Downtown:

1. We held a funeral for the Birks Building

At 2:00 pm. on Sunday March 24, 1974 a group of about a hundred, many of them students and professors from the UBC School of Architecture, came together in a mock funeral for the Birks Building. They marched from the old Vancouver Art Gallery at Georgia and Thurlow, led by a police escort and accompanied by a New Orleans funeral band playing a sombre dirge. The mourners assembled under the “meet me at the Birk’s clock.”

It was too late to stop the demolition—it had already begun—but not too late to protest what historians have called an “act of architectural vandalism.”

Angus McIntyre then 26, grabbed his Konica Autoreflex 2, 35mm camera and rode his bike downtown to record the event. The crew working on the new building at Georgia and Granville, shut off the air compressors and laid down their tools. Rev. Jack Kent, chaplain of the Vancouver Mariners Club officiated. He was accompanied by a choir.

“There was a Gathering, a Sharing of Ideas, a Choir performance and a Laying of the Wreaths,” Angus told me. “A small group of people wearing recycled videotape clothing put hexes on new buildings nearby. As soon as it came time to return to the Art Gallery, the band switched to Dixieland jazz, and the mood became slightly more upbeat.”

For a long time afterwards, the large R.I.P. banner hung in a second storey office window at the Sam Kee building on Pender Street.

And just like that, the beautiful old Birks Building—well not that old really, only 61 in 1974—was killed off to make way for the Scotia Tower and Vancouver Centre mall. The only positive thing to come out of the loss of this much-loved building was that it mobilized the heritage preservation community in Vancouver and saved many of our other buildings from a similar fate.

2. The Pacific

By the 1960s, the redevelopment of downtown Vancouver with the intersection of Georgia and Granville Streets as its epicentre, had long been a dream of City Council. The goal was to breathe life back into that intersection through a new and improved “superblock.” This superblock was made up of Block 52—bounded by Granville, Georgia, Howe and Robson; and Block 42—bounded by Granville, Georgia, Howe, and Dunsmuir. The problem was that the Eaton Company which owned all of Block 52 didn’t seem in a hurry to move their store up from West Hastings, and a new Eatons Department Store was essential to anchor the intersection. The other problem was that Block 42 was owned by 18 individual land owners, and none of them wanted to sell. By the fifth redevelopment report in July 1964, a frustrated Mayor Tom Campbell and members of City Council were figuring out ways they could expropriate the land from the unwilling owners.

In May 1968 the city held a plebiscite to allow them to buy up all the properties in Block 42 and 70 percent of voters agreed. Mayor Campbell told the press: “We’ve got a united city which wants a heart. Vancouver had only a past—today it has a future. This is Vancouver’s greatest day.”

By 1974, We had the Pacific Centre and Vancouver Centre, much of it as an underground mall. We’d rid the streets of those grand old brick buildings, and gained the 30-storey black monument to Toronto’s TD bank, the IBM Building, the Four Seasons Hotel and the Scotia Tower. And, rather than revitalizing the Granville and Georgia Street intersection, we sucked the life right out of it.

3. The CPR Park and Bandstand

In the 1890s, the Canadian Pacific Railway offered to sell its park on the north west corner of Granville and Georgia to the City of Vancouver for $17,000. The city said no thanks, they weren’t interested in paying for a “special benefit” for the hotel’s guests. Instead, the CPR sold the lot to developers Samuel Howe and Benjamin Johnston who put up a three-storey building in 1901, and promptly flipped the land and building for a million dollars. The Granville-Georgia block was demolished in 1972 to make way for the IBM tower.

4. Vancouver’s First Horse Race

The first official Dominion Day horse race in 1887 was supposed to be held along Granville Street. Unfortunately, it rained too hard, conditions were too muddy and the race moved to Howe Street. The starting line was just above Pacific Street and the finish line was at the first Hotel Vancouver where the “grand stand” was erected (and where the TD Bank tower is today). The Dominion Day race continued the following year with four horses contending—George Black’s Bryan O’Lynn, Sam Brighouse’s Coquitlam Jim, Charles Casell’s Royal, and the Duke of York’s Slow Dick. The races officially moved to Hastings Park in 1892 where they remain.

5. The First CPR Station

The first transcontinental train arrived in Vancouver in May 1887 and it was a very big deal. Businesses closed for the afternoon, city council adjourned its meeting, the first brigade and city band led a parade of hundreds to the station and the Mayor arrived in Vancouver’s only horse-drawn cab to meet the train at the CPR station at the foot of Howe Street.

The little station served Vancouver for the next 12 years. When its replacement was finished, the CPR hauled the station down the tracks to the foot of Heatley Street, and handed it over to William Alberts. Alberts, one of the original CPR switchmen, was involved in a workplace accident in the late 1890s. He lived at the station rent free for the rest of his life, which proved to be quite a long one. He died in 1948 at the age of 80.

William and his wife Isabella raised their three children there. When their daughter Irene and her husband Noel Ross returned the house to the CPR after her father’s death, a Vancouver Sun reporter and photographer were there to record it. The reporter noted “the moss-covered roof’ and the “goodbye” that had been scribbled on the former waiting room floor which still had the original benches and stove, and the former garden which had been consumed by railway tracks. Irene told him she’d watched the troop trains come and go in both world wars and said that she was so used to train whistles and bells that she never heard them.

The Second CPR Station

Even if you don’t love the architecture—and I do happen to be a fan of anything that’s gothic and grim and wears a turret—you’ve got to admit that the second CPR station would have made an amazing addition to our current landscape. This station was designed by Edward Maxwell in the railway’s early chateau style. It dominated the foot of Granville Street with its two massive turrets—one round and one octagonal and an arched entranceway made from Calgary limestone. But all this gorgeousness didn’t save the station. It quickly became too small for burgeoning Vancouver and was demolished in August 1914 and replaced by the current Waterfront Station.

Lots for Sale in Shaughnessy Heights

Hundreds of Vancouver’s richest citizens lined up on both sides of Granville Street and for more than four blocks along West Hastings Street in 1909 to buy a lot in Shaughnessy Heights. Which just goes to show that speculating in real estate has always been a Vancouver sport. As a condition of sale, all homes had to cost a minimum of $6,000—six times the price of an average house at the time. A standard covenant read: “No person of the African or Asiatic race or African of Asiatic descent (except servants of the occupier of the premises in residence) shall reside or be allowed to remain on premises.” It wasn’t until 1985 that the province changed the laws to void these racist clauses, but bizarrely they can still be found attached to some land titles.