MNP Tower West Hastings Street

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We looked at an image of the Empress, and her next-door neighbour, the Phoenix, in a post we wrote six years ago. Then we saw a horizontal slice of the buildings, but this Archives image from 50 years ago shows the full vertical extent of a tall building on a 25 foot lot. The $90,000 construction was developed by L L Mills, and designed by his brother-in-law who worked in Independence, Kansas, and who almost certainly got the job because he was married to Lyle’s sister, Emma. Lyle Le Roy Mills was born in the US, in Iowa, and in 1912 when he obtained the permit for the building he was 43. His wife Elsie was from originally from Sweden, shown in the 1911 census as three years younger, (although actually three years older). They had married in Seattle in 1904, and were living in the West End with an extended family; Lyle’s mother, Margaret who was 85 was living with them, and Elsie’s mother, Carrie Swensen, and her sister, Ellen. Lyle’s brother, Oscar and his wife Cora were also living at 1967 Barclay with their children, Oscar Le Roy, 13, and Earl Van, 11. Oscar worked as a barman at what was described as the ‘world’s narrowest tallest hotel’ when it was built. Lyle and Elsie had married in Washington state in 1904, and it wasn’t Elsie’s first marriage as she was recorded then as Elsie Anderson. After a few years Mr Mills ran into problems. In 1916 it was alleged that a young woman stayed at the hotel without registering. On the strength of the allegation (which was never tested in court), Mr Mills was threatened with the loss of his hotel licence. Mayor McBeath, and the City’s Licence Inspector held the view that the board could arbitarily cancel a licence. They suggested that if he wanted his day in court, Mr Mills could always appeal. Lawyers appearing for Mr Mills initially persuaded other board members that they could only cancel a licence after a conviction in police court, but a temporary suspension was agreed Unwilling to drop the case, the board launched its own inquiry, and called the girl to give evidence. She admitted staying with two men for two nights without having registered. Detectives said that they had seen the girl leaving the hotel, and the hotel clerks were called and confirmed she was not registered. But they also stated that they, and Mr Mills, did not know she was staying, and they were under instructions to not allow unaccompanied women to use the hotel rooms. The lawyer for Mr Mills throughout the proceeedings objected that they lay beyond the board’s powers, and that there was no proof (or accusation) that Mr Mills knew of the woman’s presence. Just as the board were about to debate suspending the licence, Frank Lyons, the lawyer, produced writs claiming damages against the board members for usurpation of powers, and an injunction preventing them from suspending the hotel licence. “Remember that I am telling you now that you have no power, no authority, no right; your action is unfair, improper, illegal, unjust.” The mayor wasn’t willing to back down, and by the summer of 1917 the case was in the Supreme Court, where Sir Charles Hibbert Tupper was representing Mr Mills. (He was a former conservative politician, Minister of Justice and Solicitor General for Canada). There had also been something of a PR disaster for the hotel, when a sensational case arose concerning the death of Mrs Nora Cowan. She fell – or jumped – from a fifth floor window, and died as a result. The circumstances filled the papers for days. A coroner’s jury handed down an open verdict after hearing that Mrs Cowan (married to a soldier serving in Europe) had met Vernon Cole (a married man with a wife and children) and after several drinks in the hotel had appeared to have had too much alcohol, and had been taken to a room usually occupied by one of the hotel barmen. A doctor (a friend of Mr Cole) had seen she was asleep, and she was left alone. Mr Mills had briefly interacted with the party, as he was a friend of Mr Cole, but there was no suggestion of any inpropriety on his part. Nevertheless the mayor used the episode as another reason for the removal of the licence, and this time the board agreed. Sir Charles Tupper declared the board’s actions to be illegal, as they had determined to remove the licence and then tried to find grounds to support that position. There was a week’s delay in the appeal to the Supreme Court while the mayor was unavailable, on a trip to Winnipeg, and a week later when the mayor was again unable to attend as he was on holiday in Calgary. Eventually Justice Murphy held the hearing, and having heard extensively from Sir Charles Tupper (who continued to denounce the board for depriving the hotelier of his $200,000 investment with no direct evidence of any wrongdoing), he nevertheless determined, a week later, that the board could suspend or cancel the licence as they saw fit, without having to follow the normal rules of evidence or procedures of a court. Six days later Walter J Robinson, a baliff, was offering the contents of the hotel to meet a debt of $1,450 against Lyle L

A couple of blocks of Seymour Street developed into the ultimate shopping desination (if you were popping out to buy a truck). Federal Motors, and GMC Trucks were on the next block to the south, and International Motor Trucks put their showroom here, on the 1100 block. Built in two phases, International moved here in 1927 when the expanded from their smaller premises at the north end of the same block, on Davie Street. The initial building was the northern (right hand) half, seen in this 1927 Vancouver Public Library image. According to the permit it was developed in 1926 by Mr. J. E. McAllister at a cost of $8,500. Charles James McAllister was born in Wiarton, Bruce County Ontario in 1869. He became a blacksmith, and arrived in Vancouver around 1891, initially working for the CPR. He worked on East Hastings, initially we think for John McAllister, another blacksmith who had The Columbia Carriage Works there. It seems likely they were related, and Charles lodged with John when he first arrived. Charles married Ellen Percival in 1898. She was born in Manitoba but lived in Vancouver from 1887. They had a daughter, Elva, in 1899, and a son, Clarence in 1903. In 1905 they were living on this site at 1145 Seymour in a house that Charles had built a year earlier (just visible on the edge of the 1927 image). In the 1911 census Charles was still a blacksmith. In 1921 E J McAllister got a permit to carry out repairs and raise the house. Charles J McAllister was still shown living here in the street directory, and in 1928 was president of McAllister Spring Co, (based in 1162 Seymour) and still living here, as was his son Clarence, who worked with him. We’re not sure if there really was a J E McAllister who owned the premises, and almost certain there was no E J McAllister (at least, not in any street directories) but Charles J McAllister lived in this location for over 20 years before the garage was built. Whoever developed the garage probably hired Bedford Davidson to design and build it. If not, they copied the other garage designs Mr Davidson was resposible for in the area. The house at 1145 Seymour had rooms to let between 1927 and 1931, which is when we think it must have been replaced by the extended showroom. By 1933 when our main image was taken, the building had been doubled to 100 feet wide. Charles McAllister died in 1956 at the age of 87. His obitiary noted that he owned McAllister Spring Co for 45 years, having set it up when he stopped working for the CPR. International Harvester Co moved into the building at 1135 in 1927, and were listed until 1950. United Upholstery moved into the building in 1951, and were here until 1957. In 1958 a new bowling alley was announced; Norman Loomer was going to spend $15,000 on remodelling the premises and installing the equipment. He already had Seymour Recreations at 1105 Seymour, and when Loomer Lanes opened in August they allowed both 5 and 10 pin bowling in ‘the most modern lanes in Canada’. In 1964 they were the Holly Lanes, but by 1967 Budget Office Furniture had taken the space, and was here to the mid 1970s, but by 1975 Dorwell Office Equipment had taken over, and by the early 1980s it was the Furniture Division of Williams and Mackie. Today it’s part of a twin tower strata project called Brava, designed by Hewitt and Kwasnicky, and developed by Onni and Amacon in the early 2000s, completed in 2005. On this part of the street there are townhouses, but the Vancouver International Film Centre run the theatre to the south that’s part of the complex. Image sources; City of Vancouver Archives CVA 99-4547 and Vancouver Public Library 1420

You may have heard that Postmedia Network Canada Corporation donated approximately 5.6 million Vancouver Sun and The Province photographic negatives to the Archives in 2017. You may have also heard that around this time last year, 25,000 Vancouver Sun photo assignments (out of 250,000 in the whole donation) became available for searching on our online database. You may even be one of the many researchers who in the past year has accessed and viewed these negatives in person in our Reading Room. But do you know the steps involved in making those negatives available for viewing? Well, if not, you’re in luck! In honour of achieving a milestone 50,000 photo assignments available (that’s over 1.1 million images!), we’d like to give you a glimpse of the work that goes on behind the scenes to make this happen. The “Before” state—a banker’s box full of photo assignment envelopes The journey begins with a banker’s box. A peek inside reveals approximately 1,800 tightly-packed envelopes, each representing a single photo assignment given to a Sun photographer. These envelopes are taken out of the banker’s box in batches, making the processing more manageable. Each envelope is given a unique identifier, which becomes its reference code in our database. Stamping the first part of the identifier, ‘AM1616-S1-F,’ helps speed up the process, as all envelopes in this series will have this same eleven-character ID reflecting the fonds (AM1616) and series (S1) numbers. The six-digit file number portion of the identifier (that comes after the ‘F’) is handwritten in pencil and is unique within the series, with numbers assigned sequentially. The envelope for file AM1616-S1-F077888 After assigning the envelopes their identifiers, we count the number of images contained in each envelope and record that data in a spreadsheet. Each envelope may contain anywhere from fewer than 10 to more than 100 images on strips three frames long, for an average of 22.4 images per envelope. Counting the frames The rest of the information contained on each envelope is transcribed into the spreadsheet, including the assignment title or description of the assignment, the photographer’s name, the date, and if present, the “twincheck” number assigned by the Sun librarians when originally filing the negatives. Other information that is required to make fully standards-compliant file-level descriptions is also added. So much metadata After all of this metadata is captured, the envelopes are transferred to a new, acid-free Hollinger box. Once full, the box is labeled with the AM1616 fonds number, a unique container name and a barcode representing the container name. A full box, labeled and ready to travel The box is now ready for its trip to its new permanent home in one of our frozen storage vaults. To help the contents of the box slowly acclimatize to the -18 Celsius environment of the vault, the box is placed in a cooler bag and the cooler goes into the vault. After 24 hours, the box is removed from the cooler and placed in one of the sealed frozen storage cabinets, where it resides until someone asks to see some of the negatives. Inside a frozen storage vault Meanwhile, envelope metadata continues to be added to the spreadsheet and, when 2,500 envelopes have been entered, the spreadsheet undergoes a quality control check. We look for logical places to split very long descriptions, for glaring typographical errors and for any issues flagged during transcription. We also check for offensive or discriminatory language that is reflective of the time period in which the photographs were taken and of the attitudes of the creator. In these cases, we retain the newspaper staff’s original descriptions in order to keep the historical context of creation, but we will supply updated and/or more accurate terminology. When the quality control work is complete, the spreadsheet data is uploaded to our database and the new file-level descriptions are ready for searching by the public. Search result for “Sonny and Cher” The full file-level description of the images of Sonny and Cher when they played the Coliseum. Reference Code: AM1616-S1-F009500 Here’s a video of what this whole process looks like. As we mention in the video, to view the images, we need 48 hours’ notice, so we can repeat the negatives’ journey in reverse. Once we have a retrieval request in hand, we will pull the relevant envelope from its box and place the envelope in a plastic zip lock bag. The box is placed in the cooler bag and the cooler is brought to our preservation lab to allow the negatives to slowly acclimatize to room temperature. Once thawed, the negatives can be viewed in our reading room on a light table. Viewing the negatives If you need any assistance in finding Sun photographs relating to your research interest, or would like a photo assignment retrieved, please contact us at archives@vancouver.ca or 604-736-8561. The Reference team will be happy to help. 200,000 more envelopes to go!

There are three buildings here that remain one of the last undeveloped industrial premises in Downtown South (often called Yaletown these days, although technically that’s the other side of the street). 1293 on the corner was developed in 1925, and 1285, the 3-storey section, five years later, designed and built by Dominion Construction for $8,000. 1277 Homer, the smaller element beyond it dates from 1948. Remarkably, they hang on as the last remaining manufacturing operation in a location surrounded by residential towers. Both the southern buildings were developed by C E Mahon, an Ontario insurance and real estate broker who moved to Vancouver in 1907. This seems to have been his only investment property, apart from his home on West 13th. Born in Paisley, Ontario, in 1871, he retired from his real estate and insurance business in 1946. He was elected as an alderman in 1913, and four subsequent years. He was appointed police commissioner from 1930 to 1933. He had six children, all but one living in Vancouver when he died. 1293 Homer, the older building, was occupied by Crown Cartage. They also operated Crown Messenger Service, and were looking for ‘Messenger Boys and Solo Riders’ in 1930. The same operation was there in 1941, when the classified add specified they were seeking boys with bicycles for delivery and messenger work. In 1943 5,658 gasoline vouchers, representing almost 17,000 gallons of gasoline were stolen from the premises – confirming the existence of a black market in gasoline (if that had ever been in any doubt). In 1944 thieves blew open the safe with explosives in the middle of the night, taking $365, a victory bond, and a $66.70 cheque. A year later there was another break in, but one of the thieves left a fingerprint on a piece of broken glass, that led to him receiving a 2-year prison sentence. In 1946 $1,000 was stolen from the safe, with police having no clue how the safe had been opened. It was reported as the fourth time in a year that the safe had been opened, and several other attempts had been unsuccessful. Extraordinarily, the money was found five days later in a sawdust bin in the lane behind the business. The address disappeared in the early 1950s when the premises were occupied by the company in the next building along. The first mention of 1285 Homer in the press was in 1934, when there was a break in at Electrical Power Equipment Ltd. The same company continues to occupy the premises today. In 1956 thieves chopped through a strongbox and stole $1,000 in paycheques. The thieves also took the corresponding insurance books which might allow them to cash the cheques. In 1967 brothers Alan and Roy Pearson were given suspended sentences when they broke into the premises, stealing a radio, camera and tools. For many years Barvic Engineering also operated here. They specialised in translation sets, that allowed simultaneous French-English translation. They supplied 22 sets to the Canadian Bar Association convention in 1968, but The Sun, under the headline ‘Lost in Translation’ reported that only three of them were returned. Electrical Power Equipment Ltd still manufacture here, as they were in our 1981 image. We think the company probably own the premises these days. They supply one-off switchgear for high voltage applications like power plants and production facilities. The company design, build and install their equipment, which also includes complete fire detection and suppression systems for industrial applications. Image source: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 779-E08.10 1413

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