T J Whiteside designed and built a house here in 1901, and added another in 1904. He moved one of the houses in April 1912, and then built this $27,000 14-unit apartment building, The Connaught, in June. H A Hodgson was hired as the architect.
Thomas John Whiteside was from Scarborough, York, Ontario, where he was born in 1861. He married Margaret Robinson in 1888 in Toronto, and they must have moved here not too long after bercause Irene was born in BC in 1891. Thomas first appears in Vancouver in 1892, as a plasterer living on Harris Street (East Georgia), then in 1893 living on Ninth Avenue, a joiner at Cassidy’s Mill, and then a carpenter, (although in 1896 he was working as a canneryman, and he seems to have moved out of the city for the next couple of years, and was living here, listed as a canneryman again from 1900 to 1909. He was foreman of the Wallace Cannery, and a Justice of the Peace, in Claxton, 8 miles from the mouth of the Skeena River). That aspect of his working life seems to have been forgotten – his obitiary refers to him as ‘pioneer building contractor’. A 1906 newspaper story concerning a ‘tong fight’ between workers in the Great Northern Cannery identified Mr. Whiteside as one of the cannery managers that year. As cannery operations were seasonal, it’s likely that the cannery and contracting jobs were at the same time – T J Whiteside was certainly obtaining building permits from 1905 for speculative house construction – often three at a time.
In 1907 Thomas was appointed as Elections Commissioner for Vancouver, and in 1909 he stood for election for the Ward Five (Mount Pleasant) seat on City Council, and was elected an alderman. In 1910 he was reelected, in Mayor L D Taylor’s first term, and was chairman of the civic fire and police committee. He had a falling out in the press with architects Parr and Fee, who wanted to have Seattle style electric light standards on Granville Street. Alderman Whiteside explained Vancouver’s preference for their own, superior, design. He had a falling out with the mayor over alleged favours. The mayor vigorously denied any wrongdoing (on the front page of the Daily World – that he conveniently owned). Mayor Taylor was elected in 1911, but T J Whiteside was not.
In the year he built this apartment building, where he had first built a house, the Whiteside family wintered in Long Beach, California. The Province reported: “There is, he says, a whole colony of Vancouverites at Long Beach and in its vicinity suffering all kinds of discomforts from fleas to sand storms and. even worse, the alkali clouds that blow over from the great American desert and make bitterness for eye, nostrils and palate. Mr. Whiteside says that it is wonderful, though, to see the way the people work in an effort to make themselves believe that they enjoy it.”
The apartments were also featured in the press: “The structure is of mill construction, faced with red pressed brick and trimmed with stone. It stands three storeys in height and has a mill finished basement. The foundation is of concrete Fourteen three-room-suites are contained in the building. These apartments have exceptionally large rooms and have as a feature not found in most suites, a large entrance hall. It has been the aim of the architects to make these suites more like private houses than apartments. Every room In the building has the benefit of outside light. The structure is heated by hot water. An elaborate entrance hall containing marble stairs gives access to the structure. In the basement of the house are situated a large laundry with drying room in connection and a baggage room for the use of the tenants.”
When it was built the Connaught Apartments were on the corner of 8th and Victoria. That caused confusion with another Victoria not far to the east, and Victoria became Guelph in 1913. Unusually, the apartments were given letters, rather than numbers. In 1941 there were two burglaries in the same week, and a month later, Frank Ross (alias Tony Comody) and Aylmer Young were arrested and charged. In 1944 the tenanat of the basement suite (who was initially the caretaker), was urgently selling a 1930 Harley Davidson for $125 ono.
In 1947 the building was sold for $39,300 by N Kulynych to R Smith. That was Nellie Kulynych, who had bought the building in 1941 for $24,000, and then spent $8,000 on improvements. On the death of her husband, Mrs. Kulynych moved to Winnipeg, knowing nothing about a carpenter’s lein for $900 which led to a sherriff’s sale of the building that fetched a bargain price of $14,550. On discovering the situation in 1944, Mrs. Kulynych went to court to recover her property, and apparently succeeded.
In 1965 Yee Lee collected $3,000 of heroin from an apartment here, and was subsequently arrested and sentenced to four years in prison. Lee’s defence argued that he had just been collecting the parcel for a friend. Our image was shot in 1978. Today there are now 17 apartments in the heritage building, and three in the adjacent house. The buildings were listed for sale in 2023 for $8,950,000.
Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 786-60.23
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Changing Vancouver 