Every Place Has a Story

Our missing West End residential heritage: What were we thinking?

the_title()

For more stories like this one see Vancouver Exposed: Searching for this city’s hidden historyWestend in the 50s Tom

I was trekking around the West End with artist and historian Tom Carter on Tuesday. I found some pictures of gorgeous old West End houses at the archives and I wanted to see what replaced them.

Tom had some aerial photos of the West End taken in the ‘50s that showed masses of houses, low rise apartment buildings and lots of trees, built in the late 1880s and early 20th century, before Shaughnessy opened up and the West End was still a desirable place to live.

Many of the old mansions became apartment buildings and rooming houses, and when the six-storey height limit was removed in the late 1950s, most of these old houses and their beautiful gardens disappeared in a frenzy of demolition.

1201 Pendrell

1201 Pendrell Street
The Pillars, CVA Bu P508.82

The house first shows up in the directories in 1906, built for Duncan Rowan who is listed simply as “cannery man.” Duncan died a few years later and the house sold to the Buttimer family where it stayed until1930. When this photo was taken in 1956 it was an apartment building called The Pillars.

Here’s what we’ve done with the lot:

1201 Pendrell, 2015
1201 Pendrell, 2015

1221 Burnaby

Wootton Manor, CVA Bu.P.508.64
Wootton Manor, CVA Bu.P.508.64

Built for George Coleman in 1901, directories show that at one time it was the Convent of the Sacred Heart and later a school called the Vancouver Academy. The house became an apartment building called Wootton Manor in the 1940s.

This is Wootton Manor’s replacement:

Wootton manor replacement

1185 Harwood

1185 Harwood Street, CVA Bu.508.27
1185 Harwood Street, CVA Bu.508.27

Well, at least the stone fence is still there. The house was once surrounded by other old mansions and built for Alex Morrison, a contractor. It stayed in the family until 1930 and became the Margaret Convalescent and Nursing home during the war years.

1185 Harwood
1185 Harwood, 2015

1025 Gilford

Thomas Fee house
1025 Gilford, VPL 16134, ca.1910

Architect Thomas Fee designed this house for his family in 1907 because Mrs. Fee wanted a house in the country. Fee was part of Parr and Fee a prolific architectural firm that designed numerous buildings such as Glen Brae in Shaughnessy, The Manhattan apartments on Robson, the Hotel Europe in Gastown and the Vancouver Block. The house became the Park Gilford Hotel in the late 1940s. It came down in 1961.

All that remains is a few holly trees.

fee today

For more about the West End:

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

Our Missing Heritage: The buildings along West Georgia Street

the_title()

1924 Vancouver streetscape by W.J. Moore

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

I came across this photo* of downtown Vancouver in 1924 while I was playing on Vancouver Archive’s site a few years ago. It took me quite a while to figure out what I was looking at. There’s the Vancouver Block sticking up in the background—you can see the familiar clock—but check out all those other amazing buildings: the Strand Theatre, the Birks Building and the Second Hotel Vancouver—all missing from our streetscape less than half-a-century later.

The hotel was the first to go. Built by the CPR in 1916, you can see some of the incredible detail of the architecture in the photo (above). It even had a trellised outdoor roof café. It was all too grand for Vancouver apparently, because when the third (and existing) Hotel Vancouver was finished, its days were numbered. Eatons bought the site in 1949, pulled down the building and it remained an empty lot for the next two decades. The lot became the Eaton Centre in 1974, then Sears, and now it’s Nordstrom, a US department store.

Across the road from the second Hotel Vancouver was the beautiful old Birks Building. Well not that old really, only 61 in 1974. She was killed off to make way for the Scotia Tower and ugly Vancouver Centre (you know the one with London Drugs on Granville and Georgia).

* CVA Str N201.1

For more posts like this one see: Our Missing Heritage

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