Eve Lazarus's Blog: Every Place has a Story, page 33

10 things you won’t see at the PNE this year

The PNE opens today at Hastings Park, and at 108, must be one of Vancouver’s oldest institutions. Not surprising it’s also changed a lot over the years. Some things will be missed and others not so much. Here are 10 things you won’t be seeing this year.

1. A brill trolley bus

You won’t be taking a brill trolley bus to the fair. Angus McIntyre is pictured here on one that was detoured for the PNE parade at Hastings and Commercial in 1974. “There wasn’t always a switch or wire for these maneuvers, so we rode the rear bumper, held onto to a retriever with one hand, and pulled both poles down with the other,” says Angus, adding that this was done while travelling at speeds of up to 30 km/hr. Photo courtesy John Day.

The Challenger relief map, 1954 Courtesy CVA 180-5614

2. The Challenger Relief Map and the B.C. Pavilion

The B.C. Pavilion was demolished in 1997 and the Challenger Relief Map of B.C. that occupied 1,850 square metres of floor space, was placed in storage at an Air Canada hangar at YVR. George Challenger and his family spent seven years building the map to topographical scale from fir plywood cut into 986,000 pieces. It was at the PNE for 43 years.

3. Babes in the Woods

The Babes in the Woods was the name given to the skeletons of two little boys found in Stanley Park in 1953. Unbelievably, their tiny skulls were put on exhibition at the PNE and later at the Vancouver Police Museum. Today they are with the BC Coroners Service, where Laura Yazedjian, identification specialist hopes to give them back their names.

4. A Prize Home under $1 Million

The first PNE home was raffled off in 1934. It was worth $5,000 and is still at 2812 Dundas Street and valued at $1.6 million. This year’s house is worth $1.8 million and that’s only because it’s in Naramata, a five-hour commute from Vancouver. At 3025 square feet, it’s also more than twice the size of the 1934 edition and comes with a sauna, an elevator and interactive art.

5. Inspector Vance’s Crime Lab

I found this ad for the 1933 PNE in a pile of personal papers belonging to J.F.C.B. Vance,  once known as the Sherlock Holmes of Canada. The slogan that Depression year was “Forward British Columbia—Prosperity Beckons.” Highlights included my Inspector Vance’s display of scientific apparatus for crime detection. It was insured for a whopping $10,000.

6. Dal Richards

He was known as Vancouver’s King of Swing. Dal Richards, born in 1918, just 8 years after the first PNE, died on December 31, 2015. He was 97. Marpole-raised, Richards is a Magee Secondary grad from 1937. His 11-piece dance band played at the Hotel Vancouver for 25 years, and his radio show Dal’s Place aired for more than two decades. Richards played his 75th PNE—a 17-day-run in 2014.

Miss PNE contestants watching a football game at Empire Stadium in 1966. Courtesy CVA

7. Empire Stadium and Miss PNE

Empire Stadium was constructed in 1954 for the British Empire and Commonwealth Games. It’s probably most famous for hosting Elvis Presley in 1957 and the Beatles in 1964 and was home to the BC Lions from 1954 to 1982. The stadium was demolished in 1993 two years after the last Miss PNE was crowned.

8. Pulsating Raptures

Love this Fred Herzog photo shot in 1962 at the PNE. Mum probably thought they were going to see the pig races. Note the Jack Jones posters, who according to Wikipedia, is 80 years old and still performing—but not at the PNE this year.

August 25, 1947. Courtesy CVA 180-1328

9. A Parade

On August 25, 1947 an estimated 100,000 people stood along Georgia, Granville and Hastings Streets waiting for the PNE parade—the first one in six years (because of the war). The first parade was in 1910 and the last—at least along this route—was in 1995.

Courtesy Heritage Vancouver Society

10. Roller Coaster

Dormer K Treffrey photographed the installation of the PNE’s first roller coaster in 1914. It had the wonderful name of Dip the Dips. It was replaced in 1925. Our wooden roller coaster has been around since 1958 and turns 60 this year (think of that next time you ride it).

Can you add to the list?

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

 

The BC Mills House Museum, a Mystery, a Captain and a Troll

The BC Mills House Museum at Lynn Headwaters plays a cameo role in Rachel Greenaway’s brilliant new mystery Creep where the action all takes place in upper Lynn Valley. While the little house has sat at the entrance to the park for a couple of decades now, I only recently discovered its back story.

Michael Kluckner’s painting of the BC Mills House at 147 East 1st Street in 1989.

 According to Michael Kluckner’s Vanishing Vancouver, the two-bedroom house was built in 1908 at East 1st  near Lonsdale in North Vancouver as an investment property. It was a pre-fab Model J constructed by the BC Mills, Timber and Trading Company which operated out of what’s now the Mission to Seafarers house at the foot of Dunlevy.

The owner, Captain Henry Pybus went broke along with a lot of other land speculators in the 1913/1914 land crash. A hunt through the city directories suggests the longest owner/resident was Mark Falonvitch, a Russian-born welder/foreman at Burrard Dry Docks who lived there with his wife Ada from the early ‘20s until his retirement in 1949.

Richard The Troll outside his house in Lower Lonsdale in 1988. CBC Archives

The house’s most famous resident was Richard “The Troll” Schaller, former leader of the Rhinoceros Party of Canada which fielded candidates between 1963 and 1993 on the promise “to keep none of our promises”. Other platform promises included “repeal the law of gravity,” “provide higher education by building taller schools, and “ban guns and butter—both kill.”

Richard the Troll’s Rhino Party salute. CBC Archives

In 1995, the house was saved thanks to the determination of long-time North Vancouver City Councillor Stella Jo Dean and moved to Lynn Headwaters. The Coronado, a four-storey condo building, is now in its former location.

See story on Fred Varley’s former house which is on the way to Lynn Headwaters

With thanks to Michael Kluckner for letting me pillage his painting and background from Vanishing Vancouver, to CBC Archives for their footage on Richard the Troll which you can watch here, Vancouver as it Was , and Macleans Magazine  for the 14 campaign promises of the parti rhinoceros.

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

The Art of Frits Jacobsen

By Jason Vanderhill

I first heard about Frits Jacobsen, and saw his beautiful drawings in a post by Jason Vanderhill on his Illustrated Vancouver blog. Jason kindly allowed me to repost it here.

Frits Jacobsen studied at the Free Academy of Fine Arts in the Hague before arriving in Canada in 1959. He moved to Vancouver in 1968. I met him in East Vancouver a few years before his death in 2015 and was able to show him a photograph of the door to his studio at 522 Shanghai Alley taken in 1974. His studio was next door, just above the Sam Kee Building. Both buildings are still there.

Courtesy Harold Henry (Hal) Johnston, 1974

The photo reminded Frits of his hostility towards the postal code movement, though when I showed it to him, he shrugged it off as rather comical.

In December 1979, Vancouver Magazine ran a feature titled “Now you see them” by Ian Bateson and featuring some of Vancouver’s threatened heritage buildings. The drawings that accompanied the article were not credited but I was able to confirm with Frits that he drew them.

The Englesea Lodge, at the entrance to Stanley Park was the first to go, destroyed by fire in 1981.

In 1979, the Manhattan Apartments at 784 Thurlow Street was also under threat, but fortunately has managed to survive.

Built in 1908 for industrialist W.L. Tait, the Manhattan was one of the city’s first apartment blocks and served as a model for many that came after. The building contains attractive stained-glass windows designed by A.P. Bogardus and made in Vancouver. Three of the windows overlook the ornate, pilastered main entrance to the building, although the two smaller ones that sat above both the main and Robson Street entrances are missing. Hopefully, they have been stored somewhere and not destroyed by vandals.

The VanMag article included Jacobsen’s drawing of the Orillia on Robson and Seymour—demolished in 1985 to make way for a new tower.

Heritage Hall on Main Street rounds out the article. At the time, it had stood empty and neglected for two years and was in serious jeopardy. Thankfully, this was one battle that the heritage advocates won, and the hall survives to this day.

Frits was a remarkable artist and a true Vancouver character. If you happen to be going through the MCC thrift store in Surrey, you might just find his drawing of the missing Birks Building.

If you are lucky enough to own a Frits Jacobsen drawing, or one of his early photographs-likely shot in Strathcona or Kitsilano, please send me a picture or scan of it at info@evelazarus.com and we’ll either do another blog or put it up on Facebook Every Place has a Story. Eve.

The Royal Crown Soap Company

Occasionally, when I’m searching for photos using the baffling search engine at Vancouver Archives, I stumble across an interesting building or streetscape that I’ve never seen before. Often the information with the photos is quite detailed, but in the above photo all I had was a photo of the Royal Crown Soap Company building and the date ca.1905.

In front of 97 Water Street in 1936 . Courtesy CVA 99-4900

As its name implies, the Royal Crown Soap Company was a Canadian company that specialized in soap with factories in Vancouver and Winnipeg.

The company first appears in the City Directories in 1900 at 308 Harris Street—what East Georgia was called prior to 1915—the year the first Georgia viaduct was completed. The company is managed by Frederick T. Schooley, and he stays at the helm for the next 28 years.

http://companiesofcanada.wikia.com/wi...

Looking at ads from the ‘20s, Royal Crown was quite a prolific print advertiser, regularly engaging in coupon campaigns.

The company—which changes to the Royal Crown Soap Company and finally to Lever Bros Soap Manufacturers in 1942—started to see declining sales of soap in the 1940s. The city directory listing for 1949 is vacant, and the factory was demolished in the 1950s.

http://companiesofcanada.wikia.com/wi...

A look at Google maps shows the building would have been where the park is at Gore and East Georgia. Today, the only thing left of the Royal Crown Soap Company, is a ghost sign on the side of the London Pub at East Georgia and Main.

Ghost sign at the London Pub. Photo courtesy Lani Russwurm, 2018

Top photo: The Royal Crown Soap Company, ca.1905. Photo courtesy CVA 312.27

With a ton of thanks to Lani Russwurm who discovered the ghost sign and put it on his blog PastTense Vancouver. And, then was kind enough to pop around and check if it was still there and snap this photo.

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

Captain Pybus and Vancouver’s St. Clair Hotel

A little while ago I was having lunch with Tom Carter and Maurice Guibord at the newly renovated Railway Club. Afterwards, we were walking along Richards Street and Tom gave us a tour of the St. Clair Hotel-Hostel.

The Blushing Boutique is on the ground floor and a set of very steep stairs takes you up to the Hostel. The whole interior is designed in a nautical theme, which I guess isn’t surprising since it was designed by architect Samuel Birds for Captain Henry Pybus.

The four-storey brick building at 577 Richards Street was finished in 1911 and initially known as the Dunsmuir Rooms until 1930 when it became the St Clair Rooms. It sits next door to BC Stamp Works, which was built in 1895 as a boarding house.

When Pybus was building his commercial block, it looks like the owner at BC Stamp Works (583 Richards) took the opportunity to have the first floor lifted so a retail store or offices could be added—one of Vancouver’s few remaining buried houses.

Captain Henry Pybus in 1909. Courtesy CVA Port P1645

Pybus captained the Empress of China, and later and the Empress of Japan—a white clipper-ship, which with Pybus at the helm, held the record for crossing the Pacific for over 20 years. Pybus retired in 1911 at age 60. The Empress of Japan was decommissioned in 1922 and left to rot in Vancouver Harbour. Fortunately, the editor of the Province heard she was to be scrapped and had his staff rescue her dragon figurehead, donated it to the city, and it sat in Stanley Park until 1960 when it was replaced with a fiberglass replica. (The original was restored and remains with the Vancouver Maritime Museum).

The dragon figurehead from the Empress of Japan in 1936. Courtesy CVA Bo N83.1

According to Michael Kluckner’s Vanishing Vancouver, the South African born Pybus, fancied himself as a speculator and owned a bunch of property around the city—including a pre-fab Model J BC Mills house that sat at East 1st and Lonsdale from 1908 until 1995 when it was moved—and remains at—Lynn Headwaters Regional Park.

Pybus’s BC Mills House now at Lynn Headwaters

Pybus lost most of his properties in the land crash of 1913/14. He spent the rest of his long life in the West End and died in 1938. Fifty years later, his grandson, Henry Pybus Bell-Irving became the 23rd Lieutenant Governor of BC

What’s surprising, is how little change there has been on the Richards Street block. The retail space below the St. Clair started as a storefront for the United Typewriter Company, became the Vancouver Auction Rooms in the ‘20s, and by 1930 was the headquarters for Pluto Office Furniture. BC Stamp Works, the St. Clair and the office furniture business were still co-existing 25 years later, and not much has changed in the years since.

Top photo: The St. Clair Hotel and BC Stamp Works on the 500-block Richards Street in 1985. Courtesy CVA 790-1797

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

Rhona Duncan (1959-1976)

Rhona Duncan died years before I moved to North Vancouver, but whenever I drive up Larson and cross Bewicke I think of her.  And, 42 years later, her murder still haunts my friends and neighbours who either knew her or of her. This is an excerpt from Cold Case Vancouver.

Rhona Duncan, her boyfriend Shawn Mapoles, and their friends Owen Parry and Marion Bogues left the party on East Queens Road in North Vancouver in the early hours of July 17, 1976. It was a warm summer night and they took their time walking in the direction of their homes. The teens, who were to enter Grade 12 at Carson Graham in the fall, stopped at the municipal hall on West Queens. Owen and Shawn lived up the hill, and Rhona and Marion lived in the Hamilton area. The girls wanted to be by themselves to talk about the night; it was an easy walk down Jones Avenue.

Rhona and Marion stopped and talked for a while and then parted company near Marion’s home at the corner of Larson Road and Wolfe Avenue. Rhona disappeared into the darkness of Larson Road, turned south on Bewicke Avenue, and was at the intersection at West 15th, the quiet residential street where she lived, when someone stopped her. She was in sight of the safety of her home.

By 4:00 a.m. Rhona, the oldest of four girls, was dead. She had been raped and strangled.

Shawn found out about his girlfriend’s murder the next day from one of his friends. Later that morning the RCMP arrived, bagged his clothes and interviewed him. He voluntarily took a polygraph, and when DNA came on the scene two decades later, he volunteered his as well.

Shawn, who still lives in North Vancouver, told me: “I felt guilty. Normally, I would walk a woman home, but Rhona didn’t want me to walk her home that night.”

Police asked Shawn if he remembered anyone paying a lot of attention to Rhona at the party. He told them that while he knew a lot of the kids there that night, he couldn’t remember anything that seemed strange or out of place. “We were just getting to know each other, so I was focusing my attention on Rhona, not on my surroundings.”

Carson Graham Students in 1976. Rhona front row left. Photo courtesy Gord Curl

On July 22, five days after the murder, the RCMP announced that they had formed a special squad to check for similarities in the unsolved sex slayings of at least 12 women since January 1975.

Police say they’ve interviewed hundreds of witnesses and suspects in the Rhona Duncan case, performed polygraphs on the higher priority suspects, and tested DNA. The case remains inside eight boxes of evidence in the cold file room, where every now and then it’s taken out, dusted off, and re-examined.

Duncan home on West 15th. Eve Lazarus photo

From the RCMP website:

“A list of 172 males consisting of all of Duncan’s acquaintances and all of the suspects on the file was compiled. Investigators have obtained DNA samples from the vast majority of the subjects on the list and compared them with the suspect DNA with negative results. All of the higher priority subjects on the list have been eliminated. Many of the remaining subjects are either deceased or have not been located.”

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

The History Store

Chris Wright wants to start a cultural movement around history.  A former location scout for the film industry and a treasure hunter with a metal detector, he is the owner of The History Store in Mount Pleasant.

The store has been there almost a year, but unless you have an appointment, it’s only open from noon to 4:00 pm. on Saturdays. And, trust me that’s not long enough.

Chris specializes in photos, negatives, slides and postcards. But he also has movie size posters, maps, blueprints, letters—even a section of the Lions Gate Bridge.

A piece from the Lions Gate Bridge after the late 1990s retrofit. Eve Lazarus photo

There are boxes offering photos of animals, costumes and cars for $3. For $2 you can pick up a Christmas postcard or a photo of early New Westminster.

Chris tells me he has 400 pounds of negatives to go through and has looked at more than 30,000 slides this past week. He buys them in bulk and pays 10 cents per slide. It’s worth it he says, every now and then one slide will net him $400 or more. Negatives are the future of the business. He has glass negatives dating back to 1900 and his intention is to develop the negatives, blow them up and sell them with the photo—so you know you have a one-of-a-kind photo hanging on your wall.

Vic Steele lives in Coquitlam and spends most Saturday afternoons at the store. He’s a military collector and says his best find to date is a Royal Air Force tunic that belonged to a pilot who flew in the Battle of Britain. The pilot survived the war and his uniform is now displayed in Vic’s man cave.

I knew this was a serious store when Neil Whaley walked in. Chris tells him that he’s just come into 18 boxes of film and television photos. Like any collector (or writer for that matter) there’s nothing more exciting than getting first crack at something archival.

When I asked Neil what he thought was the coolest thing in the store, he pointed to a poster for the 1922 film The Radio King, considered a “lost film,” likely destroyed in the fire at Universal Studios.

The poster was found under an oak floor during a home renovation in Kerrisdale ten years ago. It will find a home at North Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery.

Neil tells me that his favourite History Store find is a series of photos of the Black Gospel Rescue with Rev. Melinda Thorne. According to James Johnstone’s Blog, Thorne led the Mizpah African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church between 1966 and 1971 at 823 Jackson Street.

The History Store is addictive. I found some great aerial photos of Vancouver by George Allen taken in the 1980s.

Chris says he recently donated some George Nye photos to North Vancouver Museum and Archives. “I think we can do better for history by sharing it,” he says. “If you share more than you take, it rains down on you.”

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

Our Missing Heritage: Vancouver’s First Hospital

Last week, Michael Kluckner and I were over at Tom Carter’s studio looking out his seventh storey window onto the EasyPark—a cavernous concrete lot that fronts West Pender and takes up the entire city block from Cambie to Beatty Streets.

In 2013, Michael had the dubious honour (my words) of presenting the parking lot with a heritage plaque on behalf of Places That Matter.

He wasn’t recognizing the parking lot of course, but the buildings that were once Vancouver’s first city hospital and included a men’s surgical ward, a maternity ward, a tuberculosis ward, and the city morgue which faced Beatty Street.

Pender and Beatty Street in 1939. Note the Sun Tower left of frame and former Hospital buildings behind. Courtesy Tom Carter

If we’d been looking out Tom’s window back in 1912, we would have had a great view of the courthouse in what’s now Victory Square, the shiny new Dominion Building, and the former city hospital, built in 1888, which according to Michael’s Vancouver: The Way it Was consisted of a compound of brick buildings with wooden balconies set back from the street, flower gardens and a picket fence.

Aerial view of Larwill Park construction, the Sun Tower and the Vancouver hospital buildings. Note the Central School bottom right of frame demolished in 1946. Courtesy Tom Carter

By the turn of the century, the 50-bed hospital was too small for Vancouver’s growing population and a new hospital was built in Fairview in 1906 which became the Vancouver General Hospital as we know it now.

The first city hospital was repurposed into the headquarters for McGill University College (BC). And that’s another interesting story.

A former hospital building in 1949, shortly before it was turned into a parking lot. Courtesy CVA 447.61

In 1899, Vancouver High School joined forces with McGill to offer first year arts courses. Six years later the school moved to fancy new digs at Oak and 12th Avenue (later renamed King Edward High School), and McGill moved into the former hospital buildings. McGill stayed in the old hospital until 1911 and faded from the landscape after UBC opened in 1915.

The tuberculosis ward, courtesy Tom Carter

JFCB Vance from Blood, Sweat, and Fear had a lab in there from around 1912 when the police station on East Cordova was demolished until the new station  opened in 1914. According to City Directories, a former hospital building became the “old people’s home” until 1915 when Social Services (the City Relief and Employment Department)  moved in and stayed until the late ’40s.

And just like that it’s a parking lot. 1951 photo courtesy Tom Carter

The city hospital buildings were gone by 1950 and now all that’s left is a plaque affixed to a parking lot.

Just look what we did with the space! Beatty and West Pender, Google maps 2018

Top photo: The first Vancouver Hospital in 1902. Courtesy CVA Bu P369

With thanks to Tom Carter for finding all these great photos and to Places That Matter for all the work that they do.

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

Kits Point and the Summer of ‘23

By Michael Kluckner

Michael Kluckner  is a writer and artist with a list of books that includes Vanishing Vancouver and Toshiko. His most recent book is a graphic biography called Julia.   He is the president of the Vancouver Historical Society and chair of the city’s Heritage Commission.

Summertime, traffic jams, and the changing city are caught in a set of previously unpublished photos taken from the front porch of a Kits Point house in 1923.

In 1923, Ogden was a corduroy road. The parkland in the background at Ogden and Maple Street which had been popular as an informal camping area in the early 1900s, was bought for the City by retired jeweller Harvey Hadden in 1928. I was given this photograph (above) a dozen years ago by Anne Terriss, who lived with her architect husband Kenneth at 1970 Ogden Avenue, and published it in Vancouver Remembered in 2006.

I was intrigued by the number of families who arrived by car rather than by the streetcar that serviced the beach from a line a few blocks away near Cornwall Avenue. Also, I noted the number of cars parked in the sun with torn-up brush covering their tires to stop the rubber from cracking in the heat.

As it turned out, there were two other photographs taken in 1923 from the front porch of 1982 Ogden, probably by a member of the Bell family. (Photos courtesy of Shirley Wheatcroft, who lives there today.) The photo (below) shows the view northward of the West End and its English Bay waterfront with the Sylvia Hotel visible near the left edge.

Anne and Ken Terriss were long-time members of the Kitsilano community and were part of the generation of volunteers and patrons who created the theatre and arts scene in Vancouver in the 1950s and 1960s. Anne was one of the handful of people in Kitsilano in the 1960s and early 1970s with a good camera and an eye for photographing the passing parade, and freely gave her photographs for publication to the Around Kitsilano community newspaper and, later, to me.

Visible on the right-hand side of the above photo, are porch posts from a cottage, actually one of three BC Mills Model J prefab cottages that faced Yew Street. At the time, this corner was part of a dense little beach community—on a 100-foot-square lot, there stood the apartment building, the three BC Mills cottages facing Yew Street, plus two more that faced onto the lane! Anne recalled that a private lending library charging 10 cents a book operated from one of the cottages.

The strategic corner tenant of the apartment building has been a Starbucks for many recent years.

Courtesy Hal Kalman, Exploring Vancouver, 1978 (p. 198)

Ken Terriss was an architect with a deft touch who made most of his living working independently with small residential commissions. He designed his own house on Ogden in 1971 and fitted it into the vintage streetscape. In Exploring Vancouver, Hal Kalman described the house as “exuberantly imaginative” and noted that the “angle of the plan exploits the spectacular mountain views.” “Despite the house’s explicit modernity,” he wrote, “it respects the size and scale of its older neighbours.” The house next door in the photo was one of the five “show homes” built by the CPR in 1909 to entice settlers to the area.

Ken and Anne’s house was torn down and replaced by an even more modern house—the kind of glassy box that has become the current style du jour on Kits Point, which is apparently the most expensive “detached house” real estate per square foot in Vancouver.

For other guest blogs by Michael Kluckner see:

Saving History: the Rec Room and the Player Piano
Vancouver’s Buried Houses

West Coast Modern Architecture

There is a chapter in Sensational Vancouver called West Coast Modern which explains the connections between artists and architects and the West Coast Modern movement in Vancouver.

Last week I wrote about Selwyn Pullan’s photography exhibition currently on display at the West Vancouver Museum. I focused on his shots of West Coast Modern houses now almost all obliterated from the landscape.

But Selwyn also did a lot of commercial photography and one of his largest clients was Thompson Berwick Pratt, the architecture firm headed up by Ned Pratt who hired and mentored some of our most influential West Coast Modern architects. Arthur Erickson, Ron Thom, Paul Merrick, Barry Downs and Fred Hollingsworth all cut their teeth at TBP, and BC Binning consulted on much of the art that went along with the buildings.

BC Electric from the back cover of Sensational Vancouver. Courtesy Selwyn Pullan, 1957.

Ned Pratt’s crowning achievement was winning the commission to design the BC Electric building on Burrard Street—a game changer in the early 1950s. While the building is still there, now dwarfed by glass towers and repurposed into the Electra—a few of the firm’s other creations are long gone.

There was the Clarke Simpkins car dealership built in 1963 on West Georgia that demonstrated Vancouver’s growing fascination with neon.

CKWX (News 1130) building designed at 1275 Burrard in 1956, demolished 1989. Replaced by The Ellington. Selwyn Pullan photo 1956

Our love for neon also showed up in the former CKWX headquarters at 1275 Burrard Street. According to the Modern Movement Architecture in BC (MOMO) the building won the Massey Silver Medal in 1958. “This skylit concrete bunker was home to one of Vancouver’s major radio stations until the late 1980s. The glassed-in entrance showcased wall mosaics by BC Binning, their blue-gray tile patterns symbolizing the electronic gathering and transmission of information.”

The building is long gone, replaced by a 20-storey condo building called The Ellington in 1990.

The Ritz Hotel at 1040 West Georgia was originally a 1912 apartment building. It was remodeled into a hotel when this photo was taken in 1956 and demolished in 1982. It was replaced by the 22-storey hideous gold Grosvenor building. Selwyn Pullan photo

I wonder what happened to the murals?

The Exhibition runs until July 14.

Top photo: Clarke Simpkins Dealership, 1345 West Georgia. Built 1963, demolished 1993. Selwyn Pullan photo, 1963.

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