Tourist in My Own Town

Posted on 27. Jan, 2009 by Kerry Banks in BC

A few days before Christmas I was tromping around downtown Vancouver, searching for some last-minute gifts. It was snowing heavily and the city was ablaze with an assortment of festive lights. I bought some presents and then took out my camera and started snapping. Everything looked new to me, partly because of the crazy weather, but also because I had not been downtown at night in awhile. That snowy evening I became a tourist in my own city, which was an odd but invigorating sensation. The photos I took revealed a different Vancouver than the one I was accustomed to seeing. For example, the image on the left is of the Sheraton Wall Centre, part of a complex of three skyscrapers in the city centre. On its side there is a reflection of One Wall Centre, another tower with black glazing that Vancouver’s City Planning Department initially opposed because of a concern that it would dominate the downtown skyline. After considerable squabbling, the city planners agreed to a compromise, allowing dark glazing to be installed on the lower half of the tower, with a lighter shade used on the upper half. But when I took this photo there was no lightness to the scene at all. It looked menacing and mysterious and very much like it belonged in Gotham City. The only thing missing was Batman.

As you can plainly see, it was 7:55 when I snapped this shot of the art-deco clock that sits atop the Vancouver Block at 736 Granville Street. As I was aiming my camera, a guy walking past said to his friend, “You know more tourists take photos of that clock than anything else in the city.” I don’t know if that’s true, but it prompted me to try to find some information about this neon landmark. Evidently, the clock dates back to 1911 and was designed by J.E. Parr and Thomas Fee, who were the most prolific Vancouver architects of the pre-World War I boom. The duo also built the Manhattan Apartments on Thurlow at Robson (1907), and the first reinforced concrete structure in Vancouver, the Europe Hotel (1908). Their patron was W. Lamont Tait, a lumber wholesaler, for whom Parr & Fee did one of the first mansions in Shaughnessy Heights, “Glen Brae” (1911), which is now the Canuck Place Children’s Hospice.

Another of the CPR’s legendary railway hotels, the present-day Hotel Vancouver, which was built in 1939, is actually the third Hotel Vancouver. The second version, constructed in 1916, was designed in a grand Italianate revival style, and was considered one of the great hotels of the British Empire. It had several ballrooms and lounges, as well as an adjacent opera house and all the bathrooms were fitted with marble sinks and gold-plate faucetry. Until the opening of the CBC Regional Broadcast Centre in the 1970s, the offices and broadcast studios of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Vancouver bureau were on the hotel’s mezzanine floor, overlooking the corner of Hornby and Georgia. A large art-deco sound stage used for radio theatre and musical broadcasts was located on the ground floor. The preposterous 1975 thriller Russian Roulette, starring George Segal, which features a plot to assassinate Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin, staged its climactic gunfight on the hotel’s famous green rooftop, which looked like a castle battlement on the night I took this shot.

There are several huge construction projects taking place in Vancouver right now. One of the more prominent is a $400 million redevelopment of the old Hotel Georgia. The 1927 heritage hotel is being completely renovated and will re-emerge as a Valencia Group property, a U.S. hotelier known for its exclusive boutique properties. The new hotel will actually have fewer rooms than the Georgia, down from 313 to 170. There is also a 48-storey tower being constructed next door that will feature 155 condominiums called “The Private Residences,” which sounds anonymous and pretentious at the same time. An image of the design is draped over the site. I took a shot of it with this futuristic-looking light in the foreground that was shining a beam on the north wall of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Although this is definitely a city shot, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would place it in Vancouver.

The image being projected onto the facade of the Vancouver Art Gallery by the powerful beam of light in the previous picture was part of an installation entitled “The House of the Ghosts” by Kwakwaka’wakw artist Marianne Nicolson. The show has ended now, but while it was still running the projected image of a Big House was continuously shining on the facade, although it was only visible after sunset. That reflected the traditional Kwakwaka’wakw belief that the world of ghosts, although continuously present, is only accessible to humans at night. Though extremely modern in its medium, the techniques and subject matter used in “The House of the Ghosts” are based in the traditions of Pacific Northwest First Nations’ art. Nicolson’s creation includes stylized killer whales, wolves, owls and a ghost puppet, all believed to heal the sick and revive the dead. Also included is the Sisiutl, a double-headed serpent with a human face at its centre, which appears as the crossbeam of the Gallery’s facade, reinforcing a sense of balance.

Plodding south on Burrard Street through driving snow, I came across St. Paul’s Hospital’s “Lights of Hope” display. The goal of the annual show is to raise funds for equipment, research and patient care, and it’s been quite successful. More than nine million dollars have been donated since St. Paul’s started lighting up the sky in 1998. This December, the exuberant display inspired a man who was walking past to start singing Christmas carols. That in turn caused another man, who was clearly overflowing with the holiday spirit, to punch the singer in the head three times. I witnessed no head punching when I was there, but the lights of St. Paul spoke to me as well. In this shot they look more like a painting than a photo and, like most everything else that night, completely surreal.