Before it was redeveloped as a condo tower, this was better known to many Vancouver residents as Luv-a-fair, a nighclub that ran for over 25 years from 1974. Needless to say, that wasn’t how the building started life. It was developed in 1937 by the White Motor Company, an American automobile, truck, bus and agricultural tractor manufacturer from 1900 until 1980. The company’s first motor vehicles were steamers; in 1911 President William Howard Taft purchased one of the $4,000 cars, and is said to have enjoyed using bursts of steam against “pesky” press photographers. White switched to truck manufacturing in the 1920s, as well as buses and fire trucks.

Their trucks could be found on Vancouver’s streets, and the company operated in Vancouver in the 1930s at 967 Seymour, but in 1937 White Distributors Ltd hired McCarter Nairne & Partners to design a $14,000 warehouse and garage built by K M Skene.

H G De Bou was the manager in 1940 when the dealership switched to selling GMC trucks, renaming the business General Truck Sales. Here’s the garage at night in 1946, in an Archives image. You could still order a new GMC truck here in October 1953, but by November you were out of luck – but you could buy a Volkswagen quarter ton truck, (or a Beetle), as VW Pacific took over the space. They weren’t here for much more than ten years.

In 1966 the building became The King of Clubs. Initially operating without a licence, (in 1967 28 bottles of liquor were confiscated). Run by Gary Taylor, who was only 25, and a drummer with his own band playing backup to the strippers at the Smilin’ Buddah he was backed by friends who were sports players. The venue had a transmission shop at the back of the building to help cover revenue. There was $3,000 in the safe one Sunday night in September when a handyman heard noises, and called the police, who surrounded the building and caught the would-be safebreakers.

In 1968 Dick and Dee Dee were here for a 2-week engagement in April, replaced by The Mojo Co. Generally the bands were local, including Gerneral Wolfe and the Redcoats, Accent, and Handley Page. In March the licence was limited to 8pm to 2am because of ‘inadequate luncheon service’. (They were operating as a bar, and should have been selling food as well). The licencing executive of the Liquor Distribution Board insisted it wasn’t because the waitresses were topless, ‘which is strictly up to the City of Vancouver’. The doorman must have been pretty effective: in May “Two male bandits wearing hoods and masks fled the King of Clubs cabaret, 1275 Seymour, just before midnight after a doorman refused to let them enter the club”.

Taylor and his backers sold up after three years; he went on to run a show lounge on Granville, and then Hornby Street. In October 1969 it was announced that Nashville rockabilly recording star Buddy Knox would be at the newly named Purple Steer for a three week engagement, during which time he would be buying a controlling share in the business. Billed as ‘Country Music Capital in Western Canada’, Knox often performed here when he wasn’t on tour, and a variety of other local and visiting acts filled the other performances. By 1972 the club had morphed into ‘The Garage’ – in September Sonny Martinez and his Blue Collar Rock Band were headlining, and in November Wildroot.

In May 1973 Robert Leigh Wilkins of West Vancouver had an argument with his girlfriend, and was thrown out by the doorman. He returned in his car, and attempted to drive into the clubs’s assistant manager. He leaped out of the way, and the car removed the club’s doors. Wilkins was charged with attempted murder. The club became a biker hangout, as two brothers found out after being knifed after an argument outside the club in 1974.

In 1974, the club, said by columnist Jack Wasserman to have had 5 names and 15 owners, reported it reopening as Love Affair, run by Barry Maggliocco. Actually it was Luv-A-Fair, and it lasted longer than all the previous iterations of the club, until 2003, just after our main image was taken. A Vancouver Sun epitaph summed up the nearly 30 year run: “The Luv-A-Fair is over. It was a club like no other this city has known – loud and garish and irresistible. Formerly the Garage night club, it reopened under new owners and with a brand new name, befitting a gay club, in 1975, and proceeded to transform itself over the years, evolving along with the city’s music scene and club culture. It has attracted, and entertained, all manner of rocker, punk, skater, goth and disco diva – sometimes on the same night.

Its walls reverberated to the live sounds of alternative bands such as Sonic Youth and Nine Inch Nails. Pop culture icons like Marilyn Manson, Tom Cruise and Johnny Depp prowled its poorly lit edges, late at night.” The who’s who of live and DJ’d new wave and alternative music started in 1979, replacing an earlier gay disco version of the club.

The club was replaced with Cressey’s ‘Elan’ 32-storey condo tower in 2008, with a townhouse base, designed by Merrick Architecture.

Image sources: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 586-4786, luvafair.com.

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This 1929 image is very unusual for the angle that was used. The image is attributed to Stuart Thomson and shows a newly completed office building that was overshadowed by its flashier neighbours from the same era, the Marine Building, the Royal Bank, the Georgia Medical Dental Building and across the street, the Stock Exchange Building.

It’s unusual because the architects were from out of town – Northwood and Chivers were a Winnipeg firm of architects, and almost everything else they designed was in that city. While today it’s just known by its address, 789 W Pender, and earlier as The Hall Building, when it was being developed it was called the Coast Investment Building. It was 10 storeys high, and developed by the Hall Investment Corporation, whose President was E E Hall, who also ran Coast Investment. Hall Company Limited were Investment Bankers, and a January 1929 news story explained the development history. “Acquiring the half-interest of Sir Stephen Lennard. E. E. Hall of the Hall Investment corporation becomes sole owner of the $700,000 office block now under construction on the northeast corner of Pender and Howe streets, under the terms of a deal completed today. Mr. Hall has purchased all the stock of Sir Stephen in the Coast Investment company, which was formed for the purpose of erecting the building.”

The building was constructed by Carter-Halls-Aldinger, and they rushed to complete it in September ahead of the Marine Building. The Winnipeg architects weren’t acknowledged in the Vancouver press; McCarter and Nairne were described as the designers – we thought their role was to supervise the construction, but this 1929 sketch in the Vancouver Public Library gives equal billing to both firms. The likely reason for a Winnipeg designer became evident in the notice of the death of Elmer E Hall, in 1939, aged 74. He had arrived in Vancouver from Winnipeg in 1928, and had been born in Nashua, Iowa. He grew up as a farm boy before taking employment at a bank in Iowa. He came to Canada in 1906, and started a banking business in Outlook, Saskatchewan. He moved to Winnipeg in 1908, and his company The Central Grain Co became highly profitable. When it merged in 1928 he brought his funds to Vancouver. He was a director of many businesses in Winnipeg, including Equitable Trust, a Western Grocers and Security National Insurance Company of Canada, which operated a large line of grain elevators.

In 1970 McCarter Nairne and Partners designed an adjacent 15 storey building for the Montreal Trust, set back from the 1929 heritage building’s facade, and replacing single storey restaurant buildings. The expanded building still operates as successful multi-tenanted CBD office space.

Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 99-3792

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These four buildings were swallowed by the BC Tel (now Telus) data centre, which these days is mostly office space. The BC Telephone Company were already here in this 1947 image. They had developed the tall 8-storey building almost on the right of the picture. Although the company claimed, on the building permit, to be architect and builder of the project, we know that J Y McCarter designed the 1913 structure, because his drawings for it are in the Vancouver Archives.

Next door is Firehall #2. It was built in 1903, cost $29,000 and was designed by W T Whiteway. The small building to the north, (738 Seymour), with the unusual pediment, was designed in 1925 by W F Gardiner for Rose, Cowan & Latta Ltd. They were printers and stationers, and also sometimes publishers of information booklets, commemorating events in the city. In 1925 R R Rose was company president, (but may not have lived in Vancouver), John B Cowan was company secretary, living on W37th, and Edward F Latta lived in North Vancouver. The company were still here in 1947, with the Seymour Cigar Store in the retail unit, with Miss I New and G Hicks offering vocal training at the same address, presumably in an office upstairs. The building replaced a house built here in 1901. It cost $1,000, and the developer was Mr. Morton, possibly one of two carpenters called Morton who lived in the city at that time.

The two storey building to the north (with the protruding ‘button’ sign) was Smith’s Button Works, The Button Works first appeared in 1929, and before that in 1928 it looks as if there was a house here. Smith’s actually did much more than supply buttons, as this directory entry shows. London & British North America Co. Ltd were the developers, and the architect was Philip P Brown. Baynes & Horie built the $15,000 investment.

724 Seymour on the edge of the picture was home to the Quadra Club in 1947. The building seems to have been built around 1932. It housed the Vancouver Little Theatre Association that year, and Paul Pini was running a restaurant in 1934. By 1936 that had become the Old Dutch Mill Cafe, with the Bal Tavern Cabaret, run by Mrs. E Yaci. The cabaret to see 1936 in advertised “BAL TAVERN CABARET NEW YEAR’S JAMBOREE dance to the Delightful Music of CLAUDE HILL AND HIS RHYTHM BOYS Gay Entertainment by MARIE MACK JACK GORDON AND A HOST OF OTHERS” The club had gone by 1937, replaced in 1938 by the Musicians Mutual Protective Union, and the Hotel & Restaurant Employees Union in 1940. There were other tenants – Sills and Grace, who sold hardware, and Technocracy Inc. They were an organisation that proposed replacing politicians and businesspeople with scientists and engineers to manage the economy. They were closed down in 1940 as they were perceived as being anti-war, but allowed to reform in 1943 when it became apparent that they favoured total conscription. They were replaced, briefly, by the National Spiritualist Association of Canada, but around 1942 the Quadra Club moved in, and stayed until the early 1970s.

Curiously, the Archives title for the picture also identifies the ‘Stock Exchange Bldg’, but that is clearly not here. Shell Oil apparently commissioned the photograph from Don Notman’s studios, but the reason isn’t obvious. In the late 1950s BC Tel replaced the Firehall and their 1913 building with a new much larger and more conemporary building, extended north in 1975 with a huge new automated telephone exchange designed by McCarter, Nairne and Partners. (They probably designed the first phase in the 1950s as well). In the past two years the building has been overclad with a glazed screen. Space no longer needed for equipment has been repurposed as offices, and the Telus headquarters is now here, and in the new Telus Garden office added a few years ago at the end of the block. A complex energy saving system has been introduced, recirculating the excess heat from the company’s computer servers.

To the south next to the BC Tel building, the 1940s Farrell Building (just being built in 1947) had an extra skin added in 2000 to improve energy efficiency, and more recently has been sold by Telus as a separate building, now the headquarters of Avigilon security systems, part of Motorola since 2018.

Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 586-7266

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This stretch of West Pender still has two buildings today that can be seen in this 1981 image (looking west). The Uniglobe Building (seen in the previous post) is at the far end of the block, and dates back to 1956, (although it’s had a re-skin and looks quite different). It was  designed by J McLaren, who was actually an engineer rather than an architect, and was the headquarters for Macmillan Bloedel for 12 years, until they commissioned Arthur Erickson to design a larger replacement nearby on West Georgia. The Shorehill Building, designed by McCarter and Nairne and Partners, still looks the same, although it’s more hidden today than in 1981. It dates back to 1966; between those buildings the taller Coast Hotel has been added, built in 2010.

Closer to us was a modest two storey building that dated back to 1954. It was developed for Gypsum Lime Canada, but was also the offices of the architects who designed it, Semmens Simpson. For a brief period this partnership designed some of the best modernist international buildings in the city, including the new City Library on Burrard, and a series of West End apartment buildings. Their own offices were designed in the same simple but effective style, with minimal ornamentation. The office was replaced in the late 1990s by a condo and hotel tower designed by Hancock, Bruckner Eng and Wright. There are 39 apartments on the top floors and the Delta by Marriott Pinnacle Hotel on the lower floors of a 36 storey building. When there was a lower building on the site you could see the Harbourfront Hotel – now the Pinnacle Harbourfront. It was once home to one of the city’s three revolving restaurants, but the Empire Landmark was recently demolished and this one is no longer operating. Built in 1975, it was designed by the Waisman Architectural Group. The same architects designed the charcoal painted concrete grid tower to the west, completed in 1968.

Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 779-W19.13

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We’re looking east on West Pender, and the building on the left is still standing, although with a new screen of windows. In 1981 it still looked the same as when it was first built, in 1956. It was developed for Macmillan and Bloedel, the fast-growing forestry and pulp business. It was designed in-house by Dominion Construction, who had their structural engineer J McLaren, sign off on the design. Dominion’s president, Charles Bentall, also an engineer, had been in trouble with the AIBC for exactly the same issue, but the company continued to design their own perfectly well-designed buildings (without an accredited architect) for several years.

DA Architects designed the building seen next door today, the new Coast Hotel, opened just in time for the 2010 Olympics. The 1966 Shorehill Building beyond it (designed by McCarter, Nairne and Partners) can be seen more clearly in 1981 than it can today but it’s effectively unchanged. While the low buildings beyond from the 1950s have today been replaced with a hotel and office buildings, the United Kingdom Building, another 1950s tower, designed by Douglas Simpson, is still standing on the corner of Granville.

Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 779-W19.16

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This is another early 1980s image showing a part of Downtown where relatively little change has taken place in nearly 40 years. The image is from after 1979, and we’re standing at the corner of Melville looking north on Thurlow. On the left is a 1975 office building of 11 floors designed by Waisman Architectural Group. Beyond it is a 1965 eight storey office called the Phillips Building. Across the lane is an orange brick clad building known by its address, 1112 West Pender, completed in 1960; it was designed by McCarter, Nairne & Partners. The office at the end of the block was developed by R C Baxter in 1966, and is another Waisman Architectural Group design.

All four are still standing today, although they represent the more modest density buildings that are now being redeveloped as larger, more energy efficient towers. There are two buildings visible today on the west side of the street that weren’t around in the 1980s. In front of the Baxter building is the white tower of the Delta Pinnacle hotel, built in 2000, while beyond it there’s now a green-clad condo tower designed by IBI/HB and completed in 2012 called Three Harbour Green.

The dark glazing closest to us on the right is Four Bentall Centre, the tallest in the Bentall cluster at 35 floors and completed in 1981, designed by Frank W Musson and Associates. Beyond it is 1090 West Pender. It’s a 1971 twelve storey office building designed by Gerald Hamilton for Dawson Developments, and with the parkade alongside it’s in the process of being demolished. It will be replaced by a 31 storey office tower with an underground parkade. Beyond it is Manulife Place, a 22-storey office completed in 1991.

Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 772-1403

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This 1930s postcard shows several buildings that have been redeveloped, and three that are still standing. The extraordinary Marine Building dominates the older picture – one of Vancouver’s rare ‘street end blockers’ – and fortunately, a worthy example, designed by Vancouver’s McCartner Nairne and Partners, designing their first skyscraper. While it’s Vancouver’s finest art deco building, it was far from a positive example of development budgeting. Costing $2.3 million, it was $1.1 million over budget, and guaranteed the bankruptcy of its developers, Toronto-based G A Stimson and Co.

Stimsons were also owners of the Merchant’s Exchange, the building closest to the camera on the north (right) side of the street. That was designed by Townley & Matheson, and the building permit says it cost $100,000 and was developed in 1923 for “A. Melville Dollar Co”. Alexander Melville Dollar was from Bracebridge, Ontario, but moved to Vancouver as the Canadian Director of the Robert Dollar Company. Robert Dollar was a Scotsman who managed a world-wide shipping line from his home in San Francisco. His son Harold was based in Shanghai, overseeing the Chinese end of the Oriental trade, another son, Stanley managed the Admiral Oriental Line, and the third son, A Melville Dollar looked after the Canadian interests, including property development. (The Melville Dollar was a steamship, owned by the Dollar Steamship Company, which ran between Vancouver and Vladivostok in the early 1920s). Vancouver entrepreneur and rum-runner J W Hobbs who managed Stimson’s West Coast activities paid $400,000 for the building in 1927. Stimson’s bought the site with the intention of tearing down the recently completed building to construct the Marine Building, then discovered it was a profitable enterprise and instead bought the site at the end of the street.

The larger building on the right is the Metropolitan Building, designed by John S Helyer and Son, who previously designed the Dominion Building. Beyond it is the Vancouver Club, built in 1914 and designed by Sharp and Thompson.

On the south side of the street in the distance is the Credit Foncier building, designed in Montreal by Barrot, Blackadder and Webster, and in Vancouver by the local office of the US-based H L Stevens and Co. Almost next door was the Ceperley Rounfell building, whose façade is still standing today, built in 1921 at a cost of $50,000, designed by Sharp & Thompson.

Next door was the Fairmont Hotel, that started life as the Hamilton House, developed by Frank Hamilton, and designed by C B McLean, which around the time of the postcard became the Invermay Hotel. The two storey building on the corner of Howe was built in 1927 for Macaulay, Nicolls & Maitland, designed by Sharp and Thompson. Before the building in the picture it was a single storey structure developed by Col. T H Tracey in the early 1900s. There were a variety of motoring businesses based here, including a tire store on the corner and Vancouver Motor & Cycle Co a couple of doors down (next to Ladner Auto Service, run by H N Clement). The building was owned at the time by the Sun Life Insurance Co. Today there are two red brick modest office buildings, one from 1975 and the other developed in 1981.

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This set of 1920s stores sat on the corner of Georgia and Seymour until the mid 1970s. The first appearance in a street directory is 1928, when the Georgia units were first occupied by: 550 Grouse Mtn Highway, 556 Van the Tailor, 560 Waverly Barber Shop, 570 Surety Finance, 580 Sandwich Shop, 590 Goodyear Shoe Reprg and 596 Van Publicity Bureau. This image dates from 1973, not too long before the buildings were cleared. There are very few online sources of information for the 1920s for the city, and it is difficult to identify architects unless there’s a distinctive style.

Like the car dealers on West Georgia and the Film Centre on Burrard (by H H Gillingham) this building added mission-style details to the facades. Thanks to Patrick Gunn we’re now able to confirm that Gillingham was the architect for owners Allen & Boultbee, and the cost was $45,000. The insurance map shows that the retail units, and the Publicity Office on the corner were a thin veneer with most of the block taken up with the Strand Garage at the back of the building. These 1927 and 1937 Vancouver Public Library image shows that the building really didn’t change much before it was replaced with the building below.

We looked at this same corner in an earlier post where an even earlier building than those shown here are featured. Before the 1920s building there was a row of tenements, built around 1901 and owned in 1915 by George Trorey. In the mid 1970s (see here in 1981) there was a new low-rise commercial building added as part of the huge BC Tel Seymour building, with a sunken plaza and a White Spot restaurant. That building, designed by McCarter, Nairne and Partners, was demolished in 2012 for the new Telus Garden office building that has just been completed. The White Spot has been replaced with Glowbal, a partly open air restaurant under a huge and complex canopy designed by Henriquez Partners Architects (whose offices will also be here). Lovers of ‘pirate packs’ will be pleased to note that in the meantime White Spot opened two new locations nearby.

Image sources: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 447-366 and CVA 779-E05.36

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We saw the buildings that once sat on the south east, north east and north west corners of Dunsmuir and Granville already. Here’s the fourth corner; the south west corner. It held the oldest building of them all, built initially in 1888 as the Van Horne Building. Sir William Van Horne was President of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and there was no perceived conflict of interest for Sir William to acquire land and develop buildings on company property. It was in line with his responsibility to see the company’s investment pay off, so Sir William planned to build two buildings on CPR’s Granville Street holdings that were being promoted to drag the centre of the city westwards, away from its milltown origins. The first of his projects was on Granville Street at Dunsmuir, built in 1888 to the designs of Bruce Price. (Francis Rattenbury designed a second Granville Street building in 1903). Seen above in this 1887 illustration, it’s an impressive building for a one-year old city that just survived complete obliteration in a fire. Actually, the completed building was only half the size, but still impressive (as the 1909 VPL photograph on the right shows). The building lasted 24 years as an office, then received a dramatic $70,000 conversion to a cinema.

The 1912 building permit was to the Ricketts Amusement Co and the architect was E W Houghton, a Seattle-based architect originally born in Hampshire in England (who had redesigned the CPR’s former Opera House in 1907). Ricketts, who came from the same county, was the former lessee of CPR’s Opera House (just down the street from the building, and despite its title, a mainstream theatre). Ricketts probably ceased connections with the building before its completion; he managed the Imperial Theatre before retiring in 1915.  The 1913 opening saw the Kinemacolor Theatre offering movies, in colour – the first Canadian theatre with the system. Kinemacolor was invented by English cinematographer George Albert Smith, and marketed by American entrepreneur Charles Urban. Film was run through a projector at 32 frames per second, twice the normal speed, and then filtered through red and green coloured lenses to produce “the world’s wonders in nature’s colours.” A nine-piece orchestra accompanied the short films, and a baritone named George C. Temple “delighted the audience with some of the old songs.” Later, the theatre added a $10,000 organ to accompany the silent movies. The cinema failed to thrive, and was closed in 1914.

The theatre reopened as the Colonial in 1915 with Hector Quagliotti as the owner and for a time became the most popular cinema in the city. The pianist from 1917 was Paul Michelin, “The man with the Million-Dollar hands”, who could, it was said, play over 12,000 songs from memory. He also incorporated other sounds for silent films including train whistles, steam engines, and battle scenes, but was criticised by the Musicians’ Union because he was doing the work of a sound effects man. The sign for the cinema remained for many years – perhaps because it’s 7 feet high and 13 feet wide. It was removed before the building was torn down in 1972 to make way for the Pacific Centre Mall by stained glass collectors John and Derrick Adams, only to reappear in the Keg restaurant on Thurlow at Alberni, before it ended up removed from there too.

Towards the end of its life the theatre incorporated the Pauline Johnson confectionery store, a popular stop before the main feature. In earlier years it was one of Con Jones ‘Don’t Argue’ tobacconists stores (“Don’t Argue – Con Jones sells fresh tobacco”). Today there’s a 1981 corner office tower of the McCarter Nairne and Partners Pacific Centre Mall – the colours ‘brightened’ from the more sombre earlier ‘black towers’ to the south.

Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 447-399 (Walter E Frost)

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That’s the 1925 part of the Hudson’s Bay building in the centre of this 1953 image, but everything else has changed. The Bay has recently received a comprehensive restoration of the terra cotta facade of the building designed by Burke, Horwood & White of Toronto. They used almost identical designs in Victoria and Winnipeg at around the same time. The Bay had been at this location since 1893, although they started off in the city further north and east on Cordova Street in around 1887. At some point we’ll post a before and after of the building this part of the store replaced, a brick building from 1893.

The facade of the new (and current) Hudson’s Bay store was supplied by the American Terra Cotta & Ceramic Co of Chicago, and the bit you can see here is the second phase from 1925 replacing the 1893 building, which joined to the 1914 building (which was further east on the corner of Seymour and Georgia).

The next stage of the restoration of the Bay building will be new glazed canopies, signs and lighting, more in keeping with the heritage building and creating a better sidewalk than the current solid canopies. The huge change in the recent picture is the arrival of the Pacific Centre Mall, completed in 1974. This part of the complex was designed by McCarter Nairne with Cesar Pelli working at Victor Gruen and Associates of Los Angeles. The dark tower was the Stock Exchange Tower when it was built. The rotunda entrance is likely to be replaced at some point with a retail use and a revised mall entrance.

Image source: BC Archives

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