This 1970s shot shows the buildings on the corner of Jackson Avenue, with Oppenheimer Park down the street on the right. The four storey building on the corner dates back to 1911 when it was developed by Frank Vandall. He first appeared in the city directories in 1909, managing the Roseleaf Rooms on Westminster Avenue (Main Street), although he was giving Vancouver as his location in legal filings in 1908. He moved on, and a year later was managing rooms at 143 Dunlevy Avenue. His own building, listed as the Vandall Block, was designed by W F Gardiner a year later, and cost $80,000 to build. According to the permit, Mr Vandall built it himself, but we know that Mr. Gardiner let the contracts to the various specialist sub-trades, so it appears that no overall contractor was hired.

Mr Vandall proved to be elusive, missing earlier census records and not showing up in 1911. In 1895, Frank Vandall, a miner, was living in Revelstoke, and in 1898 he had two partners in a placer mine on French Creek. In 1906 and 1907 there was a Frank Vandall working as agent with William Moody, surveying and marking timber to cut on the BC coast. In 1908 Frank Vandell was a land agent in Vancouver. It’s likely that his absence from the 1911 census was due to his death; a Frank E Vandell died in August 1911 and was buried in Mountain View Cemetery. In 1912 his widow was recorded in the street directory, and while she was missing from the 1913 directory, was running the Roof Garden Rooms on Jackson in 1914, and for several years after that. Frank was only 45 when he died, and had been born in Ontario.

We think another Frank Ernest Vandall, who was born in March 1911 in Seattle, and died in 1957 in Vancouver, aged 46 was almost certainly Frank and Nellie’s son; His father was also named Frank, and his mother was formerly Nellie Ernestine Bishop. Frank junior was buried in Mountain View with his parents. Nellie had died in Capitol Hill in Seattle in 1943, and was also buried in Mountain View cemetery next to Frank. She had been born in Dublin, and left a sister in Ireland and two more living in England.

Over the years the rooms (which have their entrance on Jackson) were run by a number of different proprietors. The corner store changed too: in 1918 D D Radakovich ran a grocery store, and Nellie E Vandall was running the rooms upstairs. In 1922 A H McLean was running the Roof Garden Rooms, and by 1925 Mrs. Marriott. The corner store by then was part of Japantown, run by Shimoda Sugakichi. By 1940 the rooms had become the B C Rooms, run by T Sakamoto, but the Japanese connection was severed as the entire community were moved to internment camps away from the coast. In 1942 Mrs M Mcintosh was running the rooms, and on the same two legal lots there was a small cottage and the Jackson Rooms, run by E Karlson. The two rooming houses continued operations for many years, (and are still operating today), but in the late 1980s the small cottage was replaced with an infill building and all three became a larger Jackson Rooms.

The building closer to us, with the bay windows, was developed in 1909, although some part of it had been completed earlier. Mrs. Hannah Peterson added a frame addition that year that she had claimed (on the permit) to have designed herself. She ran a lodging house, but unfortunately for us, had moved out by 1911 when the census was collected, and Frederick Frey had replaced her. She might have been the Swedish Hanna Peterson, who had arrived in 1889. We know nothing about Frederick, because only his name was recorded – no other details were noted, so we don’t know where he came from or how old he was. The rooming house is also now a non-market housing building called The Vivian, run as transitional women’s housing by Raincity.

Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 780-349

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We’ve seen this block in earlier posts – one shows the street in 1914 when there were houses here. In this 1981 image this location was the home of radio station CKWX, who had hired architects Sharp, Thompson, Berwick Pratt, (with the design by Ron Thom working with artist BC Binning), in 1954. The building was completed in 1956: it won the Massey Silver Medal for architecture in 1958. It was described as a “skylit concrete bunker” The glassed-in entrance showcased wall mosaics by BC Binning, their blue-gray tile patterns symbolizing the electronic gathering and transmission of information.

The radio station had started in Nanaimo, but first broadcast in Vancouver in 1927, run from studios in the Hotel Georgia, and later moved to Seymour Street. The wavelength also moved around, but settled on 1130, the current broadcast wavelength, in 1954. In the early days in this new studios, from 1957, the station broadcast a rock & roll format, fronted by DJ Red Robinson. He left the station in 1962 after it had adopted a steady move to more mainstream ‘hit’ music. In 1973 the station switched again, this time to a country lineup; that lasted until 1996, when it changed to an all news approach – still running today at News 1130. The station moved locations, and this site was redeveloped in the late 1980s. (The station currently broadcasts from West Broadway and Ash Street).

In 1990 The Ellington, addressed to Burnaby Street, was completed – an 84 unit 20 storey condo tower. In 2013, ‘Modern’, another condo building designed by IBI/HB was completed on the 1300 block, down the street.

Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 779-W18.02

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The Stuart Building, seen here in 1973, was a retail and apartment block that was completed in 1910. It was designed by Henry B Watson for lumberman W W Stuart, and sat near the entrance to Stanley Park. There were buildings on the north side of the street in those days, so some views of Burrard Inlet were interrupted, but the building ran along Chilco, with clear views of the park.

Whitfield Walker Stuart was born in New Brunswick, but started making money in Massachusetts. He was living in Boston in 1886, in his mid 20s, working as a carpenter. He married a local woman that year, and they had two children before he moved west around 1891, initially to New Westminster and then to Dewdney, where Mr. Stuart worked as a farmer, and they had a third child. He first showed up in Vancouver in 1898, living on Barnard (now Union) and having returned to working as a carpenter. He moved around the same area, to Keefer, and then Heatley, before moving to the West End. In 1904 he spent a remarkably low $300 building a store and house at this location.

Only four years later he moved to Robson Street, and the house and store were demolished, and the building in the picture was erected at a stated cost of $13,000. No doubt this reflects a much lower value than if Mr. Stuart hadn’t been a contractor with his own supply of lumber. By 1907 his electric powered mill was in operation on Front Street (now 1st Avenue, in Mount Pleasant). In 1908 it was reported that “The W. W. Stuart Lumber Company of Vancouver report that they have been running steadily at full capacity all winter, their output being used chiefly for local trade. They have recently put up a new moulding shed and office buildings”. His wife died in 1916, and two years later he remarried, to an Australian, and they had two children (the first born in Australia in the same year that they were married). They moved to Kerrisdale, and Whitfield Stuart died in 1927, and was buried with his first wife in Mountain View cemetery.

The Stuart building became home to an early bicycle hire business, and later an art gallery, but by 1982 there were plans to demolish it. The Vancouver Sun reported “The Stuart Building, a three-storey apartment block with a turret lookout on top, a stained glass panel over the front door and a seven-foot-wide staircase, was built in 1909 for lumberman W.W. Stuart. At the time, it overlooked a Lost Lagoon that was still tidewater. The first park causeway was built 14 years later. Edith Clark has operated the Gallery of B.C. Arts on the ground floor of the Stuart Building for the past 20 years. On Tuesday, they’re pulling down the building that has stood as a landmark at the entrance to Stanley Park since 1909. She is furious. But she is still praying that a miracle will save the building she and her husband, Herbert, have grown to love. Clark is one of 2,500 West End residents who want to preserve the turret-ted frame building at 674 Chilco at Georgia Street. Seven city aldermen voted Tuesday to tear it down.

Clark is furious that seven council members could cancel out the wishes of thousands of people who cherish the landmark across from Lost Lagoon. She still has not given up hope of saving it from the wrecker’s ball. “I can’t abandon hope for this building. I have about 2,500 signatures on a petition to save it,” Clark said Friday as she and Herbert loaded the last of the gallery’s paintings and pottery into a moving van. “We love this building. We’ve had 20 years here with many good times. Mayor Mike Harcourt was good to consider trying to save it and for a while it looked so hopeful,” she said. Clark said she cannot understand why, when building owner Stanley Ho of Hong Kong agreed to cooperate in preserving the building, seven council members can order it destroyed. “Maybe we can hold them off a little longer, stall until the next election and get a few of those aldermen off city council.” Upstairs in suite three, pensioner Rita Pinder prepared to move from the three- bedroom unit she rented for $220 a month into a tiny West End suite that will cost $380 a month. “It’s hard to decide what to give up. This place has been so spacious and so gracious,” said Pinder who lived for 13 years in one of the eight apartments.”

The building that replaced the Stuart is a strange one. For many years standing alone, it was developed by Hong Kong based billionaire and Macau gambling mogul Stanley Ho, who acquired the lot in 1974 for $275,000. He owned property throughout the city, including the Sutton Place Hotel, and according to a Vancouver Sun article Ho offered to upgrade the building and give the city a 30-year lease in exchange for zoning incentives on another property, but a majority on Council instead approved redevelopment. There are now three huge apartments and a wedding chapel in the 5 storey replacement building, designed by Ernest Collins, and completed in 1995.

Image source: City of Vancouver Archives  CVA 447-85

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The building on the right of this 1981 image is the Alaska Pine building, which we looked at in the previous post, but from a different angle. It was designed by Thompson Berwick and Pratt for Great West Life Insurance, who developed it for the Alaska Pine lumber and pulp headquarters. They occupied it in 1953, after Dominion Construction built it in under a year. Run by a Czech immigrant family, the Koerners, the lumber company was named for the alternate name for the hemlock, a tree previously considered as effectively valueless before they introduced European kiln drying practices that allowed it to be used for construction and box manufacture. The Shell Oil offices are further west.

Here’s another view of the building, past the McMillan Bloedel tower, and the Royal Centre (closer to us) in an undated image we think was taken in the late 1970s. Alaska Pine was replaced in 1992 with a 24 storey office building designed by Webb, Zerafa, Menkes, Housden and Partners. It was headquarters for BC Gas, (later renamed as Terasen and now known as Fortis BC), but it was developed by Manulife. More recently it was acquired by the Holborn Group, who incorporated part of the podium into their more recently completed Trump Hotel to the west.

The condo and hotel tower, the second tallest in the city, is carefully located on the block, towards the back of the plot, so that by twisting slightly on each floor the upper part of the tower avoids one of the city’s viewcones that limit tall buildings on part of the site. There’s a long, low swooping canopy over the front of the hotel that picks up the rhythm of the bays of the older office building.

Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 779-W14.15 and CVA 800-59

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We’re on the 600 block of Thurlow Street, looking south at West Georgia in 1981. The office building in the middle of the picture was the home of Alaska Pine, one of Canada’s most important lumber and pulp businesses. Founded in 1939, the company was incorporated by the Koerner brothers, Leon, Otto and Walter C. From a wealthy, fourth-generation lumber company in Czechoslovakia, they fled Europe in 1938-1939 and settled in Vancouver. The Koerners saw an opportunity by taking Western Hemlock, a species previously regarded as inferior and almost unmarketable, and after a seasoning process, rebranding it as “Alaska Pine.” They successfully marketed it by exporting to the UK and Europe; during the war they supplied 75% of the ammunition and ration boxes used by the armed forces of the British Commonwealth. After the war they expanded their business throughout British Columbia by acquiring older, run-down mills and businesses, and adding them to their expanding empire of lumber mills and stands of timber. They added pulp mills in the late 1940s, and employed almost 5,000 people when they moved into their new headquarters building in 1953.

Designed by Thompson Berwick Pratt it was in the international modernist style. Great West Life Insurance occupied offices on the main floor, and there was a bank branch as well. GWL had developed the building, and Alaska Pine were their main tenant. In 1954 the Koerners sold the controlling interest in their business to Rayoniere of New York, and in 1959 the Alaska Pine and Cellulose Ltd. name was changed to Rayonier Canada Limited, although Rayonier continued to make use of the “Alaska Pine” brand name. A 1956 Macleans article about Theo Koerner explains how the family arrived in Canada, established their business here, and the progressive ideas the family introduced to make the business a success. In retirement Theo became a generous philanthropist, and the family name is still attached to many facilities. Although Rayonier continue to operate a world-wide business, they no longer have any BC interests. They were acquired by three existing BC lumber companies in 1980, and continued as Western Forest Products, still headquartered near here in the Royal Centre.

The building didn’t last very long; by the late 1980s it had been demolished, and in 1992 a new 24 storey office building was completed, designed by Webb, Zerafa, Menkes, Housden and Partners. Manulife developed the building, and the region’s main gas company moved in as the lead tenant – first as BC Gas, then Terasen and now known as Fortis BC. Now owned by The Holborn Group, part of the podium has been incorporated into their more recently completed Trump Hotel.

Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 779-W14.17

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This 1981 view of the west side of Granville’s 1200 block shows Oak windshields and custom auto glass on the corner of Drake Street. Today it’s the wildlife thrift store, but it started life in 1917 as an auto garage, occupied initially by Dixon’s Motors, who sold Ford cars. The auto glass use was here in 1978, under a different business name, and we looked at that use more closely and at the building next door in an earlier post. It was built by Reinhart Hoffmeister in 1912, who probably also developed the next two buildings to the north (no longer standing today). He operated his electrical machinery and supplies company from 1271 Granville in the 1910s. In 1978 it was a piano store, and when the company moved here in the mid 1950s it was run by Elizabeth Williams, (listed for decades as ‘widow of W R Williams’).

The next 25 foot wide 2-storey building is a mystery in terms of it’s developer; in 1920 it was owned by W A Clark, who also owned and developed the next building north in 1911. We suspect he may also have built 1267 Granville as well. The three buildings were replaced in 2002 by Candela Place, a new non-market housing building designed by Burrowes Huggins Architects for the City of Vancouver, with 63 self-contained rooms managed by the Coast Foundation..

The more substantial 5-storey ‘brick apartment house’, designed by Parr and Fee and built by Peter Tardiff at a cost of $60,000 was developed by W A Clark. He was a real estate broker, who also built the Albany Rooms (the Regal Rooms today) on the 1000 block of Granville in 1910, with the same architect and builder. He was from Ontario, and was one of two William Clark’s involved in real estate in the city, which must have been confusing at times. In 1911 he lived with his wife, May, their five daughters, and a servant, Tanda Ishira, who was from Japan.

When it first opened this was the Newport Rooms, although more recently it became the Granville Hotel. Acquired by the City Of Vancouver in 2003 for $2.8m, it’s still run as an SRO Hotel, the Granville Residence. The city paid over $4m more to repair the building, including rebuilding the façade which was in a pretty poor state in the early 2000s. The room count reduced from 100 to 82, and each is now self-contained with bathrooms, small cooking areas and averaging 160 sq. ft. in area.

Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 779-W00.09

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The Elysium was – according to the building permit – developed by C C Smith, who hired Sholto Smith to design the $95,000 investment, built by “McNeil and Marsegh” in 1909. The Daily World said the builders were McNeil and Manseigh. (The street directory said he was John Mansergh, but a legal notice for a 1911 mining claim says he was Joshua). The newspaper initially said it was going to be named The Mountain View Hotel, but it was named The Ellison when it opened, and the Elysium a year later. We have no idea who C C Smith was – this was the only project anyone of that name developed, and there was nobody apparently resident in the city with those initials.

The permit was issued in 1909, but a year later Christina Harwood was still listed as living in a house here. A year later the hotel was open as the Hotel Ellison according to the street part of the directory (but curiously, the Elysium in the name part of the directory). The owners were identified as “THE HOTELS CORPORATION LTD” – and their manager, J D Sheldon, applied for a liquor license for the Hotel Ellison in 1910, and it was still known by that name in February 1911. The name change was announced on March 15: it would become the Hotel Elysium, (with a huge name sign on the rooftop). The sign was necessary as this was a somewhat out-of-the-way location, and the timing for opening a new hotel wasn’t great either. Several other rival hotels had just been built, and by 1912 the economy was heading for a recession; then the war started, and by 1915 the hotel was offered for sale by court order, described as having cost about $300,000, but carrying a mortgage of over $100,000 at seven and a half percent interest. (The advertising extended as far as Portland, Oregon).

Two years later the hotel was taken over by the Returning Soldiers Club, who used it to house soldiers returning from the war, and a variety of related agencies like the Soldiers Aid Commission. The hotel was returned to civilian use in 1919.

The architect, Sholto Smith, had married Charlie Woodward’s daughter, but the marriage didn’t go well and Sholto left the city, initially for Moose Jaw (in 1912), and then to war, serving for five years, returning to Canada with some post-war injury from gas poisoning. He returned to Vancouver in 1920, although his marriage was by then over. He briefly went into partnership with Edmund Grassett, from Simcoe in Ontario, who was a contractor and then house builder (and self-described architect around 1909, although he was never formally registered). Although Smith’s biography says they designed the alterations to the Elysium to return it to civilian use, in practice the permit for that transformation was only submitted in 1921, a year after Smith had emigrated to New Zealand (where he would remarry and run a successful architectural practice in Auckland). Dalton & Eveleigh designed the $7,000 of alterations, with Baynes and Horie doing the building work and Macaulay & Nicolls supervising as agents.

The hotel reopened as the Elysium Hotel, with Stuart O’Brian managing. There were some permanent residents (who weren’t necessarily living in the hotel all the time, as at least one was a traveling salesman). By 1943 the hotel use had ceased, and the property became apartments, known as Park Plaza, with a redesign for the new role by C B K Van Norman. The suites were for families of former servicemen, who faced a severe housing shortage during, and after the second war. By the early 1950s it was once again returned to hotel use for a final time, before demolition not very long after this 1976 image was taken. In 1985 Hamilton Doyle’s design for an 18 storey office building replaced the hotel.

Image source City of Vancouver Archives CVA 447-99

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We looked at a view across False Creek a few years ago. That view – of the BC Place stadium and Cambie Bridge has already changed quite a bit. This one is more stable, as much of this stretch of Yaletown is built out (although there are some more distant towers that will fill in the background in a year or two). We first photographed this shot eight years ago, and we could have posted it at any time after that, as almost nothing changed over the next six years. Last year the tall tower on the left appeared, which led us to re-shoot.

Based on the buildings that are visible on the left (and the ones that are missing), we think our before image was probably taken around 1978. The new seawall around False Creek South is completed, but the landscaping had not been planted, so there’s no tree visible on the left. The BC Electric Building is prominent centre left, and the tall (28 storey) tower to the left of that is The Century Plaza Hotel, designed by Peter Cole and completed in 1972, and to the left again, The Heritage, an early West End tower completed in 1970 and designed by Eng and Wright. It was built before the strata act, so is a 99 year leasehold building. It’s pretty much the only building visible in 1978 that’s still visible from this point today, so it was the only aid to lining up the images.

To the right is the cluster of Downtown towers; the tallest white tower on the left of the cluster is The Royal Centre, from 1973, and the tall dark tower is the TD Tower on the Pacific Centre, built in 1972. The smaller cousin of the TD Tower, completed in 1974, can be seen on the right, with the Scotiabank Tower (from 1975) to the right again. Furthest to the right, and looking small because it actually on the Burrard Inlet waterfront on the other side of the peninsula, 200 Granville, is a tower designed by Francis Donaldson and completed in 1972 for Project 200 (the 1960s scheme that would have seen the waterfront transformed and Gastown obliterated).

Today almost all the towers that hide Downtown are part of Concord Pacific Place, designed over 30 years by a variety of Vancouver-based architects. The most obvious background tower is the Wall Centre condo and hotel, now re-clad dark as the developer (but not the architect or the City of Vancouver) always intended. The recently completed tall tower on the left is another Wall building, this one designed by Dialog and offered as rentals rather than condos.

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We’ve been scouring our ‘borrowed’ images to try to match this 1956 aerial – it’s in the Vancouver Archives, and John Mackie says it was taken on December 27th by Bill Dennett – (the Archives didn’t record the date). Although it’s nearly impossible to find a contemporary image with the same angle, distance and elevation to match, this is a pretty good approximation, posted in December last year by Trish Jewison in the Global BC traffic helicopter, close to sunset, and posted on her twitter feed.

We can line the images up because the Hotel Vancouver is visible on the left, and although the Marine Building has disappeared in a forest of towers, the Post Office in the centre is still very clearly visible. Since December there are two big holes through the building, and two cranes on the roof (with two more to come). In 1956 the structure was just being completed – the largest welded steel building in North America, at the time. Now it’s getting two new office towers, an atrium retail space, and will be the largest building in Vancouver, with thousands of new office employees, many working for Amazon who have pre-leased much of the space. Before it was built in the mid 1950s the street had small houses and commercial buildings, just like the block to the east still had in 1956.

Across the angle of West Georgia was a Texaco gas station next to a building only recently demolished. It was one of ten gas stations we can identify in the picture – today there are none. There’s another gas station at the bottom of the picture, next to the Drill Hall, and on top of the Dunsmuir Tunnel, which can almost be seen, heading for the waterfront. The Vancouver Sun printing works can be seen across the road from the gas station, on Beatty Street. Today it’s the heat plant for the central steam system, but proposed as another interestingly designed office tower.

It’s also possible to see the Hudson’s Bay building, and Spencer’s Department store – now SFU office and teaching space. The block to the east of the Post Office (closer to us) is the Queen Elizabeth Theatre and Playhouse today, but in 1956 the block was still full of houses and small commercial buildings. They must have been close to demolition, as the theatre opened in 1959.

The same is true of the block to the south, which today has the Main Branch of the Vancouver Public Library. It too still had houses dating back to the turn of the century, (including this row on Robson) when this was a residential neighbourhood, with rooming houses and small businesses. While some of the houses had been cleared by 1956, the fire station was only recently opened. Larwill Park, in the foreground, hidden today behind the Spectrum residential towers, is still a parking lot (awaiting a decision on a new city Art Gallery), but in 1955 it was the bus station, opened in 1947.

Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 296-033; Trish Jewison, twitter, December 10 2018

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