This image is another rare example of a Vancouver building published in the Journal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, this time in 1953. The reason for selecting this particular building is unclear, but it was one of three industrial buildings featured in the June edition of the Journal, none likely to set the architectural world on fire.

The Vancouver warehouse for the Grinnell Company of Canada Ltd was designed by Townley and Matheson, and was filled with ‘Wrought, Cast Iron and Brass Pipe. Fittings, Valves, Pipe Hangers and Supports, Piping Supplies, Etc,’ and the company traced its history back to 1850, founded as the Providence Steam and Gas Pipe Co in Providence, Rhode Island. Among the piping they supplied and installed were early fire fighting systems. In 1869, Frederick Grinnell, a Massachusetts-born engineer, purchased a controlling interest in Providence Steam and Gas and became its president. Fire-extinguishing apparatus in factories was mainly perforated pipes connected to a water-supply system and installed along the ceilings. The water had to be turned on by hand – often too late to prevent the loss of wooden buildings. In 1874 a Connecticut inventor patented a sprinkler design and Grinnell installed it, paying a royalty to the inventor. Grinnell soon designed his own more sensitive system in 1881, and from there became one of the largest suppliers of fire systems and fire extinguishers in North America. In the year the building was photographed the company had just absorbed ADT (American District Telegraph Co), an alarm company. In 1966 they were forced to sell it, having been accused of price fixing.

The Canadian arm of the business was established in 1914, and in the 1970s became part of Tyco Industries, which in turn has been swallowed up by Johnson Controls. The company’s Lower Mainland operation is now based in Delta. This warehouse is currently vacant, and available to lease, but was most recently home to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank, who moved to a new location in Burnaby in mid 2019.

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The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada published a Journal for 50 years from the 1920s. It was heavily eastern-centric, mostly featuring buildings in Toronto and Montreal, but very occasionally it featured western buildings. For some inexplicable reason a 1946 edition of the Journal featured an architect’s sketch of the new Powell Street premises of Alliance Ware, a national supplier of plumbing and bathroom suites. The building was designed that year, and completed in 1947 – there’s a slightly out of focus Archives image of the building from that year. It was a fairly early work of Sharp, Thompson, Berwick and Pratt. A year after the building was built, Crane Co, another US based plumbing supplies company took over the business, but it remained as a separate but integrated part of the new, larger entity.

Vancouver these days isn’t an industrial city, but in 1946 this was a new plant to make bathtubs, kitchen sinks and other porcelain-on-steel products. The factory was an early example of a green building – a manager explained in 1958 “The excess heat from the furnaces for making bathtubs is enough to heat our Powell Street plant”. (That year Crane opened a large new vitreous pottery factory in Coquitlam). When it opened, the Journal of Commerce published further details, and the same illustration. The company built a powerhouse on Franklin Street, and the building has a steel frame with concrete block walls, built by Armstrong and Monteith Construction. Allied were an arm of Dominion Rustproofing, whose rustproofing operations moved from here to West 1st Avenue to accommodate the new building.

Today the building has been changed relatively little, and is the warehouse and headquarters of Relaxus, who supply massage equipment, essential oils and related products throughout North America. Currently PPE has become an important and expanding part of the company’s business.

The building to the west, 1516 Powell, was built here in 1912, designed by Townsend & Townsend for S Flack, and costing $50,000 to build. By 1921 the rooming house was owned by Credit Foncier. Samuel Flack was manager of Flack Estate and Investments, from Ontario, born in 1866, and the earliest we find him in Vancouver is in the 1891 census, when he was a streetcar conductor. Samuel died in 1928, and his death notice says his father was John Flack and his mother Ellen Fallis. He married Ida McGillvray, who was ten years younger in 1901 in Ontario. When Samuel died in 1928 he was described as “pioneer real estate broker of this city”. The couple had two sons, Chauncey and Cyril, and two daughters, Kathleen and Eleanor. Ida was 90 when she died in 1964.

As far as we can tell, while Mr. Flack had his offices in the Flack Block, that was a convenient location for him, but he was not a relative of Thomas Flack who was a successful English-born miner, who had developed the building in 1899. The rooming house opened before 1914 when it was called Manvers Lodge, run by D Pettigrew, offering ‘completely furnished suites’. By 1930 it had become the Terminal Hotel, and then the Wicklow Rooms by 1940. In 1978 it finally got a $200,000 makeover, reported in the Vancouver Sun in depth. “John Brown, a 71-year-old retired welder who lived at the Wicklow on and off for about 11 years before the renovations and who moved back in last week after the renovations were completed, stirred a pot of home-made stew. “Cockroaches were just about packing it away,” he said. “There was no warm water and only a dribble of cold water. Sometimes the heater would go and there would be no heat.” Brown, who lives on a $200-a-month pension, now pays $95 each month for a warm, comfortable sleeping room with wall-to-wall carpets, a small refrigerator, a bed, chairs and a kitchen table. It’s now named ‘The Flint’ and run by Atira Housing Society. Jesse P Flint owned and ran the adjacent rooming house to the west at 1514 Powell, and somehow his name has mistakenly got attached to this building.

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This 1900s postcard shows the original buildings of the Vancouver General Hospital. The City’s first hospital buildings were in Downtown, but the activity relocated to the southern edge of the city in 1906. (16th Avenue was the border with neighbouring South Vancouver). today it’s knows as the Heather Pavilion, but it was originally known as the Fairview Building. The two wings were added in 1908, and there was a further addition in the middle added in the early 1950s, and mostly removed a few years ago. The 1900s buildings were designed by Grant and Henderson in either the Romanesque revival style, or the Italianate Style, planned in accordance with the Beaux Art school of design (depending on which document you read).

In 2002 the structure seen in the postcard were awarded heritage protection as part of the VGH campus rezoning, and there are plans to restore the stonework to replicate the original appearance. Most of the exterior walls of the original structures remain intact despite the additions. When it opened the design was not considered to be anything special. The Vancouver Daily World said “The view from the hospital window and balconies is nothing short of magnificent overlooking as it does the whole of the city and harbor and the snow clad mountain beyond. It Is an outlook that cannot fail of having a cheering effect on the convalescing patient”. “As to the building itself, no claim may be laid to architectural beauty modern; utility was the great aim of the architects and to this beauty of lines was properly made subservient. But even in its unfinished state it is an imposing and majestic pile, solid and substantial and businesslike.”

Today there are much larger and more important hospital buildings on the campus, and the Heather Pavilion was constructed long before seismic codes became an important aspect of building design. The building has therefore been used as ancillary offices for many years, rather than as clinical facilities. The revised hospital precinct plan, in 2000, identified the possibility of upper floors being used for bio-tech research, but rehabilitation of the structure is still some way off in the future.

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Here’s the Vancouver Club’s 1893 premises for sale in 1930. To the west is the club’s newer building, designed by Sharp and Thompson and opened in 1914. Many published histories will tell you that the new building replaced the old, but as this picture shows, that’s not exactly accurate. The club developed their new building, opening on January 1st 1914, on the site where there was an earlier single storey annex to the first club building. That had been designed by C O Wickenden, and like the new club, was state-of-the-art when it was first constructed.

Initially the Club had occupied space in the Lefevre Block, which was opened in 1890. Many of the first members were associated with the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the club was seen as having the city’s ‘elite’ membership. CPR executive (and property developer) Harry Abbott and its chief surveyor, J M Browning helped found the club.

Once the club moved into their own building in 1894, David Oppenheimer, the mayor, and Isaac, his brother, and another important landowner were also members. The Daily World said “The idea originated in the minds of conservative men of a class who want a thing good and who are willing to have the patience to abide their time in order to secure the fulfilment of their desires.” The building was said to have been designed with ‘refined elegance’ and featured a lower floor with billiard room with two tables, and a bowling alley, as well as cold storage and a cellar. Upstairs were a wine room, a reading room and a refrigerated room. Above that were two card rooms and two dining rooms, with oak paneling, as well as the kitchen and pastry room. At the top of the building were bedrooms for ‘the help’. and also for members or guests.

Having moved again to even larger premises, the club retained its pretentions through the decades. Rafe Mair wrote about joining the club; “In 1966, the Vancouver Club was an English-style men’s club: dark and cheerless, where voices were kept at a murmur and displays of mirth beyond the hint of a smile were frowned upon. Women were allowed as guests and then only at dinner – escorted by a member, of course – and were not permitted to enter the premises through the main doors.” “The reading room was on the main floor, and boasted deep armchairs and a selection of all the right magazines and papers, such as the London Times, Punch, the Illustrated London News and, oh heresy, The New Yorker. That was where, after a liquid lunch, the cream of Vancouver’s business community slept it off before wobbling back to the office. They would return to the club at 5 p.m. sharp and repair promptly to the third-floor bar to top off the day with a few drinks for the road.” Women were finally allowed to become members in 1994, and more joined when the women-only Georgian Club merged its membership. The club has evolved significantly since then, in terms of both membership profile and activities.

The old building was initially occupied by the Great War Veteran’s Association, and later a new club, the Quadra Club was started there around 1923. That allowed members to obtain a drink – although prohibition had ended in BC in 1921, the availability of liquor and the rules for saloons were onerous; clubs had greater freedom. The Quadra Club moved a block to the west along West Hastings in 1930.

The building was demolished not long after it was sold (as this Vancouver Public Library image shows) and the site has, remarkably, never really been developed since then. In the 1940s and 50s it had Thompson and Graham’s gas bar, service station and privately owned parking lot. (There was also another gas station on the north side of the street in 1940). It was still a parking lot in the 1980s, and indeed, it is today, although you wouldn’t know from this image. The entrance to Lot 19 is on the next street to the north, West Cordova, and there are 409 city-owned underground parkade space underneath the civic plaza with a pedestrian right-of-way, and public art. This consists of the (unintentionally ironically named) ‘Working Landscapes, by Daniel Laskarin, installed in 1998 “Four circular platforms are set in the park throughway beside the Vancouver Club. Each platform has a park bench and a living indigenous tree in a round steel planter on it. The platforms are made of wood and rotate at subtle speeds based on the work week: 1 hour, 8 hours and 40 hours. The fourth platform represents the 20-minute coffee break.” The mechanisms have been repaired and replaced several times, but more often than not, it seems, they’re not working.

Image Source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 677-67

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We looked at Maple Tree Square as it appeared just before the 1886 fire in an earlier post. We’ve examined pretty much all the buildings in this shot over the years. Just on the left hand edge is the Alhambra Hotel, and on the right is the Packing House; offices today, but once the Swift Meat Packing facility (and before that the site of the Alexandra Hotel). Further up the Malkin Warehouse is a six storey brick warehouse with huge old growth timbers forming the frame, and today hidden by street trees in the summer.

One notable difference is that in 1970 the newly installed statue of Gassy Jack used to look along Water Street. Now he’s moved across the street, in front of the Alhambra, looking eastwards. There was a commemoration of Maple Tree Square as the founding location of the settlement here – originally called Granville, and then Vancouver after 1886. It was a drinking fountain, installed in 1925 in what was still an industrial street. The attempts to revitalize the run down neighbourhood in the late 1960s, once the decision had been taken not to bulldoze the entire street for a freeway, included the commission of the sculpture by real estate developer Larry Killam. Fritz Jacobson made a sketch, and Okanagan-born artist Vern Simpson sculpted it. It was presented to the City, although mayor Tom Campbell apparently wanted it towed to the City dump. The 1925 plaque from the fountain is now incorporated into the plinth the statue sits on.

Jack Deighton was a sea captain, gold prospector, riverboat pilot and bar owner, originally from Hull, in England, who squatted in a clearing just beyond the Hastings Mill boundary and built the first non-native structure in the area that would become a town, and then a city (although he died many years before that came about). Fond of talking, ‘Gassy’ Jack was the basis for Granville being known locally as Gastown. The first government survey of Granville was careful to ensure his his original saloon ended up in the middle of the street, forcing Jack to acquire a legal plot nearby to rebuild his Globe Saloon, where the Alhambra would be built after the 1886 fire. More recently ‘Gassy’ Jack has been covered in paint; a protest about celebrating someone who married his second Indian wife when she was about 12 years old. It’s possible he may move again, perhaps away from Maple Tree Square.

Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 780-770

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Surprisingly, we’ve only examined the history of one of the buildings on this part of the block. That’s the Strathcona Hotel, now renovated and turned into condos as the Paris Block. Long-time home of shoemakers Pierre Paris & Sons, it was designed by Hooper & Watkins and developed around 1908 by John Deeks, who had made money mining for gold in Atlin. He converted it to a hotel around 1910, with R T Perry designing the necessary  alterations.

To the west, the single storey retail units. They were almost certainly developed by real estate broker W A Clark, who had his office in the Deeks office building when it first opened. William Clark was from Ontario, and like many other Vancouver real estate brokers also developed property on parcels that they had acquired. In Mr. Clark’s case, he also built retail buildings on Granville Street, and a 5-storey apartment building there that cost $60,000, and another (still standing today) that cost $50,000. In 1904 he had W P Matheson design a $4,000 house on Broughton Street. It must have been quite full, as in 1911 he lived there with his wife Mary and five daughters, aged 10 to 19, and their Japanese servant. Over the years He paid for a series of alterations and repairs to these buildings as tenants came and went. The two building were erected in 1905, one by Mr. Clark, and the one to the west by McWhinney & Lewerke, although in subsequent years into the 1920s he seems to have owned both buildings. We don’t know who designed the buildings, but in 1905 the ‘Hardware Merchant Magazine’ announced “McWhinney & Lewerke, Vancouver intend erecting a three-storey brick block on Hastings street, adjoining the Rubinowitz departmental stores recently purchased by them.” As far as we know the project never proceeded.

In 1936 when our image was taken Model boots and shoes occupied half of one unit, and Westinghouse sold Electrical goods, lights and radios in the other half. Next door was the Thrifty Dress Shop and the Union Shoe Co who offered ‘Better Values in Novelty Shoes’. Model Express must be one of the longest-lived businesses in the city; they were still located in the same unit until a year ago, and are still in business two doors away today. Today they ‘are proud to be Vancouver’s #1 stripper store’ and specialize in ‘exotic’ footwear (heels can be over 8″) and matching lingerie.

The building dated back to 1903 when W T Whiteway designed the $10,000 build for B C Permanent Co. In the first few years it was occupied by the Rubinowitz Department store. Major Matthews, the City Archivist wrote about Mr Rubinowitz, and collected his portrait, taken in 1939. “Mr. Louis Rubinowitz came to Vancouver in 1892, took some interest in Jewish affairs, but never took an interest in civic or public matters; it is difficult to find what he did take an interest in – in a public way. He had a small general store at Steveston, and also one in Vancouver, both queer places, an assortment of goods scattered aimlessly about after the manner of a secondhand store. He was a very elderly man when he decided to contest the office of Mayor. He wore his hair in a most noticeable manner. A long flowing grey beard, almost to his waist, and the long, almost white hair of his head hung over his shoulders as far as his shoulder blades. Sometimes, on Jewish ceremonial days, he wore a long black morning coat and a “stovepipe” tall silk hat, and had a rather venerable appearance, somewhat akin to a Jewish patriarch. He presented an odd and eccentric appearance as he walked down the street.” Liebermann Louis Rubinowitz ran in both the 1926 and 1918 election, receiving around 200 votes (1% of the total) – in the elections.

In the early 1920s Olympia Confectionery occupied the corner; a few years later it was a drug store, The Cut Rate Drug Co. The 1936 image shows The Grand Union Public Market, which remained operating through to at least the 1950s when it had 16 different stalls, among them a butcher, a baker and an umbrella maker; a fruit stand, a branch of Cunningham Drugs, a magazine exchange, two egg stores and the Healthy Cocktail Bar, selling juices. Stong’s grocery were here too. In the early 1990s it was a Fields department store (no doubt hoping to borrow some of Woodward’s customers from across Abbott Street). Before it was demolished over 10 years ago it was a greengrocers, the SunMart Market. It’s still a parking lot today, but plans have been approved for a 10 storey rental building over new retail units.

Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 99-4889 and CVA Port P372

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We’ve looked at the west side of this block of Granville looking north is previous posts, but not looking south, from Robson Street. The picture dates from 1951, when there were still plenty of competing cinemas with vertical blade signs. On the east side wire the Capitol and the Orpheum; the bigger theatres on the block, but the Paradise and Plaza had equally large signs, even if their capacity was less. The Paradise opened in 1938, showing Paul Robeson in “The Big Fella”. The 1938 art deco facade was designed by Thomas Kerr, and the cinema had 790 seats. This wasn’t the first cinema here, in 1912 The Globe opened, designed by an engineer, C P Gregory, for the Pacific Amusement Company. It cost $40,000, and three years later was altered by new owners the Hope Investment Company. There were further alterations a year later, when W P Nichols was shown as the owner, and in 1922 a pipe organ was installed. The theatre was taken over by Odeon in 1941 who later refurbished and reopened it as the Coronet Theatre in 1964 showing Peter Sellers in “The Pink Panther”. In 1976 the cinema was twinned – two smaller screens allowed less popular movies to be shown. The Coronet cinema closed in 1986, although that wasn’t the end of its movie-house story.

Odeon also acquired the Plaza Theatre just up Granville Street by the late 1940s, renaming it as the Odeon after a refurbishment in the early 1960s. Their theatre was three doors to the south of the Paradise, as we saw in an earlier post photographed in 1974. That was another Thomas Kerr design, from 1936, which was a rebuild of the 1908 Maple Leaf Theatre. Today it’s Venue, a nightclub that (until recent restrictions) had live music as well as DJs. As other cinemas closed on Granville, Odeon decided to close the Plaza, and acquired the Vermilyea Block (next to the Plaza), designed by William Blackmore in 1893 and operated for years as The Palms Hotel. They also demolished 855 Granville, a 1920 office building developed by J F Mahon. They combined the Paradise and the two adjacent buildings and in 1987 the Cineplex Granville 7 opened, with a total of over 2,400 seats in seven cinemas in a building that incorporated the facade of both the Vermilyea and the Coronet, with a new building between. The cinema closed in 2012 as the Empire Granville, and is now being redeveloped as The Rec Room, another Cineplex entertainment complex, but with no movie element.

On the corner today is the Mason Robson Centre which a few years ago replaced the Farmer Building, and incorporated the facade of the Power Block, a 1929 Townley and Matheson art deco building. The demolished back of the building dated back to 1888, when it was developed by Captain William Power, of North Vancouver, who hired N S Hoffar to design it. The tall building to the south is the Medical Arts Building, a $100,000 investment developed by J J Coughlin and designed by Maurice Helyer in 1922 (and still used as office space today). John J Coughlin ran a Vancouver construction company – the biggest in the city. His company built the $200,000 Second Hotel Vancouver, a block from here to the north. The small building to the south is now missing the design elements initially included by architect James Keagey for his clients recorded in the building permit as ‘Powers and Boughton’ in 1913. Actually they were John E Powis and G E Broughton, real estate agents and developers.

Image source: City of Vancouver archives CVA 772-8

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This is our third look at this block. Our earlier posts were comparing the street today and 40 years ago. Over that period it really hasn’t changed much – at least to look at, although there has been some reconstruction over the years. Here we’re going back further – either to 1904, if you think the date in the Vancouver Public Library copy of this picture is correct, or 1906 if the Vancouver Archives are accurate. The street was originally called Dupont, then briefly became Princess before finally changing to East Pender in 1907. This part of the street was always part of Chinatown.

On the right is the Wing Sang Company’s headquarters. The 1889 building had already seen vertical and horizontal additions – faithfully restored a few years ago in the extraordinary Bob Rennie makeover of the buildings. Originally T E Julian was hired by Yip Sang to carry out the extensions in 1901 costing $10,000, and J G Price was hired in 1911 to add a further $25,000 structure. The next two buildings date from 1889 and 1920. These days they’re all part of the Yue Shan Society complex of buildings. W H Chow designed the three storey structure. Between the two buildings is a narrow alley that leads to a courtyard; behind that is a third building. That was developed by Sam Kee (a company name for Sam Toy’s merchant empire) in 1912, and cost $46,000. It was designed by Edward Stanley Mitton. Wing Sang had a wide range of import and trading interests, including opium trading in the late 1880s, and ownership of an opium processing business in the late 1900s.

We can see that the next two 4-storey buildings were built after 1906. Su Lee Wo Co built the first for $18,000 in 1910, hiring R J McDonald to design it. The second was, until recently, known as the home of Ming Wo Cookware, but they only occupied it in 1922. It was built in 1907 by Wong Soon King, (who also owned a company called Hip Tuck Lung) at a cost of $15,000, altered to in 1913 and added to in 1914 with W H Chow as architect. The owners were traders, but also processed opium, with a large operation that imported Indian raw materials, ‘cooked’ it to refine it, and mostly exported to China (and sometimes illegally to the United States). It only became illegal to process opium in Canada at the end of the 1900s. Hip Tuck Lung’s premises were listed on the opposite side of the street from 1889 to 1907, but their premises on this side were first listed as opium factory in 1907. The local press reported the new development “One of the largest opium factories on the coast is now in course of completion in the new Hip Tuck Lung building on Dupont street (Pender east) near Carrall. There will be 13 ovens, in operation. These ovens the Chinese call roasting pots. The object of this factory is not so much to do the work that was done in the roasting ovens of San Francisco before the earth trembled as to provide supplies for shipment from here to China. The land of the moon swallowing dragon has through its empress dowager put a ban on the manufacture or sale of opium.”

Before the new building was constructed Lee Yune (or Yuen) had an opium and tea import business here, presumably in the 2-storey building in the picture, and later an opium factory. The business moved into Market Alley (behind Pender Street) and slightly to the west when Hip Tuck Lung built their new building, and were the last business still listed processing opium in the city, in 1910, along with Wing Sang.

At the end of the block is another Yip Sang development, this one occupied for many years by the Chinese Times. He built the premises in 1902, and hired W T Whiteway to design it. W H Chow later designed alterations. In 1913 he added a new building on the remainder of the lot, around the corner. The West Hotel was (and is) nine floors high, and designed by J G Price, who was recorded in the street directory as a structural engineer.

Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 677-530

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Like the previous post, this shot faces Burrard Inlet and the north shore mountains. It’s from two blocks further east and one block south, and was taken in 1901. On the left is the Interurban terminal, operated by BC Electric. This is the first offices and car shed designed by Frances Rattenbury in 1897. It was replaced in 1911 with a new, larger building designed by W M Somervell. It was headquarters of the BC Electric company’s entire operations until they moved to their new Burrard Street building in the mid 1950s.

Across Hastings was the Palace Hotel. Like the brick streetcar barns and office, it didn’t last long. In 1912 the Montreal-based Merchant’s Bank hired Somervell and Putnam to design a new building. It was stone clad, in a classical temple style, but on a steel frame that could have permitted several more floors to be added. However, the economic downturn and the westwards shift of the city’s businesses meant it has never been increased in height. It has recently had a significant seismic upgrade and is available as office space.

Beyond it was the Louvre Hotel. Built in 1889, it was initially home to the Vancouver Drug Company run by Dr. James Rolls and the Vancouver Tea and Coffee Company. A few years later it became the Brown Jug Saloon, which was renamed as The Louvre. Langley and Co who were wholesale druggists occupied a new building built between the Louvre and the bank, and in 1908 it was altered to become the Bijou Theatre. That use ended in 1918, and the building was demolished in 1940. Eighty years later the site is being redeveloped, incorporating the Louvre’s facade, into a market residential rental building.

Across the street, the north east corner of Hastings and Carrall was, and is, the Templeton Block. Built in 1891 and designed by C O Wickenden we’ve looked at it as it was in the early 1900s, in 1926, and in 1940. It started life as a grocery store, became a bar (The Mint Saloon), became a clothing store and Knowlton’s Drugs, and then a cigar store, with Seven Little Tailors upstairs. Today it’s the renovated headquarters of the Portland Hotel Society, with a main floor gallery space called The Interurban, and Knowlton’s Drugs still next door.

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