Jonathan Cohen's photos with the keyword: Victory Square

Regal Place is an eight-storey Edwardian commercial building built in 1908 to house the Vancouver Stock Exchange, which had been created the year before "to provide a source of risk capital for the resource companies of Western Canada to help develop the burgeoning mining industry in that area." (The founders felt that the major stock exchanges in eastern Canada would not be willing to finance the somewhat risky resource-based enterprises in the west.) The building also housed financial agents, accountants, real estate agents, and architects. Despite outward appearances of earlier design, it was among the most advanced buildings of their time, using steel girders and concrete in their structural systems. As the business centre shifted to the former Canadian Pacific Railway lands to the west, the financial tenants left this building and it was used for a succession of smaller businesses. In 1917, this became the home of the Province newspaper, which started in Victoria then came to Vancouver (before it moved to its new headquarters at 198 West Hastings Street). In the 1920s the arcade retail store took over the main floor, and the building next door, and the elaborate arched entrance was lost. By the 1930s it was called the Ray Building, the offices were a much broader range of professions with a number of doctors, but almost no financial or real estate companies, and no architects at all. In 1956 "Handsome Harry" Hooper, Vancouver’s first cab driver (owner of a wheezy two-cylinder Ford in 1903) died, aged 81, while living in his "office" in the building. His residential use of the building pre-dated its official conversion to Single Room Occupancy in 1983. Now renamed Regal Place, this building has been renovated by the Metro Vancouver Housing Society by the addition of bathrooms and kitchens to each unit. Since the year 2000, it has been operated by the Portland Hotel Society and provides 39 housing units. The residents are adults attempting to move away from substance misuse. Still in need of some external TLC, (and a its fabulous lost cornice!) the building functions as a significant slender beacon on the street.

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The Flack Block – a heritage treasure fallen into disrepair – was built in 1898 by Thomas Flack, one of the first prospectors to strike it rich in the Klondike Gold Rush – and not to lose his fortune in the saloons and brothels of Dawson City. Located at the commercial centre of the city and across from the first courthouse, the Flack Block was the original home to the Bank of Vancouver. Vancouver subsequently became the main supply center for those headed to the gold fields in the Yukon. Barristers, insurance agents and mining brokers took office in the stone building and it became home to the original Bank of Vancouver. Gold dealers, retailers selling mining supplies, and even jewelers inhabited the building, making use of the 10 or so massive gold vaults dotted throughout the various floors. In later years it hosted men’s clothier E.A. Lee. The Flack Block was constructed in the Romanesque Revival commercial style, with a rough-dressed stone facade, round-arched windows and twinned columns. Its crowning glory was a massive 20-ft. sandstone arch at its entry, emblazoned with the building’s name and number. Based on heavy twin pediments, the arch was further distinguished with a pair of relief-sculpture griffins at its outer corners, gargoyle faces in the pediments and other intricate and detailed carved-stone ornamentation. Hastings Street was prized as Vancouver’s primary commercial and shopping street until the first half of the 20th century, when the entire area began falling on hard times. The 1950s, besides writing finis to the district’s streetcar service, also ushered in the growth of new suburban shopping malls, and by the 1990s, Hastings Street around Victory Square declined, it became home to a series of pawnshops and varied illegal activities. All these unfortunate developments were reflected in the deteriorated face of the Flack Block. Sandstone tends to weather badly, and the building’s once commanding facade was showing its age by the late 20th century; worse, its mighty sculpted archway had been completely removed long before, leaving behind an unimpressive blank. The rest of the ground level had turned into a patchwork of inappropriate windows, doors, stucco cladding and other materials, as it was continually remodeled into the ground-floor storefronts of enterprises that ultimately failed. In the last few years, The entrance was recarved by local artisans using Indiana limestone to replicate the original as preserved in vintage photographs.

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The Dominion Building (originally Dominion Trust Building), is a commercial building in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Located on the edge of Gastown (207 West Hastings Street), it was Vancouver’s first steel-framed high-rise. At 53 m (175 ft), the thirteen-storey, Second Empire style building was the tallest commercial building in the British Empire upon its completion in 1910. Its architect was John S. Helyer, who is said to have died after falling off the staircase in the front of the building, though this is an urban legend. The financiers of the structure were the Counts von Alvensleben from Germany, who were active in Vancouver’s financial scene at the time. It was generally held at the time that they were a front for the Kaiser’s money, which carried the suggestion that the Empire’s tallest building had been built by its greatest rival.

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