16, 2014

Selwyn Pullan, photographer — Selwyn Pullan in his studio, 2008. Kenneth Dyck photo

I’ve been posting pictures of the BC Electric Building on Facebook this week, but I haven’t posted this one—it’s on the back of Sensational Vancouver and in the chapter on West Coast Modern. The photo was shot by Selwyn Pullan in 1957, the same year BC Electric completed this ground breaking piece of architecture.

While Ned Pratt and Ron Thom were designing the BC Electric building and other west coast modern architects such as Arthur western living 1961 Erickson and Barry Downs were producing buildings full of glass and angles and natural materials built to expand into spaces in ways unseen before, it was Selwyn Pullan who captured their vision.

Selwyn studied under Ansel Adams at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, and after moving back to Vancouver he became a sought after commercial photographer, working for magazines such as Western Homes and Living, Macleans and Architectural Digest.

“I just look at the house and photograph it,” he told me. “I don’t have any preconceptions when I photograph, it’s a journalistic assignment not a photographic one.”

Many of Selwyn’s photos are in my book, and so is he. He’s over 90 now and still living in the North Vancouver house he bought in 1952. Pullan asked Fred Hollingsworth to design a carport. The finished structure looks more like a plane than a garage, and that’s interesting not just from an architectural point of view, but because he and Hollingsworth used to make model airplanes together as teens. Pullan says Hollingsworth still does.

Selwyn Pullan's studio. Selwyn Pullan photo, 1960 — Selwyn Pullan’s studio. Selwyn Pullan photo, 1960

In 1960 when Pullan needed a multi-purpose studio and darkroom for his growing photographing business, he sought out Hollingsworth again. Rather then add another room to the house, the architect created a covered passageway that led from the house and flowed down the slope of the property. He designed a two-level studio with floor-to-ceiling windows and concrete floors that blend seamlessly with the landscape.It was here in 1969 that Selwyn shot the paintings for Lawren Harris’s book, from the artist’s early days with the Group of Seven through to his abstract period in Vancouver. Selwyn refused to shoot them anywhere except his studio and only when he was alone. The paintings would be trucked to his studio in batches, taken away and a new group brought in. Harris, who lived on ritzy Belmont Avenue in Vancouver, died the following year. Cover image by DRK Design. To see more of his work, see Selwyn Pullan: Photographing Mid-Century West Coast Modern, Douglas & McIntyre, 2012.

Tags Ansel Adams, Architectural Digest, Art Center School, Arthur Erickson, Barry Downs, BC Electric, Fred Hollingsworth, Lawren Harris, Ned Pratt, Ron Thom, Selwyn Pullan, Sensational Vancouver, Western Homes and Living

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