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Two decades after  , I've completed a
sequel, Vanishing
Vancouver: The Last 25 Years, an entirely new book, which
will be published in April, 2012, by Whitecap Books:, a book about buildings and
landscapes, complements  , a history book.Here's a preview ... Table of Contents *Preface & Introduction: to put a little historical context into the last 25 years or so of heritage preservation and development *Landmark City: successes and failures on the downtown peninsula *The Working Harbour: a chapter on the evolution of the port *The Vancouver Shop: changes in design of buildings and tenants in the city's retail districts *The Vancouver House: the evolution of house design in the past 125 years; which ones have held up best.... *The Vancouver Apartment: the evolution of apartments over the last century *The Planted City: urban and sustainable agriculture and changing fashions in gardens *Legacies & Memories: examining how places and buildings link to tell stories |
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Me in
1989, expressing my displeasure at the addition of a Monster House to
the vintage streetscape on the 2000-block of West 36th. Photo from
Heritage Canada magazine.
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 Although
there was a hiatus in the 1990s, the builders' and developers'
juggernaut has resumed the pace it had in the post-Expo years of the
late 1980s. Above: by lunchtime, a high-hoe has reduced a small house
on the East Side to rubble; Right: Developers hard at work providing
housing for the expanding city....
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At
the end of the Introduction, I've written chapters on Sustainability
and Affordability – the two issues that challenge the 21st century
city. The illustration is a cartoon I did for the Vancouver Sun in 1980, at the beginning of an earlier spike in prices, when a house in Kerrisdale or Kitsilano cost $150,000 or so. |
Landmark City
| Above:
Downtown Vancouver about 1960, a sea of parking lots, the stage set for
the massive condo redevelopment of the 1990s-2000s (Photographer
unknown). Below: in the middle of this photograph, taken in 1965, is the Hotel Georgia, representing the triumph of residential over commercial in the downtown – it narrowly avoided replacement by an office tower in the '90s. (Photo by George Weinhaupl) Right: The change of scale in the 21st-century city: the enormous W tower on the former Woodward's site, looming above James Garden's little 1888 apartment building on Cambie Street.  |
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I've
written a section of this chapter entitled For Whom The Bridge Tolls,
reviewing the history of the region's bridges, including the Pattullo,
photographed here in the 1940s. Another section describes the challenges of saving the city's historic school buildings. Brief biographies with photos highlight the movers and shakers in the city – architects, engineers and developers – in the Modernist era after the Second World War. |
The Working Harbour
Unloading VWs at the National Harbours Board wharf on Burrard Inlet in the 1960s.
Photo by Clyde Herrington
The Vancouver Shop
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 The
chapter looks at the evolution of shops in Vancouver, noting the
passing of the neighbourhood corner stores that were a big part of the
city in the Vanishing Vancouver of 20 years ago, and the
disappearance of theatres. New designs are critiqued, you
could say.
Left: Scott's Grocery on Victoria Drive, one of a handful of independent corner stores left in the city. Above: a BC Mills, Timber & Trading Company prefab, adapted for BC Tel's use about 1910. Another design, also a prefab, survives as the museum of the Aldergrove Heritage Society. |
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 A number
of illustrations in this chapter record the city's remaining
traditional cafes and buried houses – houses left over from
the days when commercial streets were residential, with shops built in
front of them.
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The Vancouver House
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This
long chapter traces the evolution of the Vancouver house since the
city's early years, using a combination of my watercolours
and other illustrations and analyzing which house styles have been best
able to adapt to the changing nature of the city, for example by easy conversion into apartments. There are a number of house-plan cutaways, such as the one above for the ubiquitous "starter house" mainly found in East Vancouver. And, a final section looks at renovations and how houses have survived the vagaries of fashion. |
The Vancouver Apartment
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I
became interested in apartments again partly because
we rented several
furnished ones, short-term, during the years we were making the
transition from our former existence on a farm to Australia and then back to
Vancouver. The chapter traces the design changes of multi-family buildings, beginning with the rooming houses once so common all over the city, and explains the evolution of apartment ownership, from 'co-op' to strata-title. |
The Planted City
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... a chapter about farms and gardens, the most ephemeral part of the city's history
Legacies & Memories
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The concluding chapter explores the way memories get attached to
particular places in the city, creating the set of historical layers
that are essential for Vancouver's maturity. Every other mature city in
the world is a layered experience of old and new; every time Vancouver
clearcuts a site, losing another piece of its past, an element of its
richness evaporates. The book's coda, a brief few pages, focuses on the city's yin and yang – its highrise glass and steel downtown, its leafy, lowrise neighbourhoods – reflecting on the challenges the city faces as it densifies and attempts to become a green, sustainable modern place. |
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