Eve Lazarus's Blog: Every Place has a Story, page 39

Our Missing Heritage–The Georgia Medical-Dental Building: what were we thinking?

On May 28, 1989, we blew up the Georgia Medical-Dental Centre, a building on West Georgia designed by McCarter & Nairne, the same architects behind the Marine and the Devonshire Apartments. *

And there goes the Georgia Medical-Dental Building in 1989

The Devonshire was first, designed as an apartment building in 1923. Next came the 15-storey art deco medical building—and the Marine Building was completed in 1930—the only one left standing.

 

Leonard Frank photo in 1929 showing the Georgia Medical-Dental Building under construction, next to the Devonshire and the Georgia Hotel.

As this more recent photo shows, the HSBC Building now sits where the elegant Devonshire Hotel used to be, and the medical building was blown up or perhaps blown down is more accurate—to make way for the twenty-three-storey Cathedral Place.

Cathedral Place replaced the Georgia Medical Dental Building

I quite like Cathedral Place. It’s nicely tiered, the roof fits in with the Hotel Vancouver across the street, and it even has a few nurses, gargoyles and lions pasted about as a reminder of the former building. Everyone over 35 likely remembers the three nurses in their starchy World War 1 uniforms looking down from their 11th storey parapets. The Rhea Sisters, as they were known, were made from terra-cotta and weighed several tonnes each. The nurses were restored and are now part of the Technology Enterprise Facility building at UBC

But here’s a thought. Instead of honouring a heritage building by sticking fibreglass casts on a new building, why not just keep the original one!

Fibre glass nurse at Cathedral Place

Paul Merrick, the architect who designed Cathedral Place, and who did such a nice job renovating the Marine Building, the Orpheum Theatre, and converting the old BC Hydro Building to the Electra, could have easily designed Cathedral Place someplace else. The Georgia Medical-Dental Building was only sixty after all—hardly old enough for its unseemly demise, but old enough to represent a significant part of our history.

I never saw the Devonshire, it came down in 1981, but I love one of its stories. According to newspaper reports after being kicked out of the snotty Hotel Vancouver in 1951, Louis Armstrong and his All Stars walked across the street and were immediately given rooms in the Devonshire. Walter Fred Evans, a one-time member of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra built the Devonshire, and supposedly Duke Ellington, Lena Horne and the Mills Brothers wouldn’t stay anywhere else.

The Devonshire Hotel, West Georgia, CVA LGN 1060 ca.1925

* McCarter & Nairne also designed the Patricia Hotel, 403 East Hastings; Spencer’s Department Store (now SFU at Harbour Centre); the Livestock Building at the PNE, and the General Post Office on West Georgia.

For more posts see: Our Missing Heritage

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

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

It’s hard to fathom how anyone could think that a belly flop competition was a good idea, but Tom Butler did back in the ‘70s, and as it happens, it was.

Who needs a diving board when you have a hot air balloon. The World Belly Flop and Cannonball Diving Championship at the Coach House Inn in North Vancouver. Photo courtesy John Denniston, 1979

Former Sun reporter, turned PR guy, Butler was the master of the photo op. Having Margaret Trudeau turn up to the opening night of a small North Vancouver disco scored national attention for his client. He talked Neil Armstrong, the astronaut to come to Vancouver and open a revolving restaurant above the Sears Tower (now the Vancouver Lookout) and slapped on the slogan: “The restaurant that soars halfway to the moon in the night sky over Vancouver was opened by a man who went all the way.”

He borrowed a beaver from the Stanley Park zoo for a cross US tour to promote local tourism. According to a Globe and Mail story of 1979: “The beaver scrambled up the steps of San Francisco City Hall to be hugged by the mayor, and promptly committed an indignity of relieving itself.” The front-page caption in the next day’s paper was “Damn That Beaver.”

But back to belly flops.

The Coach House Inn at 700 Old Lillooet Road, by the Second Narrow Bridge. Photo courtesy NVMA 16055

Butler invented the World Belly Flop and Cannonball Diving Championship in 1974 to publicize the Bayshore Hotel’s new pool, and it quickly gained momentum and spread to the old Coach House Inn in North Vancouver. According to photographer John Denniston, the “event” drew in between three and four thousand spectators, entrants from Fiji and Japan, as well as US President Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy as a judge, and coverage from NBC television.

In 1976, the American Hotel and Motel Association recognized the belly-flop as North America’s best publicity stunt for that year.

“It’s something that is universally understood,” Butler told the G&M. “I mean, there’s no subtlety to it. But what else can a 300-pound truck driver do and get to have NBC declare that he’s champion of the U.S.A.?”

Miss 1979 Belly Flop was won by Christie Wilson, a 26-year-old stripper who went by the stage name “Big Fanny Annie.”

Coach House lobby in the 1970s. The doors by the fireplace led to the pool. Upstairs were the rooms and dinner lounge. With thanks to Sharon Proctor and the NVMA 16066

Butler eventually retired to Prince Edward Island, and died in 2013. He was 79.

In his obituary, Ian Haysom mentions that he wrote an autobiography called PR Man. I haven’t been able to get hold of a copy, but it would be worth it just for this story.

“He brought Zsa Zsa Gabor to Vancouver for the opening of the Royal Centre shopping complex,” writes Haysom. “She was, he said, the most obnoxious personality he had ever met. ‘Imagine, if you will, spending four days minding someone else’s cranky brat going through the terrible twos’.”

The book apparently has a huge belly-flop contestant leaping off a springboard and the tagline: “A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.” Let me know if you have a copy I can borrow.

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

Margaret Trudeau and the Daddy Long Legs Disco

Last Christmas, my friend Jason Vanderhill gave me a card showing a couple of disco dancers from the ‘70s. The caption explained that the photo was taken at the opening of something called Daddy Long Legs in North Vancouver.

Disco dancers at the opening of Daddy Long Legs at the International Plaza Hotel in North Vancouver. July 31, 1979. Bill Keay/Vancouver Sun

The only thing I could find out about the Daddy Long Legs disco was from a Globe and Mail article dated August 4, 1979 which focused on PR superstar Tom Butler rather than the venue he was promoting. “It was a public relations man’s dream,” went the lead. “Margaret Trudeau, the biggest newsmaker to storm the east from the North Shore’s sheltered heights, was boogying at the opening splash at Daddy Long Legs, a new North Vancouver Disco.”

“Margaret’s boogying makes Tom Smile,” Globe and Mail, August 4, 1979

The same picture appears in Kate Bird’s wonderful book Vancouver in the Seventies, and after a visit to the NVMA yesterday, we figured out that the hotel was built around 1975 and was at the corner of Marine Drive and Capilano Road. The 1980 city directory describes it as “Vancouver’s finest resort hotel.” The high-rise had 150 rooms all with colour television, complete convention facilities, restaurant dining, show lounge, garden bar, dancing, a heated indoor swimming pool, saunas, whirlpools, and tennis courts. John Hale was the general manager.

The International Plaza, no longer Vancouver’s finest resort hotel in 2017.

It doesn’t look like the disco or the hotel lasted very long because it quickly turned into the International Plaza Hotel and Apartment Complex in the city directories. The hotel’s facilities have since been repurposed into various fitness clubs (currently Steve Nash). Those who were there say the disco was on the top floor, and perhaps the “garden bar” was where the Staples is now.

Kate tells me they have photos of our Prime Minister’s mother dancing at the disco on opening night, but chose to include the above photo because there were other pictures of her in the book.

I’ll be writing more about Tom Butler in an upcoming blog.

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

They Paved Paradise and put up a Parking Lot: Larwill Park

Bus Depot , 150 Dunsmuir Street in 1953. Photo Courtesy Vancouver Archives LP 205.4

My friend Angus McIntyre was a Vancouver bus driver for 40 years and often took photos of heritage buildings, neon signs, street lamps and everyday life on his various routes. His photos are always so vivid and interesting (see his posts on Birks and elevator operators) and when he sends me one, I stop whatever I’m doing and nag him for the back story.

Inside the bus depot in 1979. Angus McIntyre photo.

Angus shot this photo of the old bus depot on Dunsmuir Street (Larwill Park) in 1979. He tells me: “This was just after Pacific Stage Lines had been dissolved, and Pacific Coach Lines had started the replacement service. The signs have tape covering the word ‘Stage’.” Angus says that on an earlier busy Sunday, employees conducted a mock funeral for Pacific Stage Lines. “Afterwards, there was a wake at the bus drivers’ booze can across the street on Dunsmuir. Seems Vancouver has this thing for mock funerals,” he says.

Larwill Park today via Google Maps

Seems we also have a thing for parking lots. Vancouver seems to revere parking lots as much as other cities value heritage buildings, public space, and art. (See Our Missing Second Hotel Vancouver).

Larwill Park is now the huge downtown parking lot that is bounded by Cambie, Dunsmuir, Beatty and Georgia Streets. It began life as the Cambie Street Grounds, a park and sports fields. And, being opposite the Beatty Street Drill Halls, at times operated as a military drill ground. The park was named after Al Larwill, who the story goes, was made “caretaker” after squatting in a shack on the land for many years. He was given a house on a corner of the land where he stored sports equipment and allowed team members to use his dining room to change.

Military exercises Cambie Street Grounds ca.1907. Photo Vancouver Archives 677-980

In 1946, Charles Bentall of the Dominion Construction Company built the bus depot, and it opened the following year as the most modern in Canada. Pacific Stage Lines, Greyhound, Squamish Coach Lines and others operated out of the terminal, until car culture struck in the 1950s and ‘60s and some of the companies went under.

In 1979, when Angus took his photo, Pacific Stage Lines had just merged with Vancouver Island Coach lines to become Pacific Coach Lines. In 1993, the bus depot moved to Pacific Central Station and the land became a parking lot.

How the Vancouver Art Gallery sees the future of Larwill Park.

The Vancouver Art Gallery has its sights on the land and wants to turn it into a backdrop for its for its bizarre bento-box building.

For more posts see: Our Missing Heritage

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

They Paved Paradise and put up a Parking Lot

Bus Depot , 150 Dunsmuir Street in 1953. Photo Courtesy Vancouver Archives LP 205.4

My friend Angus McIntyre was a Vancouver bus driver for 40 years and often took photos of heritage buildings, neon signs, street lamps and everyday life on his various routes. His photos are always so vivid and interesting (see his posts on Birks and elevator operators) and when he sends me one, I stop whatever I’m doing and nag him for the back story.

Inside the bus depot in 1979. Angus McIntyre photo.

Angus shot this photo of the old bus depot on Dunsmuir Street (Larwill Park) in 1979. He tells me: “This was just after Pacific Stage Lines had been dissolved, and Pacific Coach Lines had started the replacement service. The signs have tape covering the word ‘Stage’.” Angus says that on an earlier busy Sunday, employees conducted a mock funeral for Pacific Stage Lines. “Afterwards, there was a wake at the bus drivers’ booze can across the street on Dunsmuir. Seems Vancouver has this thing for mock funerals,” he says.

Larwill Park today via Google Maps

Seems we also have a thing for parking lots. Vancouver seems to revere parking lots as much as other cities value heritage buildings, public space, and art. (See Our Missing Second Hotel Vancouver).

Larwill Park is now the huge downtown parking lot that is bounded by Cambie, Dunsmuir, Beatty and Georgia Streets. It began life as the Cambie Street Grounds, a park and sports fields. And, being opposite the Beatty Street Drill Halls, at times operated as a military drill ground. The park was named after Al Larwill, who the story goes, was made “caretaker” after squatting in a shack on the land for many years. He was given a house on a corner of the land where he stored sports equipment and allowed team members to use his dining room to change.

Military exercises Cambie Street Grounds ca.1907. Photo Vancouver Archives 677-980

In 1946, Charles Bentall of the Dominion Construction Company built the bus depot, and it opened the following year as the most modern in Canada. Pacific Stage Lines, Greyhound, Squamish Coach Lines and others operated out of the terminal, until car culture struck in the 1950s and ‘60s and some of the companies went under.

In 1979, when Angus took his photo, Pacific Stage Lines had just merged with Vancouver Island Coach lines to become Pacific Coach Lines. In 1993, the bus depot moved to Pacific Central Station and the land became a parking lot.

How the Vancouver Art Gallery sees the future of Larwill Park.

The Vancouver Art Gallery has its sights on the land and wants to turn it into a backdrop for its for its bizarre bento-box building.

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

Bring Back the Streetcar!

Shocked faces of people riding the streetcar as they get their first look at the new Vancouver Brill (trolley) bus in 1949. Photo courtesy Angus McIntyre.

On September 3, 1906 the first North Vancouver streetcar began its journey at the ferry dock, travelled up Lonsdale and stopped at 12th Street. Jack Kelly was the conductor aboard that inaugural run. Everything went smoothly on the way up, but on the way back down, the brakes failed and Car 25 came crashing into another streetcar waiting at the bottom. Three years later, Kelly was at the controls of Car 62 when it headed down Lonsdale to meet the 4:00 p.m. ferry. Once again, the brakes failed. With 15 passengers screaming in fright, including the wife of the North Vancouver mayor, the car careened down the hill and off the end of the dock. Kelly leaped from the car, breaking his leg. The rest of the passengers were fished out of the harbour.

Streetcar #120 going south on Quebec Street into the car barn on Main Street. Photo courtesy Friends of the Olympic Line .

Dangers of early street cars aside, I’d love to see some return. At its height, there was a streetcar system that operated in Vancouver, New Westminster and North Vancouver where three lines operated up Lonsdale, Capilano and Grand Boulevard, later extending to Lynn Valley.

Streetcar #153 heads northbound on Lonsdale Avenue in 1946. Photo courtesy North Vancouver Museum & Archives

Car 153 was built by the J.G. Brill Company of Philadelphia and motored up and down Lonsdale Avenue for 35 years. Designed as a “double-ender,” when she reached the Windsor Road terminus at the top of Lonsdale the motorman and the conductor switched places for the return trip.

When streetcars were discontinued in 1947, most of their parts were sold off for scrap, while a few became summer cottages or farm buildings. Car 153 survived first as a motel cabin near Mission, then as a restaurant in Chilliwack, and, before she was rediscovered in 1982, a chicken coop on a Fraser Valley farm. Car 153, which was restored by the North Vancouver Museum & Archives in the early 1990s, and is I believe, still in storage at Mahon Park, where it’s likely to stay.

The interurban running southbound on Commercial at East 2nd in 1950. Photo courtesy Friends of the Olympic Line

Last June, councillor Don Bell’s appeal to bring back the streetcar got promptly flattened. One councillor called it: “pursuing a classic boondoggle,” telling the North Shore News: “Put yourself in Translink’s shoes: if they give this to us, how many municipalities in Metro Vancouver are going to be right at the door asking for exactly the same thing?”

Yes, god forbid Vancouver should have a transit system that makes sense. We called them trams in Melbourne where I grew up, and we took them everywhere. Now they are free in the city centre, and as well as being an amazing tourist attraction, they just make good sense from a transportation and clean energy point of view.

Photo courtesy Vancouver Archives

A group called Friends of the Olympic Line Vancouver Civic Railway is lobbying to bring back streetcars to Vancouver. Check out their Facebook page and their website,

Photo courtesy Vancouver Archives

For more about the streetcars and Interurbans of Vancouver:

http://evelazarus.com/may-1-1907-a-trip-across-vancouver/

http://evelazarus.com/the-train-that-ran-down-hastings-street/

 

The Life and Death of Seaton Street

1145 Seaton Street, ca.1890. Owned by Stephen Richards, a lawyer and land agent. Photo Vancouver Archives SGN 297

Last week I wrote about the oldest house in Vancouver—well at least that’s what they called it when it burned to the ground in 1946. It was built in 1875, and until 1915, its address was Seaton Street.

1120 Seaton Street in 1895. Owned by John P. Nicolls, a solicitor. CVA Bu P561

Unlike most of Vancouver’s streets that are named after old white men, Lauchlan Hamilton, the CPR surveyor, named this one in 1886 after pulling it at random from a map (the town of Seaton is long gone, but used to be near Hazelton in northern BC).

1218 Seaton Street ca.1901. Residents are William Bauer, surveyor and Major-General Twigge. CVA SGN 849.

The street was dubbed Blueblood Alley after its wealthy occupants. It was also a short walk to the original Vancouver Club at Hastings and Hornby Streets (built in 1893), and from 1912, the Metropolitan Club on the next block down.

1117 Seaton Street, 1914. Canadian Army Service Corps building. CVA

In 1901, the city directory shows 15 houses on Seaton Street from Burrard to Jervis. Residents include Mayor Thomas Townley, Henry Ogle Bell-Irving (known in Vancouver business circles as H.O.), and Vancouver’s first solicitor, Alfred St. George Hamersley. Frank Holt, and his little shack at #1003, is completely ignored by the city directory that year. Frank first gets a listing in 1904, and new neighbor, real estate agent Edward Mahon.

Seaton Street, now West Hastings in 1925. Photo CVA 357-4

In the early years of the 20th Century, the bluebloods began to leave the alley for higher ground above English Bay, and by 1915, the road was an extension of Hastings Street west of Burrard, and just like the rich, the name disappeared.

Seaton Street/West Hastings 1000, 1100 and 1200 block today. Google Maps

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

 

 

The Marine Building and the Little House Next Door

 

W.J. Moore’s 1935 photo of the Marine Building, the Quadra Club and Frank Holt’s cabin. CVA BU N7

It’s hard to imagine today, but when the Marine Building opened in 1930 it was the tallest building in Vancouver and stayed that way for more than a decade. If you look at the photo (above), you can see that when architects McCarter and Nairne, designed it, four of the 22 floors were built into the cliff above the CPR railway tracks. You can also see the second version of the Quadra Club, and then what looks like an old shack perched on the edge of the cliff.

I recently came across this war-time newspaper advertorial by Vancouver Breweries Limited. It shows the same 1935 photo, and circled is “the oldest building in Vancouver.”

According to the story, part of a series called “Do you know Vancouver!” the tiny house was used by CPR land commissioner Lauchlan Hamilton when he was surveying Vancouver in 1885. “Using the old cottage as a mark, Hamilton set the lines of our present Hastings Street, on which the street system of Vancouver is based,” goes the story. “When John Buchan, Baron Tweedsmuir visited Vancouver for the last time as Governor General of Canada, his attention was called to this shabby little relic of our past. ‘I hope the people of Vancouver will preserve it!’ he exclaimed, fervently.”

Well, no sir, we did not.

The little house was built in 1875 as a mess hall for Spratt’s Oilery and originally had five rooms. It survived the Great Fire, and in 1894, Frank Holt moved in. When the cannery moved out, Holt stayed on. When Frank found out that four of the rooms were taxable because they were on city property, he tore them down, and stayed in the one-room shack. He was still living there in 1943 when the foundations started to give way and the front porch fell down the embankment. Frank, who was 90 at the time, helped workers install a new foundation.

Then in 1946 a fire broke out and trapped Frank in the house. Miraculously, firefighters found Frank in the debris and carried him to safety. The house was not so lucky.

Marine Building, photo courtesy Pricetags blog

Frank came to Vancouver on the first transcontinental train. He was one of the founders of Christ Church Cathedral, and lived as a squatter in the one-room house in the shadow of the Marine Building for over half a century.

He died in December 1946, less than two months after his home burned down.

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

Murder, Investigation, and a Dash of Forensics

Laura Yazedjian, coroner with the Police Museum’s Rozz Shipp

The first time I went to the Vancouver Police Museum was in the late 1980s. It was a breakfast meeting for a tourist organization called Vancouver AM, and we ate in the autopsy room. I fell in love with the place then in all its macabre glory, and nearly three decades later I still love going there.

Last night I was at a reception to launch the new true crime exhibit. I talked to plain clothes detectives, museum curators, librarians, a criminologist, a forensic anthropologist and a GIS specialist from the coroner’s office who have the grim, but rewarding job of matching remains to missing people—sometimes decades later.

Rosslyn Shipp by part of the new true crime exhibit

Museum director, Rosslyn Shipp has spearheaded the changes, mostly on a shoestring budget, and transformed the old morgue in the process. The musty old wooden cases are gone, replaced by stories, case files, trace evidence and photographs from some of the most fascinating murders of last century. Rather than focus on the murder, the exhibits now tell the stories of the victims, putting them front and centre where they belong.

Sandra Boutilier and Carolyn Soltau, whose impending loss from the Sun/Province library will be keenly felt

The Babes in the Woods, the Pauls and the Kosberg murders have been updated and joined by three more. There’s a skull of a farmer found in the 1970s. He’d been shot in the head and buried along the edge of a river. The remains were matched to a missing person’s report by the coroner’s office. There’s the story of Viano Alto, a night watchman who was shot and killed while on the job in 1959. And there’s the 1994 murder of David Curnick, stabbed 146 times with his own kitchen knife.

The axe used in the Kosberg murders

Proper attention is now given to the work that went on in the building and its place in the evolution of forensics in Canada. John F.C.B. Vance, a city analyst and scientist (and the subject of my next book Blood, Sweat and Fear) has his place in the exhibit and much more emphasis is placed on the building’s history as the VPD crime lab (1932 to 1996).

Rozz is also the force behind the  speaker series now in its 5th year. The series kicks off next Wednesday (April 12) with a talk by Heidi Currie on the Kosberg murders. I’ll be looking at the unsolved murder of 24-year-old Jennie Conroy in 1944, former homicide sergeant Kevin McLaren will walk us through the murder investigation of four members of the Etibako family and Ashley Singh in 2006, former VPD sergeant Brian Honeybourn talks about his time in the Provincial Unsolved Homicide Unit, and staff Sergeant Lindsey Houghton will address how the VPD investigates and prosecutes organized crime.

Book your tickets: https://vancouverpolicemuseum.ca/speaker-series/

The skull of a murdered farmer found in the 1970s

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

The Missing Houses of Yaletown

Gord McCaw shot this photo of Percy Linden outside his home on June 26, 1986

Do you remember the little house on Richards Street between Nelson and Helmcken? It was one of the last ones standing and for years had quite the garden and lots of funky birdhouses and wheelbarrows. I was reminded of it when Glen Mofford posted a photo that he took of owner Percy Linden outside his house in the summer of 2001. “The house appeared to be a hold out from another age when these Victorian era houses were all over the downtown core,” says Glen.

1021 Richards Street, built in 1907. Photo courtesy Glen Mofford, 2001.

Percy was an interesting guy. A former truck driver, he bought the house in the ‘50s, rented it out, and moved in there in 1970. At one time the house was a violin studio.

1021 Richards Street in 1975. Photo courtesy Vancouver Archives 780-43

“Percy Linden is familiar to east-of-Granville Street regulars, trundling his lawnmower along the sidewalks of the hookers’ strolls, an other-era figure in the shadow of the construction cranes above the old Yaletown warehouse district that flag the march uptown of condominium towers.” wrote Globe and Mail reporter Robert Williamson in 1993.

 

1000 block Richards Street, west-side in 1981. Courtesy Vancouver Archives 779-E08-36

That year, Percy won an award for his garden from the BC Society of Landscape Architects.

“I never, ever thought of what I do in terms of landscaping,” Percy told Williamson. “I didn’t have the faintest intention of even growing a weed. I just set out to clean up the yard, and it evolved, inch by inch. People talk about hours of planning. I didn’t put one second’s planning into it; I just dug wherever I felt like it.”

1000 block Richards Street, east side, 1981. Courtesy Vancouver Archives 779-E08-26

The birdhouses—a collection of tiny farmhouses, barns, hotels and windmills, were inspired by Percy’s rural upbringing in Alberta. A little sign in the front yard read: “Take a little extra time today to stop and smell the roses long the way.”

Tour buses would stop outside his house, tourists snapped photographs, and others left fan mail in his mailbox. But every year, the house would seem to shrink a little more as a sea of high rises and condominiums grew up beside it.

1062 Richards Street in 2007. Courtesy Vancouver Sun

Not long after Glen took his photo, Percy gave up his house and garden. And, then a few years later, a feisty little old lady named Linda Rupa, who owned a little cottage in the same block as Percy, gave in under the weight of a $36,000 annual property tax bill. The former Safeway cashier sold the one-time bootlegging joint that she’d owned since 1962 for $6 million.

“When I came in here, I had 17 phones, two private lines to the States and a big poker table upstairs,” she told Vancouver Sun reporter John Mackie in 2007. “It was a lovely neighbourhood, where people cared about each other.”

1000 block Richards Street today, via Google maps

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