Vancouver’s Threatened Legacy
Globe and Mail
Trevor Boddy
tboddy@globeandmail.com
December 29, 2007
Recently, some of the region’s most historic buildings have fallen victim to the wrecker, smashing to dust an irreplaceable part of a city’s soul. Is there any way to save the remaining architectural masterpieces?
It was downtown Vancouver’s last building that could remind us of the 1930s – a whirling wedding cake of streamline stucco that most of us knew as the Fido outlet at Georgia and Richards, first built as the Collier Auto Showroom. It got knocked down early one morning during the civic strike, leaving one more empty-tooth slot in the mug’s face of downtown.
Then, on Dec. 6, the wrecking crews went to work on one of Arthur Erickson’s most world-renowned and influential houses, a grand sequence of portals and frames elegantly descending down a Horseshoe Bay cliffside. This 1963 house for David Graham was featured on the pages of Life magazine and leased as a love nest to Warren Beatty and Julie Christie when in town to shoot Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller.