Sun Tower

Heritage Vancouver’s Top 10 Most Endangered Heritage Resources of 2016

by Eve Lazarus on May 7, 2016

Bayview Community School (1913-1914) tops the 2016 list

Heritage Vancouver hosted its 16th annual bus tour today, taking people to the buildings, streets and landscapes that the Society believes have the most perilous survival rate. And, it’s not just the mansions—but also schools, churches, streets, and areas—all the things that make a community rich.
Not all the buildings are that old either. There’s the 1978 Crown Life Plaza, St. Stephen’s United Church built in 1964, and the 65-year-old art deco Salvation Army Temple.
HV townley

The 63 remaining Townley & Matheson homes claim a spot—represented by 1550 West 29th, built in 1922 to showcase the use of electricity and which Heritage Vancouver calls “demolition derby.”
Chinatown and Commercial Drive also make the list, as does the Red Light District of Alexander Street, one of the most interesting of all, and an area I studied extensively for Sensational Vancouver.
HV 500 alexander

In 1913, Chief Rufus Chamberlin wrote in a report called “Social Evil” that “there is no restricted district in the City of Vancouver at this time.”
Clearly no one had told the dozen or so madams who had either renovated existing buildings or built luxurious and expensive brothels along Alexander Street. In 1912, a time when there were few opportunities for women, brothel keeping was an attractive proposition. Dolly Darlington bought a sturdy brick building at the corner of Alexander and Jackson. The one at #504 was designed for Kathryn Maynard by William T. Whiteway, the same architect who designed the Sun Tower, while Alice Bernard hired Woolridge and McMullen architects to design and build a two-storey brick rooming house.
These three buildings still exist, as do three others in the 600-block.
HV marie

Others, such as the ones owned by Fay Packard and Marie Gomez’s House of Nations, named for her multi-cultural employees, are long gone.
The lists and the tours are certainly raising awareness, but I was curious whether they are actually working. Heritage Vancouver’s Patrick Gunn says past wins include Carleton Hall Arthur Erickson’s 1980 Evergreen building, but otherwise it’s hit and miss.
He sent me this list from the first tour in 2001 as an illustration:
1.Firehall 13 & 15: one lost, one saved
2. James Shaw House (1894): saved and restored
3. Alexandra Park Cottages: lost
4. VGH Heather Pavilion: ongoing
5. Opsal Steel (1918): saved
6. BC Electric Showroom (1928): saved
7. Pantages Theatre (1907): lost
8. Stanley Park structures: various stages
9. 100-block West Hastings, Ralph Block (1899): saved
10. Ridley House (1911): lost, illegal demolition

Tags Alice Bernard, Arthur Erickson, Crown Life Plaza, Dolly Darlington, Fay Packard, Heritage Vancouver, Kathryn Maynard, Marie Gomez, Patrick Gunn, Rufus Chamberin, Salvation Army Temple, St. Stephen's United Church, Sun Tower, Townley & Matheson, William T. Whiteway, Woolridge and McMullen

Skwachays Lodge, Cultural Tourism and Vancouver’s “Gentrifying DTES”

by Eve Lazarus on August 22, 2015

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

I’m not a huge fan of facadism—the practice of keeping the front of the building and tearing everything else down behind it—but in the case of Skwachays Lodge, it made sense.

photography by Craig Minielly at Aura Photographics — Skwachays (pronounced Squatch Eyes) is the name for the area at the head of Vancouver’s False Creek

In 1913, W.T. Whiteway, the same architect who designed the Sun Tower, created a three-storey brick residential building at 31 West Pender Street that was known as the Palmer Rooms. Over the years, it was called the Pender Hotel and the Wingate Hotel. Oddly the building was formally recognized as one of Canada’s Historic Places in 1994.

Pender Hotel in 2004, photo courtesy City of Vancouver

I say oddly, because the place was a dump. The hotel was used as a repository for stolen property; there were rumours of a meth lab, of a connection to the Pickton farm, and involvement with a well known criminal organization. The hotel witnessed a lot of depravity and violence over the years, and apparently there wasn’t much left of it worth saving.

I dropped by the hotel last week. It’s now owned and operated by the Vancouver Native Housing Society, and I’m impressed with what they’ve done.

SL check in

Judy Graves tells me that she was at the official soil turning ceremony where two very dedicated elders spent a couple of hours smudging the basement foundation with sage. It worked, because Skwachays (pronounced Squatch Eyes) has a welcoming feel to it.

SL entrance

The building provides 24 housing units for artists and 18 hotel rooms, each one designed by aboriginal artists to reflect a different theme with names such as the Hummingbird, the Moon and the Northern Lights suite.

Included in the building is a traditional longhouse on the roof topped off by the Dreamweaver—a 40-foot totem pole, as well as a sweat lodge, smudge room and artists’ workshop. On the first floor, where you check in, there’s an aboriginal-run art gallery.

SL smudge room

I found out about Skwachays when it appeared on the Guardian’s top 10 hotels in Vancouver list that “celebrate art, history and the best in food and drink.” The article promotes the Skwachays—which ranked second—to UK travelers as “Vancouver’s newest boutique hotel in the city’s gentrifying downtown east side.”

SL longhouse

With thanks to Maggie Edwards, general manager for letting me poke around and supplying the photos taken by Craig Minielly at Aura Photographics.

Tags 31 West Pender Street, Cultural Tourism, Palmer Rooms, Pender Hotell, Skwachays Lodge, Sun Tower, W.T. Whiteway, Wingate Hotel

A brief history of Vancouver’s City Halls

by Eve Lazarus on July 26, 2014

Vancouver City Hall designed by Fred Townley — Vancouver City Hall in 1945 CVA City P45

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

Before Vancouver settled on its current City Hall on West 12^th, it had been housed in a number of really interesting buildings.

The Vancouver Police Department outside City Hall in 1886 VPL #1090

The first council started out in a tent shortly after the Great Fire wiped out most of the city in 1886. The tent was on the CPR pier at the foot of Main Street. Chief Constable John Stewart is pictured second from left.

149-151 Powell Street, finished in October 1886

Three months later, the Sentell Brothers were contracted to build the first city hall at 149-151 Powell Street–a two-storey wooden structure. It took just a month to build and came in at under $1,300. But the city couldn’t afford the tab, and the Sentell Brothers took the unusual step of shutting them out until they came up with the cash.

Powell and Columbia Streets Oppenheimer Bros Wholesale Grocers building 1898

The building quickly became too small for the growing city, and when David Oppenheimer was elected mayor in 1888, City Hall into his warehouse on Powell and Columbia. The building is remarkably still there, in a sketchy part of Gastown, rehabilitated and now owned by rock star Bryan Adams.

Oppenheimer was replaced by Frederick Cope as Mayor in 1892 and City Hall moved to the old Market Hall on Main Street (Westminster Avenue until 1910) in 1898 just south of the Carnegie Library at East Hastings and remained there for the next three decades. The building with its wonderful turrets was demolished in 1958.

Holden Block. Leonard Frank photo, 1936 CVA BuP56

In 1929 City Hall moved to the Holden Block at 16 East Hastings designed in 1911 by William T. Whiteway—the same architect who designed the Sun Tower and Kathryn Maynard’s Alexander Street brothel.

Vancouver City Hall from Yukon, 1937, Leonard Frank photo CVA City P21

Since 1937 our art deco City Hall designed by Fred Townley has stayed at its current location on West 12^th. You can thank (or blame) Mayor Gerry McGeer for the look and the location, the first time a major Canadian city had built its city hall outside of the city.

Tags 149-151 Powell Street, Bryan Adams, Carnegie Library, Chief Constable John Stewart, David Oppenheimer, Fred Townley, Gerry McGeer, Holden Block, Kathryn Maynard, Old Market Hall, Opppenheimer Bros, Sentell, Sun Tower, Vancouver City Hall, William T. Whiteway

Lani Russwurm’s Awesome Vancouver

by Eve Lazarus on January 25, 2014

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.

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

Meet Tom Carter Artist

by Eve Lazarus on January 8, 2014

Tom Carter is a Vancouver-based artist known for exploring the city’s gritty urban environments.

by Tom Carter — Harry Carter–Tom’s grandfather outside his East Hastings Street cafe in the 1930s

Heritage Loft:

I visited Tom Carter in his heritage loft a couple of weeks ago. It was the same afternoon that we climbed up to the top of the Sun Tower, in what was in 1912, the tallest building in the British Empire. Tom lives next door in a 100-year-old converted warehouse designed for Storey & Campbell Limited by William Tuff Whiteway, the same architect who designed the Sun Tower for Mayor L.D. Taylor.

His loft looks out onto Pender Street and its floor to ceiling windows give a great view of Victory Square and some of the building stock we’ve managed to hang onto such as the Dominion and the Standard Buildings. The brick walls of the loft make a fitting background for Tom’s paintings of Vancouver’s street scenes and heritage buildings—many now long gone.

"Night falls over the City of Vancouver" by Tom Carter — “Night falls over the City of Vancouver” by Tom Carter

Missing Heritage:

Tom is fascinated by Vancouver’s early theatre industry and has an amazing collection of photographs, books and even some of the original plaster that he managed to salvage on his daily trips to the Pantages Theatre during its destruction two years ago.

Before he starting painting, Tom lived the rock and roll dream. He co-owned and managed a recording studio in Surrey working with artists like Long John Baldry, and members of Chilliwack and Trooper. Tom played keyboard on a lot of the albums, and his beautiful concert grand takes up a prominent position in his loft.

Tom at home with "Warmth at the edge of wilderness" — Tom at home with “Warmth at the edge of wilderness”

Music:

“We did blues albums that were nominated for Juno awards, a lot of roots rock,” says Tom. “I loved it, it was a lot of fun, but then it got to the point it just wasn’t fun anymore.”

Tom bought the loft in 2003, turned 40, stopped drinking, and dabbled in real estate.

“I found myself sitting in this place, I was unemployed, and I didn’t have a clue how I was going to make the next mortgage payment.”

Then he started to research his family history and had a kind of epiphany.

Tom Carter is a Vancouver artist — Plaster from the Pantages Theatre saved from the landfill

“I realized my grandfather was the same age—39—when he moved to Vancouver from the Prairies,” says Tom. “I knew his life from the early 40s on because he had businesses in the Okanagan, he was mayor of Oliver, but I didn’t know much about this transition period, and I was going through the same transition.”

Vancouver Cafe:

Tom learned that his grandfather had owned the Vancouver Cafe and Grill next to the Balmoral Hotel on East Hastings. His father told him about the bombing of the Royal Theatre across the street in 1933, and how a piece of the Royal had smashed into his restaurant.

Tom hit Special Collections at the Vancouver Public Library and the Vancouver Archives and searched through old newspaper articles and photos from the ‘30s and ‘40s. The stories melded with his own memories as a kid in the ‘60s coming into the city to see films at the Orpheum and the Strand.

Tom Carter painting

“There was still Woodwards downtown, we still had the PNE parade—all those Vancouver institutions that are gone now,” he says. “I was trying to find a style—something I really want to paint.”

Tom sold his first painting at a small gallery in West Vancouver for $900, his second for $1,250 and his third for $13,500. Now his sought-after paintings hang on boardroom walls and in private collections all over the city.

Tags 518 Beatty Street, Balmoral Hotel, Chilliwack, Dominion Building, Harry Carter, L.D. Taylor, Long John Baldry, Standard Building, Storey and Campbell, Sun Tower, Tom Carter, Trooper, Vancouver Cafe and Grill, William Tuff Whiteway

Click to read posts about:

Subscribe to Our Newsletter