To Have and Have Nothing
Non-Fiction by Aaron Chapman
Seven years ago, in the morning hours of an otherwise unremarkable day in March 2011, two men pushed through a fence at 152 East Hastings, and performed perhaps one of the greatest heists in the history of Vancouver.
It was perhaps so much of a perfect crime, that as of this writing, there is not even a record of the robbery itself — there was never even a police investigation. police, in fact the city of Vancouver at large, may only know of the incident with the publication of this story.
Working in tandem after pushing through the fence, the two men entered further into the building via a hole in its wall. Brazenly, they made no efforts to hide their faces to possible witnesses or passersby. During the incident, instead of inconspicuously costuming themselves as maintenance men with perhaps a cover story involving the repair of the building — they were dressed in the simple attire of regular, everyday street clothes. They entered unarmed; carrying only flashlights, chisels, hammers, bags, and — quite shamelessly — boxes to take away their loot. For a couple of hours, they went about their business cautiously, but quickly.
But these men were not tomb robbers or looters. unlike most professional thieves, the items they took were not fenced to a buyer within days of the operation, but instead stored at a secret location where they have remained, with the hope that being preserved they might find a new home and be seen and enjoyed by the public again.
Photo: Pantages Theatre Interior, 1922, 1922 (Accession Number: 21362, Vancouver Public Library Archives); Photographer:Dominion Photo Co
The building in question was the Pantages Theatre. In truth, these men were not contractors working on behalf of organized crime, and the operation was a rescue more than a robbery — but it just might as well have been. on the eve of the demolition, the men took from the theatre signature, ornate plaster cornices, over a hundred years old, that once hung as decorative emblems on the opera boxes of the theatre. In addition, stacks of fascinating, culturally valuable documents that had remained in the opened safe of the Pantages that contained the entertainment history of the theatre and Vancouver itself, as well as information noting which of Vancouver’s citizens had for years worked or performed in its productions — all taken away before the entire theatre was destroyed forever just hours later by the wrecking ball.
The fall of the Pantages Theatre — built in 1907, it was the oldest theatre in Vancouver, and perhaps the oldest purpose-built vaudeville theatre in Canada — was a significant loss. While the theatre had been closed and vacant so long that most Vancouverites had forgotten what was behind its doors, in Ottawa, Heritage Canada named its demolition as one of its worst losses. Like the demolition of the stunning second Hotel Vancouver in 1949, despite the Pantages not being as familiar or easily appreciated from the outside, history will remember the beautiful Pantages along with it as one of the great “What were we thinking?” failures in the protections of civic landmarks in this city.
That in a city of Vancouver’s wealth no answer could be found to help protect the historic Pantages may seem surprising. There is obviously a long list of priorities, including women’s shelters, affordable housing, First Nations community, cultural and employment centres, and even seniors centres that are in short supply in Vancouver, and weeping over the loss of a playhouse may seem frivolous. yet it’s Vancouver’s entertainment venues that might have been the easiest to preserve, which have also been the easiest targets for developers, and perhaps the canary in the coal mine in many areas of Vancouver for what was the redevelopment to come.
The cumulative effect over the last two decades has left many Vancouverites thinking — cynically or not — that the hungry desire of developers has been running Vancouver for years, that those who sit on city council have been bought and paid for by it’s Condo-Kings. Whole blocks are bulldozed, and real estate agents are given a “rock star” media profile, fuelled by a pursuit of offshore money and home sales that can only make one think the city simply must not care about it’s history, or it is pejoratively stating that it had no history to begin with.
But how much of this is really just cynicism? How much reasonable growth can, and should, a modern North American city like Vancouver be granted or expected to reasonably develop and change? How have we gone about choosing some historical sites to save over others? Is anything left of Vancouver to save, or worth saving in the first place? or is all of this just cranky old-neighbourhood nostalgists wishing Vancouver could go back to 1974?
It’s been very much in vogue in Vancouver in the last fifteen years or so, in books, and especially online in social media forums, to compare two images of Vancouver: a particular street or building and the surrounding area from forty or fifty years ago, against a photo taken in the same spot in the present day. The contrast inevitably provokes reactions about how much the city has changed. but these discussions or comparisons don’t happen in Edmonton, Winnipeg, or Ottawa with the frequency they do in Vancouver. In fact, it’s typically only places like Berlin or London, or a city that might have survived a war that are framed this way in popular culture. Vancouver fortunately has never experienced the shock of rebellion nor the scars of war, and there are no battlefield memorials here. Instead, the bomb that hit Vancouver was a rapid period of development that, where in another city might have normally taken seventy or eighty years to experience such change, happened to Vancouver in perhaps less than half that time.
To a certain degree, Vancouver was punching above its weight and begging for the change it got. In 1979, when the Vancouver Whitecaps went to the North American Soccer League final against the New York Cosmos, ABC Wide World of Sports commentator Jim MacKay referred to the “village” of Vancouver during the televised game. While the White- caps win electrified the city as champions, the next morning the media reported plenty of bruised egos over the term, and calls for an apology from MacKay in defining Vancouver with such insignificance.
At the edge of western Canada, away from the corporate and cultural media powerhouses in central Canada and Quebec, while many felt that our quaint maritime town had been able to slowly develop on its own, it was a metropolis in our minds. In truth, by comparison to today, a village was exactly what Vancouver then actually was. If one looks at archival film of Vancouver in the late ’70s, or to its newspaper headlines that offer a daily barometer of what the pace of life was like, the amount of traffic, the population difference, it’s downtown skyline — it indeed might as well have been a village. perhaps today MacKay is owed an apology for telling us, what was then, really the truth.
Even though most consider significant changes in Vancouver only began to happen in the 1980s, the 1960s and ’70s were rife with change in the city if we stopped to notice it. A phase of modernism in Vancouver seemed to catch a flame in popularity in those years after the moon landing, when thoughts of tomorrow were given more than considerations of yesterday. Then, a wholly different attitude reigned about even the point of heritage conservation. Who wanted old, dusty buildings that had been built before the first World War? We would soon all live in a fantastic Jetsons-esque world previously only imaginable in sci-fi fiction novels! Who wanted antiquated, tacky (and increasingly considered seamy) neon lighting that once was ubiquitous on Granville and Hastings Street when soon new, very modern, contemporary lighting could illuminate Vancouver after-dark?
The 1970s saw the demolition of the stunning Birk’s building in favour of the modernist Scotiabank Tower. Even the Orpheum Theatre was eyeballed for the wrecking ball. built only fifty years earlier, even that was too much for some Vancouverites who fought a successful public campaign to save it — not unlike how the present day Rio Theatre has been involved in fundraising for its very future and viability. In 1979, just five years after the Orpheum looked doomed, the theatre was recognized as a National Historic site of Canada. Did those five years allow us to reappraise the Orpheum? or was that recognition merited all along but we couldn’t see it in Vancouver. Either way, many other down- town buildings, like The Cave or the Orillia Rooms apartments, weren’t as lucky. perhaps they were never intended to have such a life span but were, at the same time, considered meritable in their own right,
While the event of the Expo 86 world’s fair is always cited as a turning point for Vancouver, that in its aftermath the city suddenly changed because of it, and that in our invitation to “invite the world,” the world came and stayed. In truth, Vancouver was changing much earlier.
More than fifty years ago, the city started to undergo changes resulting from construction, immigration, and industry that would begin to reshape itself. While the rise of Yaletown today is blamed for the inception of the rise of new downtown condos, this trend really began in the 1960s in the West End. This was thanks to zoning changes that encouraged the demolition of blocks of single-family homes that had once existed abundantly there, and created a new sky- line with the development of 220 high-rises and apartment buildings. And much as people bemoan that Vancouver has changed so much, so fast, there are some places in Vancouver we should perhaps in fact be happy have changed — and even applaud that they have drastically changed so quickly. It’s too easily said by many long-time Vancouverites who constantly parrot that “Vancouver was better back in the day” — in many cases, they worship a false nostalgia. While many will point to the old industrial lands of False Creek and say that they preferred it then as an industrial zone that provided jobs, from today with its populated residential towers—but its purpose had outgrown its use many years earlier.
Anyone under thirty-five today cannot imagine the log booms, factories, and smokestacks that once surrounded False Creek. From the 1920s to the 1960s False Creek rivalled Pittsburgh for smoke output. but the change did not come with Expo 86. In 1963 there were just three sawmills left in False Creek. The subsequent disappearance of the smoking beehive burners greatly reduced the amount of smoke in the city’s air and halted the foggy days of the 1940s and ’50s, also a time when it was suggested by some that False Creek should be land-filled right out to the Burrard bridge.
Photo: Pantages Theatre Interior, 1922
(Accession Number: 21363, Vancouver Public Library Archives);
Photographer: Dominion Photo Co.
Some said it was a dirty trench and the only reason local government did not fill it in was the hundreds of millions that it would have cost. It had of course been already partly filled in — from 1905 to 1915 when the Creek’s shore, which once extended past Main Street to Clark Drive and had been a marsh at low tide, was infilled with soil bulldozed from the Grandview Cut.
On July 3rd, 1960, the city had one of its worst fires, when a blaze broke out at the BC Forest products plant and lumber storage on the south side of False Creek, which left many questioning what the continued purpose of a large industrial centre at the heart of the city meant long term for the area’s future. We should hardly look back on the industrial years of False Creek that romantically. We know today that much of the soil around the northeast corner of False Creek is toxic and requires costly remediation thanks to the industries that simply dumped and dropped their by-products into it for decades.
The change of zoning from industrial to residential began in the early 1970s. Many in Vancouver said that it wouldn’t be successful, and that change did not happen overnight. In a way, Expo 86 aided that change. The change from industrial to residential in False Creek might be one of the few things we should agree indeed was a change for the better. The area may be, like Vancouver, a victim of its own success. Most of the residences today are modern condo buildings on waterfront properly that many criticize as not affordable. Now one can imagine if most real estate developers could have their way they would build a time machine and return to Vancouver over 100 years ago with briefcases full of cash, and pay to make sure none of the land was infilled, and instead dug out as it would have been and construct sales centres for Waterfront property that would be available 100 years later.
The blame for the fall of the Pantages — as with many other buildings from theatres and hotels, to whole neighbourhoods of single-family homes — can be apportioned over successive city council administrations. None of whom even dared to suggest stopping the music at the party that developers were having tearing down many older Vancouver buildings under the banner of “renewal.” And while some neighbourhoods and districts can be expected to change, what Vancouver lacked throughout the decades was suitable and, frankly, aggressive enough bylaws to protect some of the valued buildings and places that exist in those neighbourhoods where heritage designation has not always meant heritage protection.
Instead, the party kept going. None even mildly suggested a comprehensive plan to cooperatively bring together some of the willing partners to draft a proper heritage plan. After Expo 86, the Vancouver Heritage Registry went twenty-five years without an update or change. And civic authorities mostly stood idly by, failing to update toothless bylaws, or even force new bylaws that might have offered aggressive heritage protection.
In the case of the Pantages, despite a grassroots movement, and even the building’s owner seeking to raise funds and acquire needed concessions from the city to aid renovation and refurbishing, it never gained enough momentum. Thanks to neglect, and vandalism by scrap metal thieves who had raided it, portions of the roof had caved in letting in rain-water that further destroyed its interiors — finally resulting in the city deeming the building a safety hazard. There would be no wake or funeral — instead, only a celebration. The city simply decided that one landmark was better than another, and both couldn’t be kept. The city celebrated the return of the York Theatre (formerly the New York Theatre) on Commercial Drive, which was saved thanks to concessions made to another developer, who gained a couple of valuable floors over a height restriction at a planned condo property elsewhere, and in the bargain the developer had to renovate the York.
While the two men who broke into the pantages Theatre that night seven years ago and spirited away its treasures prefer to remain anonymous, they are known within the world of heritage advocates and local history buffs. And their task has been just one of the almost underground operations that some involved in preserving Vancouver history have undertaken on their own or in groups to retrieve and save pieces of city landmarks that fall through the cracks of the heritage registry. These buildings aren’t protected enough, or even considered salvageable by the city’s long inadequate bylaws.
On the other side, the robberies of our city’s heritage will continue with the demolitions, but there will be those who will try to save, barter, write, and steal back as much as they can before there really is nothing left of — or any hint of — what Vancouver used to be. It remains to be seen if their efforts will be of merit, and while they may succeed in taking some elements of a building, many of the buildings, as a whole, continue to be targets as the city cannibalizes it- self. With 2018 being a civic election year, perhaps there’s still time for the public at large to demand more and better work be done?
It only took five years after the Orpheum Theatre was saved for it to be awarded nationally, and therefore protected locally as a national historic site. It’s been seven years since those men grabbed what they could from the Pantages, and we still haven’t figured out what we had before it was gone. »