In 1911, the Runkle Block was completed on the corner of Cordova and Abbott. Previously the two-storey wooden Cosmopolitan Restaurant was here, as we saw in an earlier post. In 1910, according to a building permit, J C Runkle hired Sharp and Thompson to design a new building costing $28,000 and built by Robert McLean. There’s no Vancouver resident with that name, but we have identified a likely subject. The name ‘J C Runkle’ is on the building permit, and there’s a cartouche on the building with the initials ‘J R’.
Fortunately, Runkle is a relatively unusual name and in the 1911 census there was only one person in Canada listed with the surname ‘Runkle’. Even better, he lived in Vancouver, but he was Gordon Runkle, not J C Runkle. He had lived in Vancouver from around 1906, and died in Nanaimo in 1943. He was married in the city in 1914, and he had the same architects design a house for him on Marine Drive in 1922.
Gordon had a brother (sixteen years older) named John Cornelius Runkle. Our guess is that Gordon, at the height of Vancouver’s property boom, managed the development on behalf of his brother – an absentee American east coast investor. In 1900 John worked for the National Coal Tar Co, in 1910 he was Vice President of a manufacturing company in Boston, and in 1930 he was an executive of a lumber supply company, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1908 he bought an old house dating back to 1765, had it moved, and hired architect Lois Lilley Howe to reconstruct and remodel it. In 1911 both John C Runkle, and Gordon Runkle, made applications to buy land in the Skeena Land District. The family were obviously close; after Gordon’s death, his daughter Pam was married in New York in 1948, and was given away by her uncle, J C Runkle.
Upstairs the Dixie Rooms were addressed initially as 145 Abbott. In 1914, Kathleen Dooley, aged 7, lived here with her parents. The Province reported that “the little girl was attempting to cross the street in company with a small boy. She is said by witnesses to have stopped directly in the path of the approaching machine. The driver saw the danger and applied both foot and emergency brakes, but the car could not be brought to a standstill until after it had struck her.” Kathleen died of her injuries in Vancouver General Hospital.
A year later ‘Bobby’, a white setter went missing, and an unspecified reward was offered for his return. John Burgess, aged 14, lived here in 1917, and was riding his bicycle on Arbutus Street when he fell off and injured himself badly enough to be taken to the hospital. The Rooms closed in 1918, and the contents of 21 rooms were auctioned off by Love & Co. The rooms reopened as the Acme Rooms, and within a year became the Don Rooms, renumbered to 247 Abbott. In 1930 Ole Tallman dropped dead, after he asked his roommate Fred Johnson to get him a glass of water at 3.00am. His death was believed to have been as a result of his drinking a bottle of carbolic acid that was found in the room.
The address appears regularly for death notices, and reports of burglaries. Among the more unusual reports, the death of John Keilly was notable, in 1935. Police found the 65-year-old war pensioner wandering, and brought him back here. His landlady took him to his room, but his confused state didn’t improve, and he died soon after in the hospital, where a fractured skull was discovered. It was later confirmed that he had fallen down a flight of stairs, while intoxicated, before he was found by the police.
In 1944 Fred Lundgram met a charming couple and they all went back to his room here for a few drinks. He fell asleep, and when he woke the couple, his wallet with four $100 notes and his registration card had gone. He told the police, and an hour later a woman was arrested after $200 were found in her shoe. Her companion was arrested soon after, with $100 found in his sock. The death notices were often of loggers, or seamen. Ole Ongstad, a captain with BC Packers was 61 when he died here in 1951.
The rooms were called the Olando Rooms in 1974 when they were closed by a new lodging house bylaw, having failed Health Department inspections. Combined with the adjacent Cook Block to the west, the upper floors became office and commercial space addressed as 289 Abbott. These days it houses a mix of creative/tech companies including Archive Digital and Loud Crow Interactive, a company that crafts interactive book apps ‘that capture the fun and nostalgia of story time’, and a tattoo parlour.
The storefront on the corner became home to The Stanley Cafe, with Commercial Printers in the basement. By 1916 it was the Klean Kitchen Cafe, with May Gerrels selling cigars here too. In 1921 Yetta Franks had her cooking stove business here, but in 1924 it became home to a gun store. In 1929 “The door of Harkley & Haywood’s store, 101 West Cordova street, was accidentally left unlocked and a thief entered and stole two shotguns.” A 16-year old boy, armed with a loaded revolver, was arrested that year behind the library, which he had a passkey for, which he used for a series of minor thefts. He also admitted burglarizing the gun store.
Vincent Cashmore and his son were running the store in 1954, when a friend, Wallace Crawford, paid them a visit. A gun that was being repaired discharged unexpectedly, with the bullet ricocheting off the bench and passing through Mr Cashmore’s hand. In 1957 Michael Packloff of Timmins, Ontario, was jailed for two years for breaking in and stealing two rifles and 240 pounds of ammunition. Our picture shows the store in 1973.
After the gun and rod store moved, around 1980, the London School of Hairdressing was here, (the gun store moved nearby and went into receivership in 1982). Fusion, a consignment store, was here in 1990, and for the past 19 years, La Casita, a Mexican restaurant has occupied the space.
Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 1095-09053
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Changing Vancouver 