Eve Lazarus's Blog: Every Place has a Story, page 36

Vancouver Archives Receives Two Million Negs

City archivist Heather Gordon says the recent donation of a whopping two million negatives from the Sun and Province (Postmedia) photo library is the largest photographic collection that Vancouver Archives has ever received. It’s also one of the most important.

Heather Gordon shows off a recent donation from the Vancouver Sun and Province. “The information in the accompanying card index and on the envelopes—is fantastically detailed and complete,” she says. “Archivists don’t see that much metadata very often.”

“The Sun and Province photographers were everywhere, documenting everything, so their work is an extraordinarily valuable source of information about Vancouver particularly between 1970 and 1995,” she says. “I haven’t had a chance to really dig into the content, but I’m looking forward to seeing skyline shots and photos of neighbourhoods through the 70s, 80s and 90s. I suspect there will be coverage of events such as early PRIDE parades and there are some great aerial shots of the city that will be great for research.”

There are also a number of images from the 1940s, ‘50s, and ’60s including the 1948 Fraser Valley floods and the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games.

Acting Mayor Harry Rankin leads rock group Heart out of Vancouver City Hall in 1977,  Deni Eagland, Vancouver Sun

Kate Bird, author of Vancouver in the Seventies and City on Edge, and a PNG librarian for 25 years, helped manage the large collection.

“When I first started in 1990 there were 20 staff members working in the library, now there is just one, and I think Carolyn Soltau is the only newspaper librarian left in Canada,” says Bird. “Over the years we tried really hard to get more public access to it—to take the digital image archive and make some of those images available online, but we never got any traction, there was no money for it.”

Bird says that in the 1970s two dozen photographers worked either for the Sun or the Province shooting over 4,000 assignments each year (that’s over 10,000 rolls of film a year).

The Vancouver Stock Exchange trading floor, June 1979. George Diack, Vancouver Sun

“That’s how much stuff there is—every part of the city’s history—news, business, sports, entertainment, lifestyle, Smile of the Day—you name it.”

These days there are two photographers shooting for both dailies.

Gordon says she can’t put a value on the collection just yet, but she’ll be having it appraised later this year.

Postmedia retains the copyright, but local history writers can relax, the images will be freely available for research and news reporting. Commercial users will have to ante up to Postmedia.

A Star Wars line-up in June 1977 at the Vogue Theatre. Glenn Baglo, Vancouver Sun

Gordon warns that digitizing images is expensive and time consuming and it might be sometime until the collection is available to the public.

“On average our technician can scan between 80 and 100 images a day, and an archivist can describe anywhere from 100 to 200 images a day,” says Gordon. “The average cost per day is about $240 for the technician and about $330 for the archivist.”

Prior to the Postmedia donation, CVA had 130,000 images available online—roughly 8% of their collection.

Remember the Sea Festival? Brian Kent, Vancouver Sun, July 1977

Last year, thousands of photos were digitized including more than 4,300 from the City heritage inventory as well as Habitat Forum photos.

Gordon says they plan to add another 20,000 images this year which will include the Paul Yee Fonds and about 5,300 Don Coltman photos from the Williams Brothers Photographers collection.

A number of factors come into play when deciding what to digitize next, she says, including public interest in the content, physical condition, and most importantly—funding.

Nearly 7,000 photos from Habitat ’76 are now online. Courtesy Vancouver Archives

“We rely mostly on grants and private-sector donations to fund our digitization program,” she says. “If someone donates toward digitizing a certain group of records, those records move up the queue.”

Want to see these images get online faster? Here’s how to help:

Make a donation or take out a membership with the Friends of the Vancouver Archives – if you’re an addict like I am it will be the best twenty bucks you’ve ever spent.

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

The Babes in the Woods Murder Investigation Turns 65

Sunday  January 14 marks the 65th anniversary of the discovery of the Babes in the Woods. The murder of the two small children in Stanley Park is one of Vancouver’s most enduring murder mysteries and is part of Cold Case Vancouver: the city’s most baffling unsolved murders.  

I caught up for dinner with my friend Laura Yazedjian this week. Laura is an identification specialist with the BC Coroners Service, which currently has 181 cases of unidentified remains on its books.

With one exception, the cases span more than 50 years—from 1962 to 2017.

Some are hikers who were lost and ultimately perished in the woods. Some were pulled from rivers and lakes around the province. Others were found in mountain crevices.

Old, young, male and female. Suicides, accidents and murders. Every case is an active investigation.

Crime scene photo, 1953. Courtesy Vancouver Police Museum

Laura’s oldest case is the Babes in the Woods, the two small children who were murdered in Stanley Park in 1947, their skeletons found six years later.

In recent years, the most promising lead in the search to discover their identities came from former VPD detective Ron Amiel. Ron who was born in 1930, lived with his grandmother in her rooming house at Bute and Davie Streets. When I interviewed him for Cold Case Vancouver, he told me that his grandmother knew Harry Cox, a signalman at the Prospect Point lighthouse, and after the war, Harry’s daughter and her two sons stayed in the rooming house. At some point the two little boys disappeared. (Their disappearance wasn’t explored at the time because detectives thought they were searching for a missing brother and sister. When DNA testing emerged in the 1990s it was discovered they were two brothers).

An investigation found that there was another son who died in the ‘70s, and could be a half-brother to the Babes in the Woods. In 2015 his body was exhumed and tested for mitochondrial DNA (DNA passed directly from the mother).

Unfortunately, the results were inconclusive—there wasn’t enough DNA for a match.

Sometimes Laura has a full body to work with, sometimes just a bone. In the case of the Babes in the Woods all she has are two tiny skulls. That’s a problem when deciding what to test, because DNA is finite–she has to be careful it doesn’t run out.

The other problem is that while new techniques are available, they are expensive. Each DNA test costs the coroner’s office $600, while mitochondrial DNA costs six times that.

“Testing for mitochondrial DNA is really expensive,” says Laura. “We have to send it out because the lab we use at BCIT doesn’t do it so there has to be a real possibility of a result.”

Before signing on as a coroner in 2013, Laura, whose specialty is forensic anthropology, worked in Bosnia for 10 years identifying some of the thousands of people who were massacred during the Balkans war and dumped in mass graves.

In 2015, the Coroner’s office sent 24 samples from cold cases to a lab in Bosnia that had advanced testing procedures. Twenty-one results came back and they closed seven cases.

“That was incredibly satisfying,” says Laura, adding that the lab at BCIT now uses some of the techniques developed by the Bosnian lab.

That will come in handy in the future, because while whoever murdered the two little boys in Stanley Park is likely long dead, Laura remains optimistic that one day we’ll be able to give them back their names.

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

Saving History: The Rec Room and the Player Piano

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 novel called 2050: A Post-Apocalyptic Murder Mystery. He is the president of the Vancouver Historical Society and a member of the city’s Heritage Commission.

We inherited a player piano when we bought our house in 2010. It’s a long story, but in the back of my mind I thought I might want to play it. As it turned out I didn’t, but try to find a new home for an old piano nowadays!

Entertaining in a Western-themed rec room. Published by Canadian Forest Products, 1961. Courtesy Michael Kluckner

Our hundred-year-old Grandview house also contained a postwar classic—a panelled “rec room” in the basement where the piano lived. They were so popular that Canadian Forest Products’ New Westminster plywood division published a plan book in 1961, offering homeowners six themes to choose from—Contemporary, Western, Polynesian, Tavern, (Artist’s) Salon, and Marine. This was an era of casual entertaining at home, dancing to LPs on the hi-fi or watching TV and drinking. Three of the six plans include a bar.

The player piano’s temporary home at Salmagundi West

Our player piano came with dozens of music rolls—popular arrangements of classics and some show tunes like The Sound of Music. As most readers will know, the piano “plays itself,” powered by a “pianist” who pumped on foot pedals, causing the perforated roll to pass over a drum and triggering an ingenious multitude of cogs and arms that made the hammers hit the strings in the correct order.

Musicians Adam Farnsworth and Tom Carter take the player piano for a spin at
Salmagundi. Photo Diane Farnsworth, December 2017.

Player pianos are classic Victoriana, a great example of that era’s fascination with complex gizmos like steam engines.  A skilled pianist could actually play accompaniment to the piano-roll tune; more likely, most people pedalled away, watched the keys go up and down, and sang along. It probably made its way to our house in the ’50s.

After years of trying, we had all but given up finding the piano a new home, but then Tom Carter joined the board of the Vancouver Historical Society. Tom is a musician and artist with a keen interest in entertainment history. He came over and saw it, got it playing, hired a rebuilder to fix it up, and said he would love to have it—the only problem being that he already has a grand piano in his home.

Courtesy Tom Carter

No problem, he said, he’d find it a home.

Along the way, Tom researched its history. It’s an Angelus, probably from 1915–20. New, it was worth about $950, or double the price of a Model T Ford and about equivalent to the annual income of a skilled tradesman.

Watch and listen here: tomhighres

Player pianos were the home-entertainment centre of the day, a kind of transition between the skilled pianist (usually a woman) of 19th-century family gatherings to the hi-fi and, in this era, the TV that has now become the home theatre.

At the time of writing, the player piano was living at Salmagundi on West Cordova in Gastown. But last month, after 45 years in business, proprietor Anne Banner had the lease terminated and will be vacating the premises at the end of this month. The piano will be going to another temporary home in White Rock where it will be restored and rebuilt. EL

Top 10 History Blogs for 2017

For my last post of 2017, I have compiled a list of my favourite history blogs. To make the list, the blog had to written by an individual and have a strong Metro Vancouver flavor.

In alphabetical order: 1. A Most Agreeable Place

Lana Okerlund, a Vancouver book editor and writer, has put together this quirky little blog about bookstores past and present. And who doesn’t love a bookstore? It’s full of facts. For instance did you know a copy of Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels or Don Quixote would cost you 60 cents  in 1887?

2.  Changing Vancouver

This is one of my go to sites when I’m looking up an architect or building. John Atkin is behind this blog of before and after photos divided into still standing, gone and altered with archival photos from the Vancouver Archives, BC Archives and special collections at Vancouver Public Library. I love how the blog includes a section on how the image was made.

3. Daniel Francis Blog

Dan Francis just collected the Governor General’s History Award for Popular Media in Ottawa last month. That’s a big deal and I can’t think of anyone more deserving. There are 15 books listed on his website (everything from the history of trucks to brothels). I especially like Dan’s personal touch with posts such as the one about how he met his nanny—66 years later.

4. Every Place has a Story

Yes, this is my blog which I’ve been writing obsessively  since 2011. It’s an outlet for my passions of local history, heritage houses and murder, and lets me try out ideas for future books, have fun with photos, or just gives me an excuse to look up cool stuff. It also acts as a companion to my Facebook page of the same name.

5. Illustrated Vancouver

Jason Vanderhill stopped writing his blog in 2015 when he reached a staggering 1,000 posts. I’ve included it because it’s an amazing resource for anyone with an interest in Vancouver’s art history. You’ll find work from artists like BC Binning, contemporary artists such as Tom Carter, and stuff you never knew about such as 1930 plans for a museum at Dead Man’s Island.

6. Janet Nicol

Janet is a former high school history teacher turned writer, who according to her blog, has notched up more than 340 articles in 44 magazines and journals. She writes on BC history, social justice issues and art.  And if you can’t afford a subscription to BC History, Janet often posts her articles on this blog.

7. Past Tense

Lani Russwurm gets my vote for the most knowledgeable history guy in the city. His blogs are always entertaining, highly researched, and I’m forever learning something new and wishing that I’d thought of it first. As well as his Past Tense blog, Lani wrote Vancouver was Awesome and is behind the Forbidden Vancouver blog.

8. Unwritten Histories

I’m seriously intimidated by Angela Eidinger’s qualifications. She has a BA in history from McGill, a doctorate of philosophy in history from UVic, and is currently teaching at UBC. Angela does a roundup of history news each week, and has a great list of resources on her site such as the Canadian Historians Guide to Twitter and a Holiday Gift Guide for Historians.

9. Vanalogue

Christine Hagemoen is the force behind this excellent blog. She has worked as a media librarian for the CBC and an archival assistant at Vancouver Archives and really knows her stuff. Subject material ranges from Sara Cassell’s East Georgia Street café to the date stamps in concrete sidewalks to bottle dash stucco.

10. Vancouver as it was: a photo historical journey

Murray Maisey’s blog is much more than photos, he really delves into the history of whatever he is researching. I like the way he “talks” to himself in his stories. In a post about the long defunct Empire Building he writes: “A question which often arises in my mind with such structures is “Who were the tenants who occupied it?…So I dug into Vancouver directories.”

If you are in need of a little more history in your holidays try these posts from the last two years:

The Top 10 Facebook History pages for 2015

The Top 10 Facebook Group Pages for 2016

Have I missed your favourite Vancouver history blogger? Leave me a comment and I’ll make sure to check them out. And, thanks for following my blog!

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

Saving History: Crime Maps, Surveillance Albums and Mugshot Books

If you enjoy a good murder story, love heritage buildings, or just want to see what a morgue looks like, then you need to make your way down to the Vancouver Police Museum.

For those of us who write about crime, the museum is ground zero when it comes to information, because apart from the static displays there is a vast archive and amazing staff to help you navigate through it.

When the police station at 312 Main Street closed in 2010, the Museum inherited a bunch of really cool stuff. And, when I dropped by last week, Rozz and Elizabeth were kind enough to share a few of their finds.

Most fascinating were the crime maps dated from the 1940s to the mid ’70s.

“They are floor plans that were hand drawn by two officers and signed,” explained Elizabeth.

Some of the maps were for murder scenes, others for robberies.

Elizabeth carefully unrolled one of the maps. It was a very detailed drawing of the interior of a house and dated September 8, 1960. The address was 19 East 26th Avenue.

I couldn’t wait to get home.

Street directories showed that the house’s owner was a Mrs. Mina May Holmes. My next step was vital statistics. It turned out that 75-year-old Holmes came to an untimely end when she was beaten to death by “persons unknown.”

A date with the Vancouver Public Library’s microfilm confirmed that she was killed by a brain hemorrhage and a blow so severe that it broke her jaw and bashed in her skull. Police found her lying in a bed splattered with orange pop. They concluded that the pop bottle was the murder weapon and the prime suspect was Sammy Semple, 51, a former vaudeville dancer who had moved into her home the day before.

A check on Google maps shows that her house is still there.

Unfortunately, much of the information in the archives can’t be publicized because it contravenes Freedom of Information laws. One of these gems is an album (pictured at the top) packed full of surveillance photos showing women leaving the Penthouse nightclub on Seymour Street in the mid-1970s.

Elizabeth was able to identify the building from the distinctive exterior of the Penthouse door.

The back of the book has pages of mugshots indicating that surveillance paid off and the cops were able to prosecuted Angela, Kitty and dozens of other Penthouse “staffers.”

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

What was here before? The Kingsgate Mall

The thing about the Kingsgate Mall at Broadway and Kingsway is you either love it or you hate it. It’s weird or wonderful, strange or quaint, creepy or quirky, but it rarely goes unnoticed.

The cupola (which is a replica of the one that used to top King Edward School  before the fire) has turned the mall into a bit of a landmark, but I can’t imagine calling it a destination by any stretch of the imagination. Aside from a dental surgery and a credit union, one of the only stores not found in most other shopping malls is the Lolli Pretty Clothing Company that has 74 Facebook Likes and the fabulous tagline “Your Candy Store of Fashion.”

Postcard ca.1906: https://www.flickr.com/photos/45379817@N08/9485117002

When the mall was built in 1974, it took out the Mount Pleasant Elementary School, an 80-year-old solid brick building built in 1892, that was originally known as the False Creek School.

Angus McIntyre shot this photo of the inside of a classroom in June 1972. “Someone did not agree with the plan to keep the school,” he says.
Angus McIntyre photo, June 1972

What somehow escaped the bulldozer, was a ca.1907 buried house at 350 East 10th Avenue, directly behind the mall and adjoining a Telus parking lot.

When the Mount Pleasant school was demolished in 1972 the kids moved into a new school at 2300 Guelph, and which is still very much in operation.

These houses in the 2300-block Guelph Street were demolished to make way for the new Mount Pleasant school. Courtesy Vancouver Archives, 1966

Oddly, the land underneath the Kingsgate Mall is owned by the Vancouver School Board and has been since the late 1880s. The VSB in turn leases the land to Beedie Development Corp for $750,000 a year, and they operate the mall. No surprise that Beedie would like to buy the mall, pull it down and redevelop it.

Perhaps the pinned tweet on the unofficial twitter account for the Kingsgate Mall says it all: “STILL NOT A CONDO.”

Courtesy Northern BC Archives, June 1971

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

Vancouver’s Parking Meters turn 71

On November 12 it will be 71 years since the first parking meters hit Vancouver. The fee was five cents an hour.

For the first 30 years, police had responsibility for checking the meters, and I bet that assignment was the equivalent of standing in the corner with a dunce cap. Parking meter enforcement was transferred to a civilian force in 1976, and the rates ranged between 10 and 40 cents an hour.

Vancouver’s first parking meter unveiled November 12, 1946, showing Hotel Devonshire and Georgia Hotel in the background. Courtesy CVA 586-4816

Branca Verde was one of the early “meter maids” when she was hired by the City of Vancouver in 1982. There were 12 in total, she told a Vancouver Sun reporter on her retirement last year, and yes, all were women.

The checkers were given some scratchy dark blue fabric and told to make themselves a skirt, long shorts or pants. Then they were handed old jackets from the engineering department-it doesn’t say whether they were new or used.

Meter checker Branca Verde in 1982. Courtesy Vancouver Sun

To outsmart over-parkers who rubbed off the chalk used to mark the tire, the checkers would place a smartie on top of the tire under the wheel well, said Verde.

Today, there are around 10,000 parking meters on Vancouver streets ratcheting up anywhere from $1 to $6 an hour and filling city coffers with $50 million every year and another $20 million in parking tickets.

Gastown parking meters ca.1972. Courtesy CVA 691834

Where was the world’s first parking meter you ask? Well according to Parking-net it was in Oklahoma City on July 16, 1935 and called Park-O-Meter No. 1.

Sources:

City of Vancouver Archives – http://searcharchives.vancouver.ca/
Chuck Davis’s History of Metropolitan Vancouver
Vancouver Sun, October, 2016
CBC, November, 2016

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

 

 

 

Our Missing Heritage: King Edward High School

On June 19, 1973, a three-alarm fire broke out at Vancouver City College at West 12th and Oak Street. Over a thousand students were in class and safely evacuated, but it was too late for the school, destroyed by faulty wiring in the attic.

“My dad, Chief Bill Frederick graduated from King Ed. He sadly told the story of how his crew fought that blaze with all their might,” Patty Frederick, June 2017. Photo courtesy Vancouver Fire Fighters Historical Society.

William T. Whiteway, the same architect who designed the Sun Tower and the Storey and Campbell Warehouse on Beatty Street, and Lord Roberts Elementary in the West End, designed the school in the Neoclassical style and topped it off with a central cupola. It was the first secondary school south of False Creek, and appropriately named Vancouver High School. Classes started in 1905, the school was renamed King Edward in 1910, and another section was added in 1912.

Courtesy Andrea Nicholson

The King Ed alumni includes an impressive list of Vancouver luminaries. There is Cecil Green the philanthropist who attended UBC when classes operated out of the 12th and Oak Street building. Broadcasters include Jack Cullen and Red Robinson. While other notables to pass through the school’s corridors are Dal Grauer, Nathan Nemetz, Grace McCarthy, Yvonne De Carlo and Jack Wasserman.

There’s a skinny, very young Percy Williams in a picture of the King Ed high school track team of 1926. Percy had taken up running two years before because it was part of the sports program. Two years later he brought home two gold medals from the Olympics and became a local hero.

Percy Williams in the middle row, third from left. Courtesy Andrea Nicholson.

In 1962 King Ed became an adult education centre and the kids transitioned to Eric Hamber, says Andrea Nicholson, alumni coordinator.

Andrea’s mum Elizabeth Lowe (MacLaine) taught at the school and later became department head for Business Education. She was supposed to teach night school on the day the school burned down.

“I remember as a child going up into the turret, and I remember when they pulled that school apart the dividers for the bathroom stalls were solid marble,” says Andrea, who could see the flames from the grounds of Cecil Rhodes Elementary at 14th and Spruce.

Courtesy Vancouver Archives Sch P43, 1925

Vancouver Community College took over the school in 1965 and five years later the building sold to Vancouver General Hospital, although it remained an educational institute until the fire.

Now, all that’s left of the school building is a stained-glass window installed in VCC’s Broadway campus, a stone wall, a plaque, and a large photograph of the original school  in the VGH’s Diamond building which replaced it.

“The architects were very good to include a circle of yellow tile on the main floor which outlines the original King Ed high school,” says Andrea.

The wall received a Places that Matter plaque in 2012. Former King Ed teacher, and vice-president Annie B. Jamieson (1907-1927) recently had an elementary school named after her.

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

The Ghosts of the Fireside Grill

The Fireside Grill is situated on a ley line that runs down West Saanich Road, through Wilkinson Road, toward the Four Mile House—a reputably haunted inn—to the Portage Inlet and Esquimalt Harbour. This story is an excerpt from Sensational Victoria.

Tim Petropoulos, co-owner of the Fireside Grill since 2000, is a self-described skeptic when it comes to ghosts, but even he can’t discount all the sightings and odd things that have happened over the years and the first-hand accounts from his staff.

The Thatch/Maltwood House, 1979. Courtesy Saanich Archives

“I spend so much time here at night and during the day that it feels like somebody is with you all the time,” he says. “I just shrug it off, but I know some of my staff are believers.”

Architect Hubert Savage designed the Tudor Revival house as an English-style tea and dance room in 1939, strategically built on a hilltop between Butchart Gardens and the new Airport.

War-time rationing and gas restrictions quickly killed off the Royal Oak Inn and the business was sold to John Maltwood from England, who sought a fitting home for his artist wife and their large collection of antiques.

Katharine believed in the occult and wrote a book about her discovery of the Glastonbury Zodiac in 1927. This Zodiac, she believed, plays an important role in occult theories and is essentially the signs of the zodiac formed by features in the landscape such as waterways, roads, streams, walls and pathways.

The Maltwoods added a two-storey studio on the north side for Katharine which connected to the main building by a passageway from the minstrel’s gallery.

The Maltwoods renamed the house “The Thatch.”

Katharine died in 1961 and rumour has it that she was buried on the property. John left the house and art to UVic in 1964, and it operated as the Maltwood Museum until the university sold the property to the District of Saanich in 1980.

Staff say that the inn is haunted by Katharine’s ghost and that of a little pug dog. One staff member reported several sightings of Katharine as a white silhouette with a little dog by her side.

Having a ghost isn’t a bad thing for a restaurant, especially one that’s not mischievous or malevolent. But there have been incidents.

 

When the house was owned by the University of Victoria, caretakers would be called about alarms going off and things going missing.

“I haven’t found anything missing or changed or moved,” says Tim. “But it’s a restaurant and it’s being used all the time. I probably wouldn’t notice if the cutlery was upside down.”

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

 

Aborted Plans: All Seasons Park

When I think of all the demolition and destruction that we’ve put Vancouver through over the last century, it amazes me that we still have Stanley Park. It’s not from lack of trying though, developers have been trying to chip away at it for years.

A peace sign garden at All Seasons Park, the proposed site of a Four Seasons Hotel near the entrance to Stanley Park, on May 30, 1971. Courtesy Kate Bird.

I first heard of the All Seasons Park when I was flipping through Kate Bird’s new release: City on Edge. The photo, taken by Province photographer Gordon Sedawie over 46 years ago, shows a peace sign garden. As the caption explains, the site was occupied by people opposed to the development of a Four Seasons hotel and condo complex at the Coal Harbour entrance to Stanley Park.

Coal Harbour and the entrance to Stanley Park ca.1960s. CVA 1435-657

Kate sent me the photo and some articles explaining the context.

There were three attempts to turn the 14-acre entrance to Stanley Park into a developer’s paradise. The first was by a New York developer in the early ‘60s.

Selwyn Pullan, who died last month, photographed the first proposed model in 1963

The second was by a local outfit called Harbour Park Developments that bought the land in 1964 and proposed a $55 million development with 15 towers ranging between 15 and 31-storeys in height.

Aerial photo showing the proposed development. Courtesy Vancouver Sun.

The third, and most promising for Vancouver City Council at least, was a plan by the Four Seasons Hotel chain to build a 14-storey hotel, three 30-storey condos towers, and a bunch of townhouses.

Mayor Tom Campbell riding the wrecking ball that would take out the Lyric Theatre in 1969

This was the era when Mayor Tom Campbell (1967-72) and the NPA were replacing swaths of heritage buildings with the Pacific Centre and Vancouver Centre, pushing for freeways that would knock out large parts of the city, and lobbying for Project 200,  that if it had gone ahead, would have destroyed most of Gastown.

On May 30, 1971 a few dozen hippies took over the site and set up camp (coincidentally, around the same time that the District of North Vancouver was destroying many of the squatter shacks at Maplewood). The Stanley Park protesters planted maple trees and vegetables, dug a pond, and called it All Seasons Park.

They stayed for nearly a year.

Campbell issued a plebiscite where only property owners could vote. It succeeded when less than 60% voted to reject the Four Season’s plan. But while our city council was gung-ho, the plan fell apart in 1972 when the Federal government refused to hand over a crucial piece of land.

Five years later the land was annexed to Stanley Park and oddly renamed Devonian Harbour Park.

Stanley Park in a parallel universe

Sources:

City on Edge: A rebellious century of Vancouver protests, riots, and strikes
The Chuck Davis History of Metropolitan Vancouver
“This week in history” – Vancouver Sun, May 26, 2017
Yippies in Love (2011)

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