We have a lot of material to discuss (and show) this month.

• Michael Klucker will be giving a short presentation on the history of William Shelly, the man behind the glorious sign he and other volunteers have just restored at Victoria & William.  We will also be presenting more details of the street party we are organizing there for June 23rd;
• We will be finalizing details for our involvement in the Heritage Vancouver Heritage House Tour of June 2nd, and of CarFree Day on the Drive on June 16th.
• We will have more news of our 2013 Centenary House Signs campaign, including a suggestion for permanent ceramic plaques for the houses;
• The highlight of the evening may well be another presentation by Michael Klucker, this one about the various types of House Styles found in Grandview heritage houses;
• Several of us will talk about our experiences talking to 5-year olds about heritage at Britannia Pre-School later this week;
• We will also discuss future walks and talks.

As usual, there will be interesting items not even on the list above.  Do come and join the conversation that helps us identify, protect and enhance the heritage of Grandview!

This image is constructed from two maps (343.10 and 343.11) in the City of Vancouver Archives collection.  The series of maps is captioned as being “hand coloured to show tax sale property for sale, property with no water, street widening and drainage, replotting, reserved land for schools, reserved land for parks, sundry land, capital assets not including schools and parks, schools, and parks, as applicable.”  It is not clear what colours are meant to represent what item but, from other data I have collected, I would suggest that the houses marked in red were those in tax trouble.

If you zoom in on your screen you can see a great deal of detail.

We had a great turnout, a fabulous cake, and a good tme was had by all!

Artist Victoria Oginski led the team of 3 in the restoration, lending her technical skills to the stabilization of the painted surface, which was falling to bits two years after it was exposed to the weather during the removal of the 60-year-old stucco on the side of the old Victoria Drive Grocery …

She is also the best, fastest colour-matcher I’ve ever seen. I, Michael Kluckner, worked with Penny Street on the preparation and the painting. We finished up today by applying a coat of high-tech acrylic/epoxy sealer that will protect the surface from UV and any sort of graffiti that might happen along.

William Curtis Shelly had a very significant career, including the founding (with his brother) of the namesake bakery, a huge operation for its day, with hundreds of employees and branches in New Westminster and North Vancouver as well as the head office at the northwest corner of 10th and Ash. He also built the first highway and ski chalet on Grouse Mountain in the 1920s, served terms on the Park Board and was provincial minister of finance from 1928-32. Ironically, he is commemorated in Grandview at the misspelled S-H-E-L-L-E-Y Park at 8th and Woodland! The house in Shaughnessy, 1563 Matthews, where he lived for the final two decades of his life, before dying in 1951, is now the American consulate. I will be giving a brief Powerpoint show on him at the next GHG meeting on May 16th, and we have contacted the Park Board to let them know about the spelling mistake.

How old is the sign? Based on surviving examples of 4X advertisements that date from 1939 and the 1940s, we figure the sign’s design is at least as old as 1935. Whether it was touched up later seems unlikely given the systematic way that the company (by then owned by Canadian Bakeries Ltd., founded by Shelly himself) engaged the Stewart-McIntosh advertising agency in 1939 to update its typography and the “happy baker” image. The sign was probably more or less forgotten during the Second World War years and then covered with stucco when the store was modernized, perhaps about 1950. Doubtful we’ll ever know for sure unless some dated photographs of the store have survived somewhere. The Shelly’s 4X brand disappeared in the 1950s.

There’s another interesting piece to the story of the Victoria Drive Confectionery. It was built in 1922, two years after Scott’s Grocery at Victoria and Georgia (the only surviving operating store in the neighbourhood today). There were a myriad of small groceries in Grandview and elsewhere, affiliated with the big wholesalers – Kelly Douglas, Malkin, H.Y. Louie – the little storefronts dotting Victoria Drive and scattered on side streets like Semlin, Venables and McLean. When Victoria Drive Grocery closed it became an art gallery owned by Bill Gotts that looked like this…

Simon Kendall, the keyboard player for Doug and the Slugs and a neighbour and friend of Gotts, went up on a ladder one day and started making anagrams with the surviving letters from the store’s sign. The upshot was Doctor Vigari, the name that stayed with the gallery when it migrated to The Drive at 2nd and the former grocery building was sold to its new Via Tevere owners. Patrons of the restaurant will see the old sign mounted on a wall inside.

Until now, digital objects that were under the copyright of a 3rd party (other than City of Vancouver’s copyright) could only be viewed online as a tiny thumbnail. Now they can be viewed in full resolution in our Reading Room through our online search. This works on your laptop in the Reading Room (using our wifi) as well as at our public computers.

Also:

We received feedback that it was frustrating to be tempted by an interesting thumbnail on a list of results only to click through to find that the digital object was not viewable online. We’ve added some language to fix this.  If it says “Digital copy not on web”, then you won’t be able to view the digital object at home. You will still be able to see a more detailed description of the object if you click through to the single description.

Good stuff!

We have received confirmation that the Group has been selected for an Award of Merit for Heritage Advocacy in the 2013 City of Vancouver Heritage Awards. The award ceremony is at the Georgia Hotel on May 27.  We are very proud recipients.

That was good news, followed by the great news that we now have the funds to complete the revitalization of the Shelly’s 4X Sign at Victoria and William.  The sign has suffered badly in the elements since it was revealed last year when the stucco covering was removed during renovations prior to the opening of the Via Tevere Restaurant.

We have received a substantial contribution of $2,000 from the Via Tevere Restaurant, for which we are very grateful.  In addition we have received $1,500 from a North Hastings Community Grant which allows us to celebrate the sign and its neighbouring area in a proper way.  Once again we are extraordinarily grateful for their assistance.  We have also applied for additional grants to complete the work but, in the meanwhile, we will top up the budget from our own funds.

Michael Kluckner has already put up temporary protection on the sign and now we just need a stretch of five or six days good weather to dry out the wood and for artist Victoria Oginski to work her magic.  We are hoping to get this completed within a month or so.

Later, early in the summer, we will be having a big celebratory party for the sign and its position within the neighbourhood.  You can expect food and music, a scavenger hunt, history tours and a lot of fun!  As we firm up dates and details, we will post them here.

And the good news just rolled on.  We have now put up all 25 of this year’s Centenary Birthday Signs on a wide range of wonderful houses in Grandview that are at least one hundred years old.  We have established a page on this site where you can find a map of all the houses along with architectural and historical details.  If you happen to have more information about any of these houses, please send it in and we’ll update the map.

For the 2012 Signs campaign, we had a lovely birthday party, and we decided to do another one for the 2013 campaign.  This year’s party will be at 1:30pm on Saturday 4th May on Grandview Park opposite 1636 Charles Street.  More details to follow, but everyone is welcome to join us in this celebration of Grandview’s glorious heritage houses.

Michael Kluckner gave a presentation on some lessons we have learned from this year’s campaign.  As we were preparing the final list of 2013 houses, we were approached by the owner of a house on Woodland and we were delighted to give a sign as we had documentation that the original house had been built in 1907.  However, on viewing the property, Michael and others became suspicious about its actual date.

The 1907 building permit said it was a $750 cottage, in the middle of three other $750 cottages; but, this house was clearly bigger than its neighbour, and far too big for a $750 cottage of that age.  The 1910 and 1912 maps we looked at showed four square little cottages equidistant apart.  However, by the 1927 Fire Insurance map, this house was shown to have grown and moved a lot closer to its southern neighbour.  And aerial photos revealed that the roof had been significantly altered.

So, although there is a 1907 buildng permit, and even though the same owners had the property from 1908 to 1952, it seems certain that between 1912 and 1927 they demolished the original cottage and replaced it with a much larger house.  This goes to show that documentation isn’t everything!

The meeting continued in great style with the third in Eric Phillip’s marvelous Heritage House Mechanics and Materials series. This presentation — with excellent visuals and a lot of hard-won personal knowledge — was about the difference between traditional timber framing, balloon framing, and Western Platform framing. It was fascinating.  We will work on Eric to prepare this series for web access as soon as possible because it deserves a wider audience.

It was agreed that next month our presentation will be Michael Kluckner on house types/styles in Grandview.  That promises to be another fascinating lesson.

I am sure the highlight of the evening will be the third in Eric Phillip’s excellent series on Historic House Mechanicals and Materials.  This one will be about balloon construction and why it was different from both platform and timber frame construction.

There are a number of events coming up that we need to discuss:  2013 Heritage Awards (end of May); Heritage Vancouver House Tour (2nd June), which we might have some part of; and CarFree Day on the Drive (16 June), in which we have participated before.

We also have a couple of projects that are ongoing:  the launch of the 2013 Centenary House Signs campaign needs to be arranged; and we have news to share on the Shelly’s 4X Sign renewal project.

Hopefully we will also have time to discuss a summer program of walks and talks, and to discuss the upcoming 75th anniversary (July 1st) of the First Avenue Viaduct.  And, of course, anything else that folks want to raise

It should be a fun and interesting evening, so do please join us in this continuing conversation designed to enhance and protect the heritage of Grandview.

As local historian Bruce Macdonald has noted, the City has never produced a real map of Vancouver’s neighbourhoods.  The various “neighbourhoods” — including Grandview Woodland — that are used by administrative agencies today were agreed to by the City in 1969 after a great deal of analysis on social service, health and education delivery by United Community Services (UCS, now known as United Way) in a period when Local Area control was all the rage (quite unlike today).

However, it took the UCS a while to get agreement from the local areas themselves.  That’s because the map they produced was based entirely on theoretical calculations, breaking the city down into almost-equal population packages, with virtually no concern for social and historic considerations. For example, the following is the first map they proposed, in December 1966.

Quite a number of areas were eventually changed, but the proposal for Grandview seems the worst of all.  Virtually none of the “Grandview” in this map is in the Grandview of today, taking over as it does what we know as Mount Pleasant.

The plan to link Strathcona and Grandview had been discussed throughout the 1960s but, luckily, the folks in the Woodland Park Area Resources Council — soon to be renamed the Grandview Woodland Area Council — wouldn’t have it and Grandview was quickly reestablished in its proper position.

Source of the 1966 map is B.W.Mayhew to UCS Local Area Councils, 8 Dec 1966, in CVA, Add Ms 981, 599-A-6, File 1

Obviously I cannot verify the accuracy of this map.  However, it was prepared by Roy Blunden of the Dept of Geological Sciences at UBC in preparation for a geological map of BC.  It was published in the “Highland Echo” of 9th March, 1978.