Eve Lazarus's Blog: Every Place has a Story, page 40

Heritage Streeters from Victoria (with Patrick Dunae, Tom Hawthorn and Eve Lazarus)

This is an occasional series that asks people who love history and heritage to tell us their favourite existing building and the one that never should have been torn down.

603 Manchester Road in Victoria’s Burnside-Gorge neighbourhood

Patrick A. Dunae is a Victoria-born historian. A past member of the City of Victoria Heritage Advisory Panel, he is currently president of the Friends of the BC Archives.

Favourite Building:

One of my favourite houses is an unprepossessing, colonial-style bungalow on Manchester Road. The house was built in 1908 by Charles Deacon, who had emigrated from England with his family six years earlier, and became the foreman of a Rock Bay sawmill. I like the design and proportions of the house; and I applaud the current owners for painting the exterior a warm yellow, a colour that was popular when the house was built. This is an unfashionable part of Victoria and old houses like this are at risk. Kudos to City of Victoria Heritage Planners, who have recommended that the 600 block of Manchester and adjacent Dunedin Street, be designated as a Heritage Conservation Area. The proposal still needs to be approved by homeowners. Fingers crossed.

The Coburn family home at 2640 Blanshard, an Italianate-style house built in 1898.
The one that got away:

In the 1960s when “urban renewal” was popular and local authorities were eradicating “blighted areas,” Victoria City council used the program to demolish nearly 160 houses in its Rose-Blanshard Renewal Scheme. This “blighted” area consisted of houses built in the 1890s and early 1900s. Rose Street was its centre and North Ward School (1894), a four-storey brick structure, was a landmark. The school and neighbouring residences were demolished so that Blanshard Street could be widened to benefit motorists travelling from the new BC ferry terminal. Properties were expropriated, and occupants who refused to leave their homes were forcibly evicted. The Coburn family home was the last house standing when it was bulldozed in March 1969. It was replaced with Blanshard Court, a “low income housing estate,” now called Evergreen Terrace.

The Royal Bank building at 1108 Government St. in Victoria photographed in 1949 (BC Archives I-02169). The building was in disrepair when purchased by bookseller Jim Munro in 1984. The carved lettering in the granite facade above the entrance now read Munro’s Books of Victoria.

Tom Hawthorn is a reporter, author and bookseller who lives in Victoria. His latest book The Year Canadians Lost Their Minds and Found Their Country, will hit bookshelves th is May.

Favourite Building:

My daily workplace is a magnificent former bank building. The Edwardian-era former Royal Bank of Canada at 1108 Government St. was in terrible disrepair when purchased (against his banker’s advice) by Jim Munro in 1984. He returned the structure to its former glory, notably removing a suspended ceiling added as part of a modernizing renovation in the 1950s. Today, tapered pilasters and a cast-plaster coffer ceiling attract tourists from around the globe eager to visit a bookstore co-founded in 1963 by future Nobel laureate Alice Munro. Designed in 1909 by local architect Thomas Hooper as a Temple Bank in the Classical Revival style, with an all-granite facade including two impressive Doric columns, Munro’s Books remains a temple to a commerce less pecuniary than literary.

Exhibition Building, Willows Fairgrounds, Oak Bay (Victoria) (BCArchives H-02390)
The one that got away:

In 1899, a grand exhibition hall with an adjacent horse racing track was built on farmland in Oak Bay. The roof stood 56 feet above the ground with central octagonal towers reaching to a height of 100 feet. An open cupola topped the impressive building, which dominated the Willows Fairgrounds like a manor house amid verdant lawns.

Among the visitors to the exhibition hall, which boasted 20,000 square feet of floor space surrounded by galleries, was the future King George V.

The building and the streetcar connection, that now extended from Royal Jubilee Hospital to the fairgrounds, spurred the growth of Oak Bay, which incorporated as a municipality in 1906. Alas, the building was destroyed by fire in 1907, to be replaced by a warehouse structure of little merit. The site of the fairgrounds was subdivided into housing after the Second World War with 10 acres reserved for Carnarvon Park.

Emily Carr’s Oak Bay cabin on Foul Bay Road. Eve Lazarus photo, 2012

Eve Lazarus is a journalist, author and blogger who has a passion for unconventional history and a fascination with murder. She is the author of Cold Case Vancouver.

Favourite Building:

Emily Carr paid $900 for a plot of land on Victoria Avenue in 1913, and according to a story built the cottage “nail by nail” with the help of “one old carpenter.” After a bit of digging it turns out the carpenter was Thomas Cattarall, who built Craigdarroch for the Dunsmuir family and worked on Hatley Castle. In 1995, new owners wanted to build a house on the property but didn’t want to destroy the little cottage. Terry Tallentire stepped in, paid the city $1.00, spent another $4,000 to move it to her house, and it now lives behind a Samuel Maclure designed house on Foul Bay Road. (The full story is in Sensational Victoria).

The Wilson mansion at 730 Burdett Avenue, Victoria
The one that got away:

There are many reasons why Victoria should have saved the Wilson Mansion, but perhaps the best one is because its social history is just so eccentric. There’s the overprotective father who surrounded it with high walls, Jane, the daughter who kept exotic birds in the attic and owned a 100 pairs of white gloves. And there’s the beneficiary of her will in 1949—Louis, a macaw parrot from South America, who was then in his eighties. Jane named Wah Wong, the Chinese gardener as trustee and parrot keeper, and the terms of the will stated that the property could not be sold while the birds were still alive. The feathered tenants managed to stave off developers until 1966, when it was bulldozed to make way for the Chateau Victoria Hotel.

For more on the series see:

Heritage Streeters with Bill Allman, Kristin Hardie and Pamela Post
Heritage Streeters with Anne Banner, Tom Carter, Kerry Gold and Anthony Norfolk
Heritage Streeters with Michael Kluckner, Jess Quan, Lani Russwurm and Lisa Anne Smith
Heritage Streeters with Caroline Adderson, Heather Gordon, Eve Lazarus, Cat Rose and Stevie Wilson 
Heritage Streeters with John Atkin, Aaron Chapman, Jeremy Hood and Will Woods

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

 

Our Missing Heritage: The Birks Building. WTF were we thinking?

The Birks Building at Granville and Georgia (where the London Drugs store is today) was demolished in May 1974. Two months earlier, on March 24, a group of people got together and held a funeral. Angus McIntyre attended and took photos, and he has kindly written a guest blog about the building and its demise. All photos and captions are by Angus.

The funeral mourners assemble under the Birks clock for the ceremonial laying of the wreaths. Two ladies prepared handmade protest signs, one of which is visible on the far left. Angus McIntyre photo, 1974.

By Angus McIntyre

 Forty-three years ago this week, I rode my bike downtown to attend a funeral service. The weather was sunny and +10C, and since it was a Sunday, traffic was light, and the Granville Mall was still under construction. I saw the procession of mourners with a police escort coming from the old Vancouver Art Gallery on Georgia at Thurlow. I heard a small band playing a sombre funeral dirge. It looked like the old photos of funerals in Vancouver in the early 1900s.

This view of the Vancouver Birks store interior was taken from the top of the stairs leading up to the mezzanine. There was excellent natural light through the large windows, complemented by attractive incandescent light fixtures.

The funeral was put together by a group of staff and students from the UBC School of Architecture, and included architects and historians. As the service was about to start, crews working on the new building at Georgia and Granville shut off the air compressors and laid down their tools. There was a Gathering, a Sharing of Ideas, a Choir performance and a Laying of the Wreaths. A small group of people wearing recycled videotape clothing put hexes on new buildings nearby. As soon as it came time to return to the Art Gallery, the band switched to Dixieland jazz, and the mood became slightly more upbeat.

I am leaning out of an open arched window on the top floor of the Birks Building, and on the floor below me a terracotta man’s face is checking out the scene. The Granville Mall is under construction, the recently opened Eaton’s store has yet to have two additional floors added, and the view to the south is relatively unobstructed.

I had been able to photograph the interior of the store through the courtesy of Thom Birks, and was even able to access the roof for some photos. I later presented him with a portfolio of images, and in return he gave me a framed print of the building. I had occasionally shopped there over the years, and the pneumatic tube system for purchases lasted almost to the end. When you entered the store for the first time, you couldn’t help but look up at the incredible ceiling detail. As Thom Birks looked at a model of the new tower to be built, he turned to me and said: “Of course, this interior could never be duplicated.”

This view shows the Birks sign on top of the Vancouver Block, taken from the roof of the Birks Building. The Vancouver Block survives to this day even though it was built in 1912, one year before the Birks building.

Demolition had already begun by the time of the funeral service, and it was fitting that enough people cared to have a farewell ceremony. The large R.I.P. banner ended up in a second storey office at the narrow Sam Kee building at Carrall and Pender Streets, visible as I drove my bus every day on the Stanley Park route.

There was some theatre involved in the service, and the wreaths were traditional, although I seem to recall one was made from an old car tire.

I visited Montreal years later, and was surprised to find Birks in an 1894 building. The store, with its incredible interior, was intact. It was sold recently to a developer for conversion to a boutique hotel, with plans to retain the original building and store. It is sad that Vancouver’s Birks Building did not get the same treatment.

Scaffolding is in place on the top of the Birks Building as the funeral ceremony takes place.

There are more of Angus’s photos and details of the funeral at Michael Kluckner’s blog
More about our missing heritage buildings—the Strand, Birks and the Second Hotel Vancouver
See Angus’s post on the Missing Elevator Operators of Vancouver 
For more about Angus McIntyre

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