Today there’s a vacant site, used temporarily as a Downtown Eastside market, but in 1985 there was a substantial building still standing next to the Shaldon Hotel (built in 1909 for H D Wright of Seattle). The first permit for the lot that the taller building stands on was in 1904 for a $4,000 designed by J Young (who was actually a builder) for A Clemes. The first building mentioned in the street directories here was in 1906, and it was probably the one in the picture. It had cost quite a lot more than the initial permit. (Strangely, this entire block of East Hastings was still vacant in 1903). It’s likely that the 1904 permit was for an initial smaller building on Market Alley, the lane at the back of the property.  Another prtmit was issued to A Clemes for a $20,000 building on East Hastings was issued in 1905.

While we don’t know for certain whether it was Art Clemes who developed the building, it’s very likely. A few years later he developed the Regent Hotel down the street, (designed by Emil Guenther) and also the former Pantages Theatre there as well. He had built an earlier investment in 1903, so was in Vancouver and developing real estate in the early 1900s. In late 1905 James Young advertised in the Daily World that he had just completed the Clemes Block on East Hastings. A year earlier the same newspaper reported the acquisition of an East Hastings site: “Later Mr. Clemes will erect a handsome block on Hastings street. While this is the top price paid for unimproved property on that part of Hastings street, the purchase is considered by real estate men as a first class investment.” The design could also be by Emil Guenther, who designed the Eagles Fraternal Lodge on Hastings in 1902, although we haven’t been able to locate that building.

In 1906, when it was first complete, E S Knowlton had his drug store here, Minnie Olson had a rooming house, and Joseph Barss sold confectionery. A couple of years later the B C Concrete Block & Brick Co and Green and Melhuish’s real estate office had replaced the drugstore, and the Hastings Rooming House (run by Charles Mohr) was upstairs.

By 1918 the building was owned by the Palmer Land & Investment Company. The company was almost certainly run by Russell H Palmer, a contractor who came from PEI and had arrived in BC from the Yukon around 1907. The 1921 census shows his household consisting of Russell, aged 54, his younger sister, Gertrude and two sons; one aged 15 born in the Yukon, and one aged 13 born in BC. In 1912 he was sued with Palmer Brothers, and the Palmer Land & Investment Co, which we think establishes his connection to the investment company. His brother Arthur was a partner in the contracting business, and for a while so was Peter Henning. In 1918 the Investment Company hired builders Dixon and Murray to carry out $1,000 of repairs; ‘New marble base front installed & interior of bldgs. being given general overhauling’. The company ‘ceased to transact business’ in 1920.

The site, and the Shaldon Hotel are both going to be redeveloped as a new First Nations non-market housing building with 111 new apartments.

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We looked at the story of Alexander Pantages, whose name graced Art Clemes East Hastings Street theatre from its opening in 1908 for about a decade in our previous post. The theatre was built in a hurry – the developer was fined $10 for covering up the foundations before they could be inspected by the city’s engineer. George Calvert managed the theatre when it opened in January 1908, seeing a range of vaudeville acts revolve through the stage door, playing several houses a night as the management sought to charge lower prices than rival theatres, but still extract a profit from the operation. They ranged from musical comedy to animal acts, (Madam Lucretia with her leopards and panthers), whistlers, acrobats, a quick change artist (Mlle Fregolia, the first popular woman to perform Quick Change with prepared costumes), blackface and boxers (Bob Fitzsimmons, the ‘Famous Freckled Fighter’ from Cornwall, the lightest heavyweight champion). Alexander Pantages checked the theatre out in November 1908.

In 1909 Miss Nada Moret of Australia offered charming high-class songs, with a ‘dainty’ operetta as the headlining act. That contrasted with Sullivan and Kilrain who fought America’s last-ever bare-knuckle prizefight in 1889, and continued to cash in on it twenty years later. In 1910 Hamad’s Arabs appeared – not horses, but acrobats: “Abou Hamad’s Arabs, nine in number, said to be the best troupe of sons of the desert, will be on the bill. It is one of the best of foreign acts.” The Daily World reported “Eddie Martin, playing at the Pantages this week, will be seen in a specialty song and dance act that is one of the best in the business. Mr. Martin has the reputation of being one of the finest clog and fancy dancers in vaudeville”. Earlier that year The Great Pauline had been the attraction, “the wonderful French scientist and physician, whose demonstrations of the superiority of mind over matter have been the talk not only of the vaudeville votaries of the States and Europe, but also of physicians and psychologists in every city that he has appeared in.” This description might not make it obvious that Pauline was a male hypnotist and mind reader – one of the highest paid performers in vaudeville. He was French only if you had been hypnotized to believe that Rochester, New York, was in France. In October “an abundance of laughter will prevail during the turn of Chas Allen and Jack Lee who have the reputation of being the funniest pair of Jew comedians ever sent over the Pantages circuit.”

A year later, in August the Three Marx Brothers appeared for the first time in Vancouver in “Fun in Hi Skool”. Groucho played as a Dutch-accented schoolmaster and alongside his brothers his Aunt Hannah was one of the pupils. That year there were two attempts to break into the theatre’s safe. The Marx family returned again to play a week’s residency in 1913 as The Four Marx Brothers, and didn’t return to Vancouver again until 1918, when they had transferred their allegiance to the rival Orpheum circuit. It continued to operate throughout the war, adding drama to the roster of performances, including Arizona Joe’s Cowpuncher’s performing ‘Pastimes of the Plains’.

Once the new larger Pantages theatre opened a couple of blocks west, the old theatre continued under new owners, although Pantages had to sue to prevent the old name continuing in use. It became the Theatre Royal in mid 1918, and the owner, Mr Royal, chose a pink and gold redesign which could still be seen when the theatre was closed in the 1990s. Touring dramatic performances continued to provide most of the bookings, initially provided by Jim Post and his Musical Comedy Company, who worked up and down the west coast. There were still hypnotists and mind readers, and the occasional visiting songstress, but business was clearly falling off, and by the early 1920s the theatre was sometimes dark, and sometimes was showing films. Kelly’s Comedians performed here, but they moved to another theatre near the new Pantages.

In the late 1920s the theatre was converted to a movie house. In 1933 it survived having a bomb being thrown into the building, destroying the projectionists booth, and a car parked outside on the street. The aftermath damage is shown in our 1933 VPL image. Surrounding businesses including the Balmoral Hotel and the Dawson Building had their windows blown out, and discovered their insurance didn’t cover bombings. It was supposedly carried out by a Russian-born Chicago mobster and extortionist known as ‘Willie The Pimp’ working for union interests trying to create a monopoly union. (Years later, in 1955, having ratted out his gangland partners and despite being given a new identity by the FBI, Willie Bioff was killed when his car exploded in his Phoenix driveway).

Later it became known as the State, the Queen, the Avon and City Nights. As the Avon, in 1953, it saw a police raid in the middle of a live theatre performance of ‘Tobacco Road’. Five members of the regular cast were taken to jail, charged with taking part in an indecent performance. The play was an adaptation of Erskine Caldwell’s book about life, love, and poverty in the American South. Despite having run on Broadway for 8 years and being turned into a film, the VPD viewed the performance as “lewd and filthy”. It turned out that the raid was prompted by complaints from the production team to generate the response, and hence free publicity. It paid off; the cast returned after 90 minutes to complete the performance, and the play sold out for the rest of the run.

It last operated as the Sung Sing, a Chinese-language theatre, which closed in 1994. Several attempts were made to resurrect the theatre by community based groups, but holes in the roof started to see significant damage to the decorations. An appeal to the City of Vancouver to purchase the theatre was rejected, and the property developer owner was allowed to demolish the structure and the single storey retail buildings to the west. He built a woodframe condo building that was supposed to offer low cost home ownership over revitalized retail with a courtyard. However, the courtyard is gated, and locked, and the ownership model does not ensure the relatively low initial costs of apartments are maintained in subsequent sales, so units have been flipped to new owners at higher prices. The one tangible benefit are 18 units on non-market rental. The new Downtown Eastside plan wouldn’t allow a condo building in the area in future.

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The Pantages Theatre stood on East Hastings for over a century. It was built in 1907 and was the Vancouver base of Alexander Pantages and his Seattle managed vaudeville circuit, and was the oldest surviving Pantages Theatre in Western Canada, and until its demolition one of the earliest purpose built vaudeville houses remaining in North America. It’s seen here in a 1910 postcard in the Vancouver Public Library collection.

Alexander Pantages had only a loose affiliation with accuracy when it came to recording his history (not least because he was effectively illiterate, so kept few records, although he could speak six languages). He was possibly born on the island of Andros in Greece as Pericles Pantazis, probably in 1867, and he almost certainly ran away from home (in Cairo at the time) at the age of nine and travelled around the globe as a deck hand. He headed to north America (after a stint digging the first attempt at the Panama Canal) in the early 1880s. His 1910 census record said he arrived in the US in 1881; in 1920 he said 1883, and in 1930, 1885. (His year of birth shifted as well, from a probably inaccurate 1872 to an even less accurate 1874).

He settled initially in San Francisco where he worked as a utility boy in a vaudeville theatre, as a waiter and as an unsuccessful boxer. By 1896 he owned a restaurant and in December of that year he was arrested for smuggling 185 tins of opium. He was found not guilty after he established that at the night of the alleged crime he was training for a prize fight. An incidental detail in the case revealed that he had a surprisingly healthy bank balance for the owner of a small restaurant. Like many others he headed for the Yukon Territory during the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897 or early 1898, ending up in Dawson City. As other successful Klondike entrepreneurs, Pantages found there was more money to be made from the miners than from mining, especially if you’re only five feet six and would rather avoid digging in sub-zero temperatures. He worked as a waiter in Charlie Cole’s Saloon, which became a dance hall. He became business partner (and lover) of a Kansas native, and step-daughter of a Spokane judge, dancer and singer Kate Rockwell, (later to be known as “Klondike Kate”). Her specialty act, developed at Dawson City’s Palace Grande Theatre in 1900 involved wearing a red sequined dress spinning around in 200 feet of red chiffon cloth as if she was on fire. With Kate’s financial help he acquired and operated a small, but successful vaudeville and burlesque theatre, the Orpheum.

(There was another, and less flamboyant Yukon citizen known as Klondike Kate, with a Vancouver connection. Katherine Ryan was from New Brunswick, and in the late 1890s was set to marry her boyfriend, and when he decided instead to become a priest, Kate headed west and became a nurse in Vancouver. Tales of the goldrush led her to Whitehorse where she ran restaurant for many years. Eventually she ended up living in Vancouver again, where she died in 1932).

Unlike other female dance hall employees, as a named headliner on the vaudeville bill Kate Rockwell would not have been expected to ‘be available’ to patrons, but she would be expected to help relieve them of their money by drinking with them after the show. Champagne was $20 a bottle, and the girls were reimbursed for every cork they collected. Kate was successful as a dancer and entertainer – although not top of the bill – and she apparently saved money – although almost certainly nothing like the $150,000 that some sources suggest. She also didn’t stay the whole time in the Yukon; in 1899 she was part of a large vaudeville company that visited Victoria for a week and in 1900 she was on the bill as a dancer at the Savoy Theatre on Cordova Street. She briefly left for the States, and returned with an infant that she claimed was an orphan of a destitute mother. It’s possible that ‘Lotus Rockwell’ was the outcome of her affair with Alex.

In 1902, as the easiest gold had been found, Pangages headed south, and settled in Seattle. He rented a store on Second Street, fitted it out with hard benches, bought a movie projector and some film, hire a vaudeville act, and opened the Crystal Theatre. The funds he used included some of Kate Rockwell’s savings.

Kate was still touring; she was in Victoria at the Orpheum in 1903 ‘performing her beautiful electric serpentine dance’ and in Washington state in 1904, billed as a ‘spectacular dancer’, and had still been sending some of her earnings to Pantages. She was listed as the proprietress of the Orpheum in Victoria in 1903, having bought it for $350. Within a year she sold the theatre for $1,500 and returned to Alaska. Alex had been dictating regular love letters to Kate in which he expresses concern that she was drinking a lot, and in 1904 Kate returned to Seattle. She performed at the classier Alcazar Theatre, as Alex couldn’t afford to pay the salary she could command as a performer. She headed to Texas, which was going through an oil boom, and Alex bought yet another theatre, The Strand in the Skid Row area.

Kate understood that they would be getting married and settling down, so she wasn’t at all happy when A Pantager (sic) married Lois Mendenhall, a violinist from Oakland, in 1905. (Lois solemnly swore she was eighteen years or older – she showed her age as 25 in the 1910 census, but only 31 in 1920. She generally maintained her 1888 birthdate after that, suggesting she was actually only 17 when she was married.)

In 1905, while she was performing in Spokane, Kate heard from Alex that he was married, in a letter sent four days after the ceremony. In the summer she sued for breach of contract for $25,000. After effectively winning the suit, she settled out of court, and although some reports suggest she got $5,000, a contemporary newspaper report said she only got $800. She had to head back to Alaska and then out on the vaudeville circuit again, appearing in Vancouver with her Comedy troupe in 1907. She eventually settled in Oregon, was married at least three times, and became increasingly famous with the stories she told of her days in the Yukon – although the name ‘Klondike Kate’ appears not to have been used until 1929. She died in 1957.

Alex opened the first Pantages Theater in Seattle a few years after the Crystal, and in 1906 the even larger (1,200 seat) Lois Theatre. A year later the Vancouver theatre opened, designed by local architect E E Blackmore. Costing $100,000, it was bankrolled by local developer Art Clemes, who would go on to build the Regent Hotel next door to the theatre a few years later. Alexander supplied the acts, developing a circuit which saw his shows and acts constantly touring, always starting in Winnipeg. At the peak of his career in the 1920s, Pantages owned or controlled more than 70 vaudeville theaters, virtually all under his direct personal management. He and Lois had three children, and he moved to Los Angeles, living in a mansion. A second daughter was living with the family in 1920, Marjorie Nelson. A friend of the Pantages’ daughter Carmen, Marjorie was orphaned and adopted by the family. She later became Dixie Pantages, an actress who often doubled for her friend Carole Lombard in movies.

In the 1930 census Alexander and Lois Pantages were living apart. Lois and her children, Rodney, Lloyd and Carmen were living with her mother, Elvira, and four servants. Alexander’s census record identifies him as an inmate in San Quentin jail. 1929 had been a devastating year for the family. In June Lois caused a car accident that left a man dead and several others injured. In August, Alexander was arrested and tried for raping a 17-year-old woman named Eunice Pringle. Found guilty in a jury trial, Pantages sought a retrial, and finally in 1931 was found not guilty of the charge. The legal battle, however, exhausted a large part of his personal fortune. He had sold all but his flagship Broadway theatre to other owners, including RKO Pictures whose controlling investor, Joseph P Kennedy has been suggested to have been involved in framing Alexander on the charge. Paid in stock, rather than cash, the family fortune declined even faster as the market collapsed. Alexander Pantages died of heart failure in 1936. In Vancouver he had built a new, larger Pantages theatre which opened in 1918, and the old theatre continued under a new name and different management, finally to be redeveloped a few years ago.

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The Regent, like the Balmoral across the street, is another large commercial hotel developed at the end of the early 1900s development boom. The Regent’s developer, Art Clemes, obtained the building permit for the $150,000 building in December 1912, and it was completed the following year. It was designed by Emil Guenther.

Art Clemes is mentioned in some records as Archie or Archibald, although the earliest record aged 10 in 1860 called him Arthur, living in Victoria, Ontario, where he seems to have been listed as Clemis, rather than Clemes (although the handwriting in the record isn’t clear). Subsequently almost all official records call him Art. He was in BC by 1881, listed as a hosteler, with Esther, his wife (who was shown two years older than Art). In 1882 he was running the B C Express House in Nacomin. (Sometimes it was written as Necomin), which is in Spences Bridge.

By 1901 he was the leading businessman in the town, a small community on the Thompson River, seventy miles west of Kamloops on the main line of the C.P.R. He ran the general store and the hotel, and acted as postmaster. Around the turn of the century he took a holiday in Europe. He probably attended The 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, where it’s said that he was so taken by a Wolesley car exhibited there that in the early 1900s he ordered one from England. It was shipped via the Horn, as if it had come on the more convenient route across the Atlantic it would have had to be stripped down and crated, and there was nobody in Spences Bridge or Kamloops at that time who knew how to assemble an automobile. It was the first gasoline-driven automobile to run in the interior of British Columbia; here’s an oddly chopped picture of Art from the Archives, in his car.

In the 1901 census Art is listed as hotel keeper and rancher, with his wife Esther and their two domestic servants, Helen and Rachel Oppenheim. Art and Esther were both from England; (Art is shown specifically as being born in Cornwall, and stated his ethnicity as Cornish), and both were shown (inaccurately) to be aged 49. Art was only three when he came to Canada, while Esther had been 19. Their servants were both local, born in Yale. We know where Art’s family first moved in Canada, as his brother Henry, a stationary engineer, was living with the family. He was aged 40, and had been born in Ontario.

Art owned quite a bit of property in Vancouver. He built six brick dwellings at Hamilton Street & Georgia Street in 1903. In 1906 Art leased his ranch to Chinese growers. The Nicola Herald reported that he had leased it to three chinamen. “The enterprising Celestials intend supplying the various railroad camps with fresh vegetables. Rumour has it that $1,000 rental was paid in advance” Art remained in Spences Bridge; and retained his role as justice of the peace there, while developing in Vancouver. In 1908 he partnered with Alexander Pantage to build a theatre on East Hastings, which he continued to own for many years.

In 1911 Art and Esther were still shown in the census living in Spences Bridge, with many employees and lodgers living in the same accommodation (their hotel). They seem to have travelled more, as they visited the US in 1915. Esther died in 1918; her death record confirming she was two years older than Art. Art continued to travel after her death, and crossed from Mexico to the US in 1921. He died a year later, aged 70. The Hotel Regent (as it was called in 1923 when our image was taken), like many Downtown Eastside hotels has seen a steady decline. Today it has a mix of troubled tenants paying welfare rent and an owner unwilling or unable to invest in maintainance. Recently the exterior has been cleaned up, although the interior is still not somewhere anybody would chose to inhabit.

Image source: City of Vancouver Archives Hot N37.1 and Trans P151

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