Eve Lazarus's Blog: Every Place has a Story, page 31

Glen McDonald: Vancouver’s Colourful Coroner

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Glen McDonald Courtesy Vancouver Sun, 1979.

If I was able to go back in time and choose six people to interview, Glen McDonald would be high up on the list. I got to know him while I was researching Murder by Milkshake, and his 1985 book How Come I’m Dead? has a prime position on the book shelf above my desk.

McDonald was Vancouver’s coroner from 1954 to 1980. Unlike the star of CBC’s new show Coroner, McDonald was not a doctor. In BC—and I’m quoting from a government job posting—there are 32 full-time coroners with backgrounds in law, medicine, investigation and journalism.

Glen McDonald, courtesy Vancouver Sun 1965

McDonald, who was a lawyer and a judge, called himself the “Ombudsman of the Dead.” He told people it was his job to find the cause of death in order to help the living, and he did this from his morgue on East Cordova Street, where an average of 1,100 bodies passed through each year. He smoked 50 cigarettes a day, drank beer and spirits kept beside forensic specimens in an office fridge, and conducted one or two inquests a week that looked into deaths ranging from shootings and stabbings to drug overdoses and traffic accidents.

You can visit McDonald’s old morgue and Coroner’s Court at the Vancouver Police Museum, 240 East Cordova Street. Courtesy VPM

His job was to assemble a jury and determine whether death was natural, accidental, suicide, or homicide. After he retired, he admitted to occasionally lying to priests so that his Catholic victims could be buried in consecrated ground. He’d say he hadn’t reached a conclusion. The funeral would go ahead as if the death was not a suicide and McDonald would sign the death certificate when the body was safely in the ground.

He said his job was to find the cause of death in order to protect the living, and he investigated everything from deaths by shooting, stabbing, and strangulation, to poisoning, suicide, drug overdoses, and death by traffic, rail and boat accidents.

Glen McDonald. Photo by Alex Waterhouse-Hayward for Vancouver Magazine, 1984

He officiated over the Inquest of 18 men who were killed when the Second Narrows Bridge collapsed while under construction in 1958. And, he was in charge when CP Flight 21 blew up over the BC Interior killing all 52 people on board in 1965.

One of his more famous cases was the death of Aussie actor Errol Flynn in 1959. Flynn, 50, was in Vancouver with his 17-year-old girlfriend trying to sell his yacht Zaca to a local millionaire. He had a heart attack while at a party in the West End and ended up in McDonald’s morgue. (The full story is in Sensational Vancouver).

Errol Flynn aboard the Zaca. From the collection of Luther Greene

The first time McDonald came across death by arsenic poisoning was in 1965 with the murder of Esther Castellani. The first thing he did was install himself in the science section of the VPL and read everything he could find about arsenic poisoning. As he wrote in How Come I’m Dead? he suspected that Rene Castellani had been at the library some months before, doing exactly the same thing.

My favourite McDonaldism is when he gained national notoriety for calling Bingo Canada’s most dangerous sport. He was referring to the number of seniors who were run over while walking to their weekly games.

McDonald died 23 years ago—on January 23, 1996. He was 77.

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

Fritz Autzen and the West End’s Hippocampus

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The Hippocampus at 1076 Denman Street, ca.1960. Fritz Autzen photo

When Fritz Autzen, a baker from Neukölln, Germany moved his family to British Columbia in 1954, his first job was a cook at the Surrey Drive-in based in Newton. Five years later he moved his family to the West End and took over the Hippocampus, a fish & chip shop and deli on Denman and Comox Streets.

The Surrey Drive-in, 1956. Fritz Autzen photo

When he wasn’t working, Fritz loved to take photos in and around Vancouver, and his daughter Chris Stiles recently sent me some of her favourites.

One of them is of a business card with the opening hours 11 am to 10 pm Tuesday to Sunday. “I remember the first few years my dad had the business he never closed for holidays because he was afraid that somebody else would come and take his customers,” she says.

Fritz invented the torpedo sandwich and garlic vinegar to put on your fish and chips.

Fritz Autzen invented the Torpedo Sandwich, a forerunner to the Subway.

Chris and her older brother Michael went to Lord Roberts Elementary. The house and business are still there—one of a row of four along Denman near Davie, and some of Vancouver’s few remaining “buried houses.”  

In this photo of the 1000 block Denman you can see the early construction of Denman Place Mall on the left of the frame. Fritz Autzen photo, ca.1965

The houses were built in the early 1900s, but a look through the city directories shows the storefronts weren’t added until the 1940s. By the end of that decade, Harry Almas, who owned the King Neptune Seafood Restaurant in New Westminster, and in 1959, North Vancouver’s Seven Seas Restaurant at the foot of Lonsdale Avenue, bought the house and divided it into three apartments. The Hippocampus was added in 1953. Fritz and Herta moved into Harry and Eva Almas’s apartment and managed the other two apartments in return for a break in the rent.

Fritz Autzen at work in the Hippocampus ca.1960. Courtesy Chris Stiles

Because Monday was the only day the store closed, Fritz would grab his camera and take the kids out of school and hit Stanley Park, pick huckleberries at Lost Lagoon, and eat at the Marco Polo in Chinatown. In summer, the kids would wait for the diving barge and slide to come in at English Bay.

Chris still has Fritz’s immigration papers when he entered Canada a few months ahead of his family in 1954. His net worth was $226 and included his clothes (valued at $160), a pair of binoculars and his Teco camera.

Denman Street “buried houses” in 2017

The family lived above the store from 1959 to 1967. That year they moved to Richmond and Fritz opened the Seahorse Café.

When Fritz died in 1981, he left over one thousand slides.

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

Guy in the Sky: The BowMac Sign

The following story is an excerpt from Murder by Milkshake: An Astonishing Story of Adultery, Arsenic, and a Charismatic Killer.

Photo courtesy Angus McIntyre ca.1968. From the roof of the Fairmont Apartments at Spruce and W.10th

On June 4, 1965, CKNW personality Rene Castellani climbed to the top of the scaffolding next to the BowMac Sign and promised not to come down until every last car on the lot was sold.

That would take nine days.

Courtesy Vancouver Archives, ca.1960.

These days, the scene takes a bit of imagination. Auto row and the Bowell McLean Motor Company on West Broadway are long gone, and the giant neon sign has been neglected and was partially covered over by the current tenant—Toys-R-Us—more than 20 years ago.

But back to 1965.

The BowMac car dealership had a history of staging stunts to lure customers away from the Dueck Chevrolet Oldsmobile dealership down the road. Under Jimmy Pattison’s management, promotions included dressing up a performing monkey in overalls and hiring the Leavy brothers—seven-foot-tall twins—to hang out in the used car lot. In 1958, Pattison staged what was billed as the “world’s largest checker game” where models in red or black bathing suits became the checkers moving across a board of two-foot squares.

Pattison topped even that the following year when he commissioned Neon Products—a company he later brought—to build a sign the height of a seven-storey building with orange and red letters that spelled BOWMAC, and powered by a transformer that could light up 30 houses.

The sign cost $100,000, weighed 12 tons, and was briefly North America’s largest free-standing sign.+

April 30, 1959. Courtesy Vancouver Sun

Castellani’s assignment was called “the Guy in the Sky” and the stunt called for him to live in a station wagon next to the neon sign. The station wagon was equipped with a telephone and a direct line to CKNW, bedding, and a chemical toilet. Food was sent up to him in a bucket. The car was brightly lit up, and he was quite visible from the ground most of the time. He would give regular broadcasts from the tower. Passerbys were encouraged to drive by and honk their horns, and they could see a clothesline strung from the station wagon to the sign with a pair of Castellani’s shorts swaying in the wind.

Rene Castellani and Jack Cullen, ;1964. Courtesy Colleen Hardwick

The BowMac Sign promotion became a central part in Castellani’s capital murder trial for the arsenic poisoning of his wife Esther. A Toronto lab was able to use a nuclear reactor to chart the progress of arsenic in Esther’s hair and fingernail growth and provide a rough timeline of when she received the poison and in what quantities. Esther, who had been in Vancouver General Hospital for the nine-day duration of the promotion, had greatly improved while Castellani was away. On the day after he came back down from the sign, she got really ill and never recovered. It coincided with the charts that showed she had received a massive dose of arsenic while she was in hospital and sometime within 35 days of her death on July 11, 1965.

From FB group I Grew up in Vancouver. Photographer unknown

As for the sign, it was the subject of a Heritage Revitalization Agreement in 1997 where Toys-R- Us was allowed to add their signage instead of demolishing the sign. That agreement now runs until 2022 or until Toys-R-U goes bankrupt.

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

 

The Introvert’s Guide to the Holiday Season

After you’ve spent most of December at Christmas Parties and work functions, the small talk can just dry up. Here are some conversational kickstarters to get you back on track over the holiday festivities and help you find your feet.

The Story of the Severed Feet

I was at a Christmas party last week when the conversation turned to severed feet. You remember all those ones that turned up wearing running shoes in spots like False Creek, Richmond and Gabriola Island? It wasn’t some twisted serial killer or gang sign, when the body decomposes the feet separate (disarticulate). Normally the feet would sink, but sneakers like Nike Air have air pockets, which turns them into little life jackets. Sadly, the found feet belonged to suicides.

 

The Ku Klux Klan’s Shaughnessy digs:

In 1925, the Ku Klux Klan moved into a Glen Brae, a Shaughnessy mansion on Matthews Street. While Vancouverites were a racist bunch back then, apparently living near a mob of men wearing white robes and hoods and carrying fiery crosses through the tree-lined streets, was over the top. The KKK lasted less than a year in Vancouver. The mansion is still there, it’s now Canuck’s Place Children’s Hospice.

Source: At Home With History: The Secrets of Greater Vancouver’s Heritage Houses

KKK at Glen Brae in 1925. Courtesy CVA 99-1501

Hit and Run Over:

My favourite Chuck Davis story is from October 6, 1909. Vancouver’s first mechanized ambulance was out for a trial spin, dodged a couple of streetcars and then hit and killed a wealthy American tourist crossing Granville and Pender Street. The story ran in several North American newspapers and reported that C.F. Keiss, from Austin, Texas was in Vancouver “preparing to start on an extended hunting trip.”

Source: The Chuck Davis History of Metropolitan Vancouver

Vancouver’s first ambo would have looked something like this. Courtesy Just a Car Guy

Lurancy Harris’s Beat

If you think it’s tough being a woman in the police, RCMP or military ranks today, imagine what it was like back in 1912 when Lurancy Harris became one of the first two women police officers in Canada. She was sworn in as a fourth-class constable, given full police powers and thrown into the job with no training, no uniform and no gun.  Her big break came when she got the job of escorting Lorena Mathews on the train back to Oklahoma to stand trial for murder. Mathews had bolted to Vancouver with her two children and Jim Chapman, her 25-year-old black lover who were suspected of murdering her much older husband (you just can’t make this stuff up!) Chapman was convicted, Mathews was acquitted and Lurancy got  a promotion. She ended her career as an inspector with the VPD, although she was kept at the pay scale of a sergeant.

Source: Sensational Vancouver

Lurancy Harris

Shark Attack in False Creek:

On July 5, 1905 eight-year-old Harry Menzies was wading near the mouth of False Creek when he was nearly eaten by a 1,100 pound shark. “The boy ran; the shark followed,” reported the Vancouver Daily World. Ed Dusenberry saw the dorsal fin and attacked the shark with the hook of a pike pole and tried to pull it ashore. “Enraged by the pain, the shark opened its mouth and showed the most ferocious set of teeth he had ever seen, something like a man would expect in a horrible nightmare.” After it died, Dusenberry put a tent up around the shark and charged 10 cents admittance.

Source: This Day in Vancouver

Courtesy Past Tense

The World Belly Flop and Cannonball Diving Championship

Yup, belly flops started here in Vancouver, or more accurately, were a way to publicize the (Westin) Bayshore’s new pool in 1974. The event quickly gained momentum and spread to the old Coach House Inn in North Vancouver, drawing between 3,000 and 4,000 spectators, entrants from Fiji and Japan, as well as US President Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy as a judge. Tom Butler, the PR guy behind the stunt, told the Globe and Mail: “It’s something that is universally understood. I mean, there’s no subtlety to it. But what else can a 300-pound truck driver do and get to have NBC television declare that he’s champion of the USA?”

Source: Tom Butler, the Coach House Inn and the Belly Flop that Soared 

Coach House Inn, 1979. Courtesy John Denniston

Loretta Lynn and the Chicken Coop

Country music singer Loretta Lynn was discovered in Vancouver. No, it wasn’t at the Cave or the Palomar or another club of those times, she was singing in a backyard chicken coop on East Kent Avenue in Fraserview. Executives from a local record company called Zero Records, and with financial backing from Art Phillips (who became mayor in 1973), heard her sing, signed her up, and Loretta’s first single “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” came out in 1960.

Source: Vancouver Was Awesome: A curious Pictorial History

Courtesy Vancouver Courier, 2012

Van-Tan

Have you hard the story about the nudist camp at the top of Mountain Highway in North Vancouver? Turns out it’s not an urban myth, Van Tan was founded in 1939 and now has about 60 members that get to hang out sans clothes on several acres of cleared forest. When you get to the car park, it’s behind a locked gate, and another two clicks up a curvy, unpaved road. Sure you can hike it, but why not wait and check it out at one of their open houses this summer?

Source: Van Tan Nudist Camp

Eve Lazarus photo, 2016

Project 200

Gordon Price called it “the most important thing that never happened” to Vancouver, and certainly if Project 200 and the rest of the freeway plans had gone ahead, Vancouver would be unrecognizable today. The plan was to construct a freeway system that would connect Vancouver to the Trans-Canada Highway and to Highway 99. The freeway would run between Union and Prior Streets, and wipe out Strathcona, most of Chinatown, much of the West End, plop an ocean parkway along English Bay, and turn Vancouver into a mini Los Angeles. To get a sense of the magnitude of Project 200, check out the plaza and the tower at the foot of Granville Street. Then imagine a forest of office and residential towers, plazas, a major hotel, and parking for 7,000 cars that would take out Waterfront Station, most of the Sinclair Centre and the heritage buildings in Gastown.

Source: aborted plans

 

The Murder Factory

If you are driving up East Cordova Street these holidays, take a look at #629. It’s now a duplex, but back in 1931 it was a “private hospital” run by a Japanese man named Shinkichi Sakurada. Sick people would go in, they’d take out an insurance policy naming Sakurada as their beneficiary, and then they would die. According to the Globe and Mail, the “murder factory” was run by an “organized assassination ring” and was responsible for as many as 20 deaths.

Source: Blood, Sweat, and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance, Vancouver’s First Forensic Investigator

Eve Lazarus photo, 2017

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

The Unsolved Rape and Convent Murder of Albina Lequiea

On Sunday December 16, 1973, 96-year-old Albina Christiana Lequiea was found dead in her bed on the second floor of the Sisters of Saint Paul School in North Vancouver.

At first, it was thought that she had died from natural causes, but once her body was examined at Lions Gate Hospital, they found that she had been raped and strangled with a nylon stocking. She was still wearing her pink nightgown.

The convent is still there at 524 West Sixth Street, its name is now the Sisters of Instruction of the Child Jesus. The building became part of St. Thomas Aquinas High School in 2003 and backs onto Keith Road.

In 1973, when Albina was a resident, the convent also served as a home for the elderly.

One of the nuns told police that she had found a man in his early 20’s wandering inside the convent at around 3:30 in the morning. He had a beard and shoulder-length dirty blonde hair. He wore jeans, had “striking eyes,” and reeked of booze. He said to her: “Where’s the door? How do I get  out?” After he left, she reported it to her superior, but not to the police.

Later they found that he had got in by smashing a glass panel in the front door.

A few days later the Vancouver Sun ran a story with the headline “Psychopathic killer hunted in strangling at convent.”

There was nothing mentioned about Albina’s long life, so I went searching for a death certificate to find out where she was born. Instead, I found an article written in 2007 by Elizabeth Withey, Albina’s great granddaughter.

According to Withey’s story, she was born Albina Christiana Proulx in Nicolet, Quebec in 1877. When she was 19, she married Phillip Lequiea and they raised nine children on a farm near Battleford, Saskatchewan. Albina was a “fervent catholic” who was “tiny, gentle and devoted to her family and God.” She went to church every morning before breakfast, and it must have made her happy that one of her sons became a priest.

Ed Lequiea led the funeral mass for his mother.

The second floor of the convent. Courtesy NVMA and Churches on Sundays blog

Even with the description by the nun and a composite drawing that ran in the newspapers, Albina’s murderer was never found. His description sounds remarkably like the one that was given to police after the murder of 16-year-old Rhona Duncan less than three years later. Rhona had been raped and strangled on her way home from a party at 15th and Bewicke, just blocks from the convent.

Rhona’s murder is detailed in a chapter of Cold Case Vancouver: The City’s Most Baffling Unsolved Murders.

The murders of Albina Lequiea and Rhona Duncan are two of North Vancouver’s 17 unsolved cases dating back to 1964. After 2003, new investigations were transferred to IHIT—the RCMP’s Integrated Homicide Investigation Team.

Top photo: courtesy North Vancouver Museum and Archives #3444 and Suzanne Wilson’s blog: Churches on Sundays

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

 

Lolly, CFUN, and the Brill Trolley Bus

Angus McIntyre was reading Murder by Milkshake  when he stopped and took a closer look at a photo snapped by the Vancouver Sun’s Dan Scott in December 1966.

Where I saw a rare photo of Lolly Miller leaving court during the murder trial of her lover, Rene Castellani—Angus was looking at the background.

“I just noticed something about Lolly Miller’s photo on page 58,” said Angus, who was a Vancouver bus driver for 40 years. “In the background there is a Brill trolley bus, with the B.C. Hydro logo visible. On the side there is an advertisement–this  was for a disc jockey on CFUN, Tom Peacock.”

The ad reads “Tom Peacock. Afternoons 3 to 6.”

Radio plays a prominent part in Murder by Milkshake. In 1965, CKNW personality Rene Castellani murdered his wife Esther with arsenic so he could marry the station’s 20-something receptionist Lolly Miller.

Brill trolley bus in 1969, Angus McIntyre photo

“I just thought it was ironic that behind Lolly there was an ad for a rival radio station,” says Angus who moved to Vancouver in 1965.

“CFUN had a request line phone number, REgent 1-0000, promoted as ‘REgent ten-thousand, CFUN Requestomatic’. It almost always had a busy signal in the days of relay switches in the telephone exchanges, and kids would yell out their phone numbers over the sound of the busy signal to get a call back,” says Angus. “Some of their contests had so many people phone in that parts of the REgent exchange would crash.”

During the ’50s and ’60s, CKNW, the Top Dog, was a familiar sight in the community. Courtesy CVA 180-2127

According to his broadcast bio, Peacock eventually moved to CKWX (1130) and became the station’s general manager. He died in 2006, at age 67.

In 1965, CKNW was still the “Top Dog,” and as George Garrett, a news reporter for the station for over four decades, told me, “We were the most promotions minded station you could imagine.” The station’s deejays included Jack Cullen, Jack Webster and Norm Grohmann. Over at CFUN, a top 40-station at the time, deejays (below) were Red Robinson, Al Jordan, Fred Latremouille, Tom Peacock, Ed Kargl, Mad Mel, and John Tanner.

It depends what source you look at, but I find it hard to argue with thoughtco.com’s top 10 picks of 1965:

I Can’t Get No Satisfaction; The Rolling Stones
Like a Rolling Stone; Bob Dylan
A Change is Gonna Come; Sam Cooke
Tambourine Man; The Byrds
Ticket to Ride; The Beatles
I’ve Been Loving You Too Long; Otis Redding
Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag; James Brown
My Girl; The Temptations
Stop! In the Name of Love; The Supremes
Do you Believe in Magic?; The Lovin’ Spoonful

Top photo: Lolly Miller. Photo by Dan Scott/Vancouver Sun [PNG Merlin Archive]

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

Saving History: The Woodward’s Christmas Windows

When David Rowland heard that Woodward’s was closing in 1993, he phoned up the manager and put in an offer for the department store’s historic Christmas windows. They agreed on a price, and Rowland became the proud owner of six semi-trailer loads of animated teddy bears, elves, geese, children, a horse and cart and various storefronts.

Woodward’s ca.1907. Courtesy Vancouver Archives 677-611

In the late 1960s, 14-year-old Rowland rode the bus into Vancouver carrying three samples of puppets and marionettes that he had made. He walked up and down what was then Robsonstrasse trying to interest toy store owners into buying his merchandise.

“They said ‘they are nice little toys, and you are a nice little boy, but come back when you have sold them somewhere else’,” says Rowland. “I was about to give up and I thought well there’s always The Bay.”

Rowland found the manager of Toyland and put his marionettes through their paces.

“A lot of people gathered and shoppers started picking up the boxes looking for prices.”

The manager ordered 50 and had Rowland come in and demonstrate them every Saturday. Later he invented a coin-operated puppet theatre where you put 25 cents in and the lights turned on and music played and the puppets danced across the stage. He sold three dozen of them to shopping centres in B.C.  As requests came in to build Santa’s castles and other seasonal structures, Rowland’s business took off.

Original figures made by David Rowland for Woodward’s in the ’70s. Courtesy David Rowland

Woodward’s started getting serious about their Christmas windows in the 1960s, and sent buyers off to New York to bring back different figures. The department store hired Rowland in the  ‘70s to create mechanical figures for their Toyland and display work for their windows.

When Rowland unpacked his newly acquired Christmas windows in the ‘90s, he found at least a dozen different scenes. He looked around for a venue big enough to display them and found himself at Canada Place. Rowland wanted to rent them, but Canada Place offered to buy them outright. “That wasn’t my initial plan, but at the time I had a banker from hell and I needed some capital and so I sold a lot of it to them,” he says.

Christmas window display at the Grosvenor Building. Courtesy David Rowland

Rowland couldn’t bear to part with all of them though, and every year he sets up a few in buildings around Vancouver. You can catch some of the former Woodward’s Christmas windows and Rowland’s own work at:

The Grosvenor Building: 1040 West Georgia Street
FortisBC: 1111 West Georgia Street
BCAA lobby: 4567 Canada Way, Burnaby
The promenade at Canada Place

Christmas window display at FortisBC building. Courtesy David Rowland

Top photo: David Rowland putting together a former Woodward’s Christmas window in 2010 for Canada Place. Courtesy David Rowland.

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

Our Missing Heritage: The Ritz Hotel

Selwyn Pullan shot these photos of the Ritz Hotel in 1956, shortly after it had been renovated into this awesome mid-century modern look.

But while it had a fancy name, the Ritz Hotel at 1040 West Georgia was originally designed as a YMCA in 1912 by Henry Sandham Griffith. Griffith had offices in Vancouver and Victoria and was riding the real estate boom of the time. He made enough money to build himself a castle-like manor he named Fort Garry on Cook Street in Victoria, that later belonged to David Spencer and became known as Spencer’s Castle. It’s now part of a condo development.

St. Julien Apartments, 1924. Designed as a 7-storey reinforced concrete building at a cost of $375,000. Photo: CVA 99-1411

Unfortunately for the YMCA, the economy tanked in 1913, the First World War broke out the following year and the Y couldn’t raise the money to finish the building. It sold, and was completed as the St. Julien Apartments in 1924. Radio Station CJOR launched in 1926, and shared the building for the next three years.

St. Julien Apartments, 1929. Designed by  H.S. Griffith in 1912. The only two Vancouver buildings that still exist of his work are the Board of Trade, 402 West Pender and the West End’s Barrymore Apartments on Barclay. Photo: VPL 4759

The St. Julien Apartments didn’t last long. By 1929, it had transformed into the Ritz Apartment Hotel, offering hotel rooms and fully serviced apartments. One of its long-term residents was Mabel Ellen (Springer) Boultbee, a divorcee who is said to be the first white child born on Burrard Inlet. She was born in Moodyville in 1875 and died in her room at the hotel 77 years later. She shared the apartment with her sister Eva.

Ritz Hotel in 1957. Photo VPL 42418

Mabel and Eva ran a school together in the 1890s, and Mabel wrote for the Vancouver Sun’s women’s pages for 30 years. She was also a member of the swanky women-only Georgian Club which occupied the top floor of the Ritz Hotel from 1947 until the building’s untimely demise in 1982.

One of a series of photos taken from the roof of the Ritz Hotel in 1948. Photo: VPL 80734.

The Devonshire Hotel—our other much loved and storied building just two blocks away on West Georgia, came down in 1981, replaced by the HSBC building.

The Georgia-Medical Dental Building is under construction in this 1929 Leonard Frank photo. The Devonshire is in the middle. Both buildings are long gone.

The Ritz Hotel was replaced by the 22-storey hideous gold Grosvenor building.

The Grosvenor Building replaced the Ritz Hotel in 1983 and boasts 12 corner offices on every floor. Photo: Emporis

With thanks to:

the Vancouver Public Library and BC City Directories 
Chuck Davis’s Vancouverhistory.ca 
Changing Vancouver blog
Building the West: Early Architects of British Columbia by Don Luxton
Find a Grave

To find out more about fabulous buildings that no longer exist – go to: Our Missing Heritage

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

Riding the Spirit Trail to West Vancouver Part 7

Lots of history to cover on this last leg of the Spirit Trail. We’re starting at Park Royal, which when it opened in 1950, was the first covered mall in Canada.

Prior to 1965, most of the land you’re riding on was swamp. Ambleside Beach is the product of 85,000 cubic metres of sand and gravel hauled from the sandbanks west of Navvy Jack Point. The pitch-and-putt is built on sawdust, bark and wood waste from a North Vancouver sawmill, and the duck lagoon used to be part of a slough.

Ambleside Beach, 1918. Courtesy WVA

If you look to the right, you’ll see the Ambleside Youth Centre. Before that it was the West Vancouver Rod and Gun Club, and before that it was one of 18 huts built by the Department of National Defence with four gun emplacements and anti-aircraft guns to defend the harbour entrance below the Lions Gate Bridge during World War 11. After the war, the District of West Vancouver bought the huts and converted them into housing for war vets and their families.

Ambleside Pool opened in 1954 and was gone by 1977. Courtesy WVA 1954

The huts were built on low land that flooded several times a year, and at those times, food and supplies were brought in by rowboat. By 1961, three were moved to the high school for classrooms and the others were destroyed.

Ferry Building, courtesy District of West Vancouver

You’ll come out onto Argyle Avenue and soon see the Ferry Building. Before it was a quaint little art gallery, it was the headquarters of West Vancouver’s ferries which operated until 1947 from a dock at the foot of 14th Street. On a good day, the ferry trip to Vancouver took 25 minutes. Too bad we don’t still have service.

You’ll pass the imposing 16-foot high Welcome Figure that faces Stanley Park—a gift from the Squamish Nation to the people of West Vancouver in 2001.

Silk Purse. Courtesy District of West Vancouver

And then you’ll see the Silk Purse—one of the last examples of the summer cottages that used to dot the area before the Lions Gate Bridge opened in 1938. Built in 1925, former Vancouver Mayor Tom Campbell inherited the cottage from his father, and in 1969, sold it to John Rowland. Rowland’s son him he was trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The name stuck and he rented out the Silk Purse as a ‘honeymoon cottage’ for $12 a night, including breakfast and champagne. The District of West Vancouver has owned the Silk Purse since 1991 and it is operated by the West Vancouver Community Arts Council.

NavvyJack/John Lawson house in 1957. Courtesy WVA

You’ll soon be at John Lawson Park, named for the man known as the “father of West Vancouver.” John was a mover and shaker in the West Vancouver business community. In the early 1900s, he bought Navvy Jack’s former house (1768 Argyle) and lived there until 1928. The house—the oldest on the North Shore—is unrecognizable from old photographs. Another victim of demolition by neglect.

Navvy Jack/John Lawson House 2018. Eve Lazarus photo

Top photo: Park Royal Shopping Centre in 1949

With thanks and gratitude to North Vancouver Museum and Archives. 

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

Riding the Spirit Trail from Pemberton Avenue to the Capilano River (Part 6)

Last week we stopped our ride at Pemberton Avenue. Today we’re going to cross the border into West Vancouver.

The first part of the Spirit Trail winds through Norgate, a quiet neighbourhood filled with mid-century ranchers built during the post-war boom period. But did you know that the whole area was originally intended to be the Capilano Air Park?

A typical Norgate rancher along the Spirit Trail. Eve Lazarus photo, 2018

It was first proposed in 1945 and the idea was that it would cater to tourists flying their own planes from other parts of North America. There would be two runways and construction would  start in 1947 and include luxury accommodation. In the end, we couldn’t afford it and the land was sold to Hullah Construction for a subdivision.

1950s newspaper ad promoting Norgate as a family-friendly neighbourhood. Courtesy NVMA

After we pass through Norgate, it’s a quick ride to the road that leads to the Lions Gate Bridge, built in 1939 by the Guinness brewing family. The provincial government later bought the bridge and the toll came off in 1963.

Now a National Historic Site of Canada. Photo courtesy Vancouver Sun

In 1982, a group of UBC engineering students suspended a Volkswagen Beetle from the bridge. On the first night, a group of students attached a cable under the bridge. On the second night, students drove a jeep towing the reinforced Beetle. The students detached the car, slipped a cable under its roof, attached the other end to the side of the bridge, and pushed the car over the railings.

Courtesy: http://bit.ly/2AYeavn, 1982

As we approach the Capilano River and West Vancouver, it’s pretty clear that the district (named by Macleans Magazine as the richest postal code in Canada last year) is not spending its net worth on the Spirit Trail. In fact, it’s lack of enthusiasm is downright dangerous as you cross the bridge that takes you over to Ambleside.

But in 1913, it wasn’t cars that you had to worry about. The sand and gravel that washed down the Capilano River had built up on the north side of First Narrows to such an extent that ships were grounding, especially in bad weather. In July of that year, George Alfred Harris became the first lightkeeper at the newly constructed First Narrows Lighthouse.

The Capilano Fog and Light Station 1914. Coutesy WVA 0032.WVA.PHO

The lighthouse, and the keeper’s house sat on pilings at the mouth of the Capilano River, and except for very low tide, the Harris family was surrounded by water. The lighthouse operated until 1968.

Top photo: Walking over the Lions Gate Bridge in 1939. Courtesy CVA 260-995

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Next time, we’ll be riding through Ambleside and along to Dundarave where the Spirit Trail ends for now.

If you’ve missed any of the rides, please see:

The North Shore’s Spirit Trail – Moodyville (part 1)

Moodyville to Lonsdale Quay (part 2) 

Lonsdale Quay (part 3)

Mosquito Creek (part 4)

Harbourside (part 5)