I’ve been gathering up photos of missing West End buildings in preparation for a talk next Thursday at the Vancouver Public Library. I came across some photos of the Stuart Building that Angus McIntyre sent me some months ago and thought I’d take a closer look.
The Stuart Building sat at the southeast corner of Georgia and Chilco, at the entrance to Stanley Park. It had a turret on top and a bike rental shop in the bottom, and was a Vancouver landmark from 1909 to 1982.
Macau billionaire Stanley Ho, aka “the king of gambling” bought the lot and building in 1974 for $275,000. According to a Vancouver Sun article, Ho offered to upgrade the building and give the city a 30-year lease in exchange for zoning incentives on another property.
But in 1982, Councillors George Puil, Don Bellamy, Harry Rankin, Bruce Eriksen and Bruce Yorke decided to expedite the process and “get rid of it once and for all.”
Angus photographed the building in the 1960s, and he was there two decades later to record its untimely demise.
“The building looks a bit rough [in the 1960s photo], but in the early 1970s it was rehabbed and painted, and looked really good,” says Angus, noting that at the time Chilco was a through street from Beach Avenue.
“The West End had no diverters or barriers or stop signs for that matter,” he says. “You can see a stop sign at Georgia, and it was a legal, but dicey left turn to head to the Lion’s Gate Bridge. Just out of view is a point duty policeman directing the rush hour traffic, and there was another constable at Georgia and Denman. The cars on Chilco would back up all the way to Beach, but were kept moving by the policeman. He also stopped all the traffic to let the trolleybuses turn into and out of Chilco and Georgia.”
Barb Wood painted the Stuart Building on the cover of a Vancouver centennial engagement calendar in 1986, and that appeared in Jason Vanderhill’s Illustrated Vancouver blog. She said: “We were told it was too frail to stand, so it should come down. When they drove the first bulldozer through it, the results were like a Bugs Bunny cartoon—the structure was so sound, that the machine left a bulldozer shaped hole, side to side.”
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