Harry and Valerie Jerome

Most people have heard of Harry Jerome. His name adorns a volleyball centre in Burnaby and a North Vancouver Rec centre. His statue is in Stanley Park and at one time he was the fastest man alive, setting a total of seven world records.

Fewer people remember Valerie, yet she was also a superb athlete. At the 1959 Canadian Track and Field National Championships Valerie set Canadian records in her running events, tied the record for long jump and her team won the relay. She came third at the Pan American games in Chicago, and went on to represent Canada at the Olympics the following year.

The media of the day called them the “dusky brother and sister athletes.”

Harry died from a brain aneurysm in 1982. He was 42.

Every February, Valerie Jerome visits Ridgeway Elementary to talk about her early years in North Vancouver.

It’s not pleasant.

She starts by pointing to the house on Lyons Place where they lived and telling the kids about her first day at school. It was August 28, 1951 and the family had just moved from Winnipeg.

“We didn’t even get onto the road. Every kid in the school was lined up with rocks,” she says. “I can still remember the feeling of the first rock that hit my back as we ran.”

Valerie was eight, Harry eleven, Caroline, ten and Barton, seven.

416 Lyon Place, North Vancouver

“It was a failure in imagination on the part of the children to understand that we were just like them,” she tells the stunned kids. “My neighbour Annabelle was the only one who had the courage to stand with us.”

Dare to be an Annabelle, she tells them.

In 1953 a fire broke out during the middle of the night when the sawdust burner caught fire.

A neighbour called the fire department and the family were left out on the street while the neighbours watched from behind their curtains.

“Nobody came out to help us. My mother was pregnant with my youngest sister and we finally got a cab to the Salvation Army Hall on Lonsdale,” says Valerie. The family spent the night on chairs on the sidewalk.

In 1954 the Jerome’s bought the small rancher at 704 East 17^th, near their next school, Sutherland Junior Secondary.

704 East 17th Street, North Vancouver

Valerie, now 67, opted to work in the school cafeteria at lunch time, rather than sit alone at the lunch table.

It’s at about this point in her talk, that Valerie writes the words “White Wash” on the school’s black board.

After Harry and Valerie qualified for the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, the City of North Vancouver held a dance in their honour and gave them $500 each to spend.

“All these people who had been spitting on us and calling us niggers every day of our lives were there,” she says. “Then I went to North Vancouver High after I had been to the Olympics and I was invited to eat with everybody. That’s what is called a white wash—you have a little bit of celebrity and somehow our brown skins turned white.”

Things at home weren’t much better. Caroline and Harry had moved out; her father, a railway porter, was away much of the time, and Valerie had a virulent relationship with her mother.

Once when she came home to pick up some clothes she found that her mother had emptied hundreds of family photos and news clippings about her and Harry on top of a refuse heap in the back yard and set them on fire. On the top was a photograph of her grandfather Army Howard who competed in the 1912 Summer Olympics. He was wearing Olympic shorts and T-shirt in the picture.

“When I went to pick it up it just crumbed in my fingers,” she says.

Despite the odds, Valerie went to university, became a teacher and taught in Vancouver for 35 years.

Sport made everything bearable, she says.

“When the stopwatch gave you a great time, it didn’t matter what colour you were.”

For more information on Harry Jerome see Harry Jerome History

I took a walk around Chinatown last week. On the surface, not a lot has changed in the last 20 years or so. There are the dim sum restaurants, herbal shops, tacky ornament shops and the in-your-face production of food—duck and pig carcasses, live bullfrogs in buckets on the sidewalk, tanks full of exotic fish and an array of fruit and vegetables still a long way from mainstream.

The Wing Sang Company Building, 51 East Pender Street

Yet for all the traditional elements, Chinatown is an area in transition. Condos are going up, bars, coffee shops and trendy clothes stores are nudging up against traditional grocery stores, and new business is moving in.

The Wing Sang Building in 2011

Bob Rennie was one of the first to see the potential when he bought the Wing Sang Building for a million bucks in 2004. He spent another $10 million turning the back of the building, where Yip Sang’s three wives once raised their 23 children, into a private art space to house his massive collection. Past exhibits by Mona Hatoum and Richard Jackson are edgy and interesting, but my favourite was Martin Creed’s where you walked through an office filled with pink balloons, dodged runners on the main floor and sipped champagne while looking at broccoli. Creed is also behind the controversial “everything is going to be alright” neon sign on the building’s rooftop garden which is clearly visible from the Sun yat-sen Gardens, and a good chunk of Vancouver. Rennie regularly holds free public tours of the building and art gallery, but next year he turns into a satellite gallery for the Royal BC Museum with an exhibit of the young Emily Carr.

The roof top of the Wing Sang Building

Boutique agencies like St. Bernadine Mission Communications are finding costs are cheaper in Chinatown. David Walker and Andrew Samuel bought a newish space at East Georgia and Main, a block away from the oddly garish Jimi Hendrix shrine. In keeping with the heritage—it was once a Chinese Laundry—the partners installed the Kee’s Laundry Gallery with photography and art displays from other agency creatives in the city.

It’s transforming yes, but there’s a strong sense of community. Residents of Strathcona and Chinatown were asked to vote on the kind of business they wanted to see open at 243 Union Street—what was once Hogan’s Alley—the black part of town before city planners replaced it with the Georgia Viaduct in the 1960s. Locals decided they wanted a local grocery store on Union and named it Harvest. They even got to choose the graphic designer who’d brand it—Naomi Macdougall from a list of six.

The whole project pales in comparison to a 1960s plan for a freeway system that would have wiped out Strathcona, most of Chinatown, much of the West End, plopped an ocean parkway along English Bay, and turned Vancouver into a mini Los Angeles, in what Gordon Price recently called “the most important thing that never happened.”

The plan was to construct a freeway between Union and Prior Streets, while another proposal called for a giant trench that would run through downtown from the Burrard Bridge to a third crossing of Burrard Inlet from Stanley Park.

Fortunately for us, the only part of the plan that eventuated is the contentious Georgia Viaduct that nobody seems to know what to do with.

The 1960's freeway proposal for Vancouver

Some people believe that the freeway proposal died because of lack of federal funding, but I like to think it was because of grassroots opposition.

In 1959, city planners declared Strathcona a slum, and very nearly made it into one. They stopped regular public works maintenance, stopped issuing redevelopment permits, and harassed home owners who tried to make improvements to their property. Called “urban renewal,” the first phase of the $100 million program saw 30 acres and dozens of gorgeous old heritage houses bulldozed to make way for the MacLean Park highrise and the Raymur-Campbell Public Housing Project.

Urban Renewal in Strathcona 1966

Three years later, the second phase went ahead, displacing 2,300 people, mostly Chinese. By 1967, the city had cleared 15 blocks of houses and started to stash the disenfranchised into soulless public housing.

But residents fought back. People like Mary Chan and Harry Con founded the Strathcona Property and Tenants Association (SPOTA) in 1968 and gathered up more than 600 locals in a fight to save their neighbourhood.

Crosscut, a blog out of Seattle, released it’s Heritage Turkeys of the Year list, what it calls “who did most to raze, wreck, uproot, neglect and generally trash our historic treasures in 2011”

Metro Vancouver made the cut twice.

The Pantages for demolition of historic theatre and “Vancouver’s Highway to hell” for “historic cannery demolition, threat to archaeological and burial grounds.’

The South Fraser Perimeter Road

Our “Highway to hell”—Crosscut aptly calls it a “car wreck”—is the $1.2 billion South Fraser Perimeter Road section, a four-lane highway that hugs the Fraser River’s shoreline from Delta to Surrey and cuts through BC’s oldest archeological site, aboriginal burial grounds and has already taken out the 1896 Glenrose fishing cannery, as well as a shitload of trees.

Heritage Vancouver called the destruction of the Pantages Theatre one of “demolition by neglect and by indecision” and a huge needless loss to the heritage of our city. Located at Hastings and Main, the 1908 theatre was left to rot for years, and finally torn down in December, its 750,000 unique orange bricks sold to a developer in Annacis Island and broken bits going to roadfill. Owned by Alexander Pantages, the Vancouver theatre was the second oldest in a chain of about 30 vaudeville theatres across North America. Alexander (actually his name was Pericles, but he called himself after Alexander the Great) settled in Seattle in 1902, but a huge clan of his relatives lived in Vancouver. Alexander’s nephew Peter, made his own stamp in town, founding the Peter Pan Café on Granville Street and the annual Polar Bear Swim. 

Peter Pantage's cafe -- May 1934

If you’d like to see our heritage while it’s still standing, you can sign up for Heritage Vancouver’s annual bus tour of the Top 10 Endangered Sites for 2012 on May 5. Tickets are $30 or $25 for members.

You’ll be mocked and told how interest rates are at historically low levels and you’ll hear all about those swarms of filthy rich Chinese flooding our borders. Then, they’ll tell you that thanks to the feds and the CMHC, pretty much anyone can over-extend themselves with 5% down and 35 years to pay it back.

For sale: $1,788,000 - 4343 West 12th Avenue, Vancouver

I went onto ClickRealty’s website and searched for single family homes in Vancouver between $1.5 and $2 million. Can’t do it—there are too many. So, instead I just clicked on houses at random.

In the example here of the $1.78 million house on West 12th, say you have a 20% down payment of $357,600, an interest rate of 5% and a 25 year amortization and you lock all that in for the next five years; your monthly mortgage payment is $8,319.28. That’s $99,831.36 a year not including taxes, lawyer’s fees, and renovation costs.

Now take another look at the house in this picture.

Interest rates have hovered below 5% for the past seven years, but historical averages are more like 10%. Let’s say when you come to remortgage in 2017, rates have jumped to a modest 7%. Your new monthly payments are $10,018.75 a month—an increase of $20,393.64 a year and your mortgage will now cost $120,225 a year.

I probably don’t need to point out that the median wage in BC is $66,700.

For sale: $1,388,888 - 4591 16th Avenue, Vancouver (1947)

In a report released last June, Sal Guatieri, senior economist, Bank of Montreal, conservatively notes that Vancouver houses cost 11.2 times median family incomes. “Riding a wave of wealthy immigrants, Vancouver’s house prices have nearly tripled in the past decade,” he says. “After running only modestly above Toronto’s prices in the early 2000s, Vancouver is now 71 per cent higher.”

Last November, the audience at a Vancouver Board of Trade discussion on housing were told that high immigration to Metro Vancouver and continued low interest rates will keep the regional housing market strong into 2012. The panel included the president of the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, CEO of Ledingham McAllister Properties and moderator David Podmore, CEO of Concert Properties—not exactly an unbiased lot.

For sale: $1,588,000 - 3470 West 6th Avenue, Vancouver

While things may stay peachy for 2012, Richard Wozny of Site Economics, a research and consulting firm, warned that Asian buyers may not continue as a market force. “China is

seeing a property bubble,” he said. “Sixty million homes remain vacant in China and hundreds of millions of square feet of office and industrial are vacant, all just speculative.”

Still think your house is safe? Let’s go back 100 years.

I took these nuggets of information away from a Vancouver Museum  exhibit a few years back:

Real estate purchases exceed all the heady expectations of eager investors in the boom years between 1908 and 1912. It all collapses in 1913 and the price of land does not recover to its pre-bust levels until the mid 1950s.

That’s over 40 years!

For sale: $1,550.000 - 3018 7th Avenue, Vancouver

January 1, 1939 Polar Bear Swim

Being an Aussie, I really don’t get the appeal of plunging into frigid salty water, but I do love the history behind the Polar Bear Swim.

Today marks the 92^nd anniversary of the New Year’s Day swim, which Peter Pantages kicked off on January 1, 1920, about a year after he’d arrived in Vancouver from Greece.

Peter started work as an usher at his cousin Alexander’s Pantages Theatre on Hastings Street. By 1929 he was running the Peter Pan Café on Granville with his three brothers Lloyd, Angelo and Alphonsos.

Peter Pantages December 15, 1927

Known to swim in English Bay three times a day, every day, Peter wanted everyone to know that it was possible to swim every day of the year in Vancouver. The story goes that he invited a handful of mates over for a New Year’s drink and talked them into taking the plunge into the waters of English Bay. That event kicked off the Polar Bear Club. Under the constitution of the club, anyone who wanted to be president had to go swimming every day—no freezing rain, snow or sickness excused.

The Swim attracted 2,246 participants last year–its biggest yet.

Peter died in Hawaii in 1971; he’d been swimming, of course.

The Pantages lived here from 1925 to the 1970s

The house where he and wife Helen brought up four children is still there at 343 East 13^th Avenue, Vancouver.

Louis the Parrot

I was doing some research on Victoria and came across this story about Louis the celebrity parrot–a blue and yellow macaw who single handedly held up development in the downtown core. Louis, who was profiled in Life Magazine and has a heritage award named after him, lived to the ripe old age of 115 on a diet of hard-boiled eggs, walnuts and brandy fed to him by a Chinese manservant, while he ruled the roost in a white mansion near the Empress Hotel.

As far as I can make out, Louis hatched in the early 1860s in South America. Seems he kicked around there for awhile before ending up in the possession of five-year-old Victoria Jane Wilson.

Jane’s mother Mary, the daughter of Alexander Munro, came from well-heeled fur trading stock, while her father, James Keith Wilson, manager of the Bank of BC, dabbled in real estate. Wilson bought a chunk of prime real estate at 730 Burdett Street, built the three-storey mansion, and because he was over protective of Jane to the point of paranoia, surrounded it with high walls.

The Wilson Mansion, Burdett Avenue, Victoria

As Jane grew older and more eccentric, she added 60-odd exotic birds to her collection, keeping them in an aviary that took up the top floor of the house. In 1911, Jane painfully shy, but pleasantly rich, decided that fresh air would benefit Louis, her favourite. She bought a Hupp Yeats electric car and took driving lessons. Unfortunately Louis disliked the noise of the outdoors and the smelly fumes, so the car stayed in the garage.

Jane’s mother died in 1917, her father in 1934 and Jane lived on in the house until her own death in 1949. When the lawyers read the will they found that she was worth around $500,000, with an estate that included over 100 pairs of white gloves, the aviary and a car that had clocked up less than 50 miles and was found sealed inside the garage. While most of her money went to charity, she left Louie with a $200 a week stipend and appointed Wah Wong the Chinese gardener as trustee and parrot keeper.

According to the terms of the Will, the property could be sold, but not developed while the birds remained alive. In other words, the birds stayed on as tenants.

Chateau Victoria Hotel

Louis and Wah Wong watched while the mansion changed hands several times, was divided up into apartments and left slowly to rot into a downtown eyesore. They managed to stave off its destruction for 17 years, but eventually got the boot when the developers won and bulldozed the mansion to make room for the 19-storey Chateau Victoria Hotel.

Wah Wong refused to give interviews, but according to newspaper reports, Louis lived with him until he died in 1967. Then, like his owner, Louis turned reclusive and lived out the rest of his life in obscurity until his own death in 1985. Presumably, the Wong family continued to earn $200 a week for the parrot’s rent and board.

Is this the house where Louis lived out his last days?

Yes, it’s a strip club with dubious connections, but it’s also one of the longest running family businesses in the city and its history of bootlegging and bad cops is also the history of early Vancouver.

Over the years current owner Danny Filippone has knocked back offers to bulldoze the place for another downtown office building or high-rise, but kept it going because he loves the building’s story. “We can paint it and refurbish it and hold all sorts of special events, but the Penthouse will always have its past and that’s what makes it different,” he told a reporter in 2009.

The story of its connections to the underworld and high class prostitution has been told many times as has the murder of owner and son of the founder, Joe Philliponi.

A few years ago I interviewed Bernie “Whistling” Smith and this is his story.

Bernie was 14 when he went to work for Philliponi in 1937 (his name was actually Filippone, but Canadian customs couldn’t spell it. At that time Philliponi owned and operated Eagle-Time Delivery Systems, a bike courier system. Philliponi called Smith “Speed Ball 21.” When Philliponi asked him what he wanted to do with his life, Smith told him he wanted to be a policeman. Philliponi, he said, actively encouraged him.

Smith joined the Vancouver Police Department in 1947, the same year that Philliponi opened the Penthouse Cabaret. The Penthouse originally opened as a bottle club providing ice and mix to customers at wildly inflated prices and turning a blind eye to their booze, usually hidden under the table in brown paper bags. Soon it attracted headliners such as Sammy Davis Junior, Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte and George Burns. Supposedly Errol Flynn dropped in the day before he died.

Ironically, Smith, who earned his nickname for whistling while he patrolled the streets, became a detective in the liquor squad and spent many nights in and out of clubs. “It was part of a way of life, and as a policeman, I didn’t feel like crawling on my hands and knees under a table looking for a bottle of whisky, so we would try and get them before they went in,” he said. “You must understand bootlegging was a violation of the Provincial Government Liquor Act, it wasn’t a criminal offence. The government could have stopped it by opening a liquor store any time at all. They were making money both ways: the money from the bootleggers when they bought from the government, and the fines that they got when they caught them. They sold them the stuff then fined them for selling it.”

Police, he said, would take the confiscated liquor to the station and return it later for a $15 “service charge.”

In 1983, at 71, Philliponi was shot to death in his office in a failed robbery attempt. Smith, along with a crowd of several hundred, including judges, businessmen and dancers, attended his funeral at Christ Church Cathedral on Burrard Street.

I figure if the Penthouse can survive police raids, its closure in 1975 when the vice squad charged Philliponi with living off the avails of prostitution, and legions of developers, it can withstand some smoke and water damage. Also think it’s about time I checked it out.

3390 The Crescent

Wondering what one gets for $30 odd million in Vancouver? According to the real estate blurb that would be 10,000+ square feet of house nestled on an acre of land with the obligatory grand entry and sweeping staircase, as well as massive living room, five fireplaces, a master bedroom with not one, but three dressing rooms and quarters for the staff, who you’ll need to cook, clean, mow and provide maps to find your way to the games room, gym and cellar.

What it doesn’t say is that the stately mansion has a great story.

It was built in 1922 for Misak Yremavitch Aviazoff, a local money man and arts lover, and his wife Aileen. The Aivazoff’s loved to entertain and counted Grand Duke Alexander, Serge Rachmanioff, Prince Obelinsky among their guests.

Aviazoff, who is listed in the city directories as president of New Method Coal and Supplies, did not do well in the Depression. He and Aileen bumped around to different Shaughnessy addresses, likely short-term rentals, and by 1938 Aileen is a landlady at a West End apartment building.

H.A. Wallace, the ship builder bought the house from the Aivazoffs and lived there until 1946, when it changed hands again and BC Electric became the owner and Albert Edward (Dal) Grauer, head of the company and his family moved in.

The Grauer Children in front of Villa Russe, 1958

Sherry Grauer was eight when she and three siblings moved into the house, which she describes as “Mediterranean”. Sherry, now an artist living on Vancouver Island, says the house only had three bedrooms (it now has six), so her father built an addition on the back and a pool with a cabana designed by family friend Arthur Erickson.

Sherry’s mother painted portraits and flowers and she remembers going upstairs to bed while her father played Chopin or Schubert on the piano.

By 1961, Dal Grauer, dying with leukemia, continued to battle the BC Government over its decision to take over the company (now BC Hydro). The government announced the takeover the day of Grauer’s funeral. Still, he managed to kick back from the grave. Sherry says her father incorporated his $2 million plus estate into a family company in another province and legally stiffed the government for estate taxes. “And that made Wacky Bennett very cross,” she said. Dal also left his stamp on the BC Electric Building (now the Elektra), built in 1957, and the Dal Grauer Substation.

John Mackie’s article: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Vancouver+mansion+sale+million/5735598/story.html

See realtor’s listing at http://www.ecorealtyinc.ca/listing?id=259090654

Her parents bought the “Watt’s Residence” from the original owners in 1965. It was built for $15,000 in 1951.

3635 Sunnycrest Drive, North Vancouver

Lee’s dad died this year, and she and her sister Bev, who both live out of province, put the house on the market – only the third time in the sixty years since it was built.

“It was my Dad’s wish to live in the house until the time he passed at the age of 87—he loved the house so much,” Lee said. “I feel not only was it my parents who influenced our aesthetic tastes and deep connection to the natural world, but also the house itself. The house helped to define who we are today.”

Lee and Bev’s fear was that new owners would want to raze the place and put up something new. So they were immensely relieved when they found buyers who also love the house. Instead of tearing it down, they’ve hired Fred’s son Russell Hollingsworth, to design an addition in keeping with his father’s philosophy.

I’ve written about Hollingsworth before, but Lee’s comments made me want to revisit some of his architecture, because when it comes to post-war architecture, Fred Hollingsworth is a rock star. He invented the Neoteric style where Lee, Bev and their older brother grew up—affordable family housing with a small footprint, open plan and simple post and beam construction. As early as 1946, Hollingsworth was including radiant floor heating, clerestory windows and skylights to let in lots of light and old growth wood paneling.

As Lee will tell you, a Hollingsworth house is part design, part art and part architecture.

2576 Edgemont Boulevard, North Vancouver

The Moon Residence was built for $11,000 in 1950. It came onto the market for $1.38 million this summer. Like Lee’s house, it is set in a private park-like setting and looks like part of nature rather than something imposed upon it. It’s the type of house that the environmentally friendly should aspire to, and fortunately there are still many Hollingsworth houses in existence–I counted 22 in the District of North Vancouver’s inventory of modern architecture.

“I’ve always said a home is an escape from the world; a place to which you escape to reconnect with nature,” Hollingsworth told writer and urban designer Bob Ransford. 

“My clients were all individuals. Many people had different interests. I tried to get into their lives. I tried to find out how they used their space.”

In fact, Hollingsworth, who will turn 95 in January, still lives in the house he designed for his family in 1946 at 1205 Ridgewood Drive in Edgemont Village.

While his name stands for West Coast Modernism and small residential homes, Hollingsworth’s architectural range is astounding. He designed the building that houses UBC’s Faculty of Law in 1971, and in 1993, he designed Nat Bosa’s West Vancouver waterfront mansion at 130 South Oxley Street. In 2005, Vancouver Magazine ranked it as the second most expensive property in BC; accessed at $24 million, with a market value of more than $30 million.

I will run a list of Hollingsworth houses from the District’s modern inventory next week, but I’d love to hear from anyone who currently owns or grew up in one of these houses.