Unknown Victoria

Commuter Rail Revival

2012-01-08T16:05:00.000-08:00

For a few hours in 2008 and 2009, residents got an idea of what it would be like to take a commuter train between Langford and Victoria.

One Saturday in August, in both those years, Jim Sturgill ran a 70-passenger VIA Rail “Budd” car back and forth between Goldstream Avenue and the old CPR roundhouse in Vic West, as part of E&N Days, a summer celebration of the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway. “It worked very well,” says Sturgill, a veteran engineer who operated locomotives on the E&N for three decades. During 2008’s one-day test, he made six round trips, taking about 25 minutes each way — a challenge for any car driver trying to reach the same destination by navigating the stop-and-go traffic on Douglas Street or Craigflower Road.

In 2009, Sturgill made seven round trips, carrying 680 people. “There were so many people wanting to take the ride,” he recalls. “Four teenagers got on the train at Langford, and I asked them if they were going to E&N Days. ‘Oh no,’ they said, ‘we’re just doing this so we can catch a bus to the Mayfair shopping centre. We wish a train like this was running all the time.’”

Back then, that wish looked certain to become a reality. In 2006, Canadian Pacific donated the E&N to the brand-new Island Corridor Foundation, and ideas flourished along the tracks. In January 2008, a group of officials from Victoria, Esquimalt, View Royal and Langford called Communities For Commuter Rail (C4CR) released a study showing that an hourly train service would cost $16 million to build, and with a one-way ticket price of $5, would only cost taxpayers $2 million a year to operate — a sum requiring lower per-rider subsidies than BC Transit’s buses. In the November 2008 municipal election, Langford and Colwood asked voters if they wanted the B.C. and federal governments to fund the E&N, and BC Transit to provide commuter rail; 93 percent said Yes. Two days later, an all-party finance committee of the provincial government said the E&N and commuter rail should be a capital spending priority. Victoria mayor-elect Dean Fortin announced: “Commuter rail from Langford to downtown Victoria is an idea whose time has come.”

[Download C4CR’s 2008 Westshore Tram Line Assessment here.]

Then it fizzled. In June 2010, consultants hired by the province to study the E&N’s viability issued reports stating it would cost $123 million to rehabilitate the entire line to Courtenay, and at least $69.5 million for Victoria-Langford commuter rail, with new stations and trains — slamming the brakes on any immediate prospect of provincial investment. The ICF tried to get a pilot commuter service running that autumn, but the B.C. Safety Authority demanded new assessments of all 24 crossings between Langford and Victoria, even though VIA had used the same route for decades. The following spring, Victoria councillors voted rail off the new Johnson Street Bridge. And all the while, BC Transit poured time and money into its $950-million plan to electrify the region with Uptown-centered Light Rail Transit.

[Download the provincial consultants’ 2010 commuter-rail analysis here.]

Now the E&N is in a perilous state. Last March, VIA’s Budd cars stopped running because of poor track conditions, and in November, VIA shipped the cars off the island. The province has said it will give the ICF $7.5 million for track improvements, but only if the federal government does too — and the feds’ decision may hinge on a just-completed assessment of the E&N’s bridges, including a century-old wrought-iron span over the Cowichan River, and the huge bridge across Goldstream’s Niagara Canyon that was built in England in 1883, erected on the Fraser River (1890s photo above left), and relocated here in 1910. Many observers quietly fear that if the bridges don’t pass, the E&N is doomed.

But would that automatically kill commuter rail? Maybe not.

The fact is, we’ve invested considerable sums in the tracks already. CRD Parks says 30 percent of the $14 million it’s put into the E&N Rail Trail has gone to rail infrastructure, such as its new Four-Mile Bridge over the Island Highway. Langford has concentrated developments around the tracks, including its new Eagle Ridge recreation centre. And Esquimalt and the province have spent $5 million on the rail crossing at Admirals Road — the potential site of a station for hundreds of people working across the street at CFB Esquimalt and Victoria Shipyards.

The key, rail advocates say, is to build up a commuter service incrementally, which would be far less expensive than the all-at-once, “platinum or nothing” mentality of the LRT plan. “Municipal operations is quite different from a provincial-scale, BC Transit way of doing things,” says Geoff Pearce, the chair of C4CR, and Langford’s former clerk-administrator. “We do what’s necessary, and if something doesn’t work, we fix it and then we go on. What we envisaged with commuter rail, starting small and growing, was totally different from what the Ministry of Transportation or BC Transit says, which is, ‘You’ve got to put in $60 million up front.’”

That incremental approach has worked elsewhere. Cash-strapped and desperate for transit, several American cities have converted old freight railways over to commuter service: one example is New Jersey’s River Line, which uses Stadler GTWs, lightweight “diesel multiple units” that roll into downtown Camden like streetcars (photo above right). Another example, even closer to our circumstances, comes from Texas: in 1994, Dallas’s transit authority bought 13 Budd cars from VIA (used ones cost as little as $100,000) and started running them on a bankrupt freight line for a commuter service called the Trinity Railway Express. Today, TRE carries 9,800 daily passengers on new trains, and has loaned out its Budd cars to build up a new commuter line in nearby Denton County:

Local commuter rail does face challenges beyond finding vehicles and money. C4CR’s $16-million scheme depended on rail coming across the Johnson Street Bridge, and so far, the City of Victoria has refused to investigate whether the new bridge could have rails embedded in its roadway, fearing increased costs and construction delays.

“It’s going to take somebody to say, ‘Hey, this is important enough, we’ll put in $30,000 to help Victoria look at that alternative. And let’s do it now rather than later’,” says Pearce, who wants to see the CRD create a regional funding formula for rail on the bridge.

There’s also the question of which entity would run the commuter service. Southern Rail, which is currently contracted by the ICF to operate the E&N, doesn’t have passenger insurance. Pearce says VIA would be the logical choice, if it brings back its Budd cars, and can be persuaded that connecting Langford and Victoria meets its intercity mandate. Alternatively, a whole new intermunicipal service could be created, or the rail system could be operated by the CRD or BC Transit.

[Download C4CR’s governance analysis here.]

Unfortunately, the last two bodies currently seem entranced by LRT. The CRD board, the regional transit commission, and local politicians have already endorsed BC Transit’s shiny plan — without much worrying about whether austerity-preaching federal and provincial governments will actually pay for it, or public opposition from The CRD Taxpayers’ Association and businesses afraid of losing two car lanes along Douglas Street.

The LRT fantasy may also cost us opportunities that are staring us right in the face. Langford’s 6,000-home Westhills development has set aside $1 million for a commuter-rail station, and a park-and-ride system connecting it to buses. But there’s a time limit, and if rail doesn’t materialize by the end of 2013, Westhills will spend that money on other infrastructure.

Jim Hartshorne, the prime project consultant for Westhills and president of the Westshore Developers’ Association, sat on BC Transit’s community-liasion panel for LRT. “And I can tell you: I don’t understand the LRT proposal. It doesn’t make sense to me. It is, in my opinion, doomed for failure,” Hartshorne says, even though BC Transit’s LRT plans include Westhills. “We will have to spend millions just to acquire rights-of-way, and design a system for a billion dollars that doesn’t appear to have a population that could support it. With the E&N, we could use the track that’s existing, and spend a few dollars to upgrade it. It’s mindboggling to me that that wouldn’t be the first thing we would do.”

A Tribute to Al Howie

2011-09-06T12:35:00.000-07:00

This September 1 marked the 20th anniversary of one of the most incredible feats ever accomplished by a Victoria resident: Al Howie’s “Tomorrow Run '91”, the fastest-ever run across Canada, which he completed in 72 days – at a pace of 103 kilometres, or two-and-a-half marathons, every day.

As I wrote in 2007 (previous post here), Al has been living bravely with the effects of Type 1 diabetes. So to cheer him up, friends and family presented Al with a plaque commemorating the anniversary, and a framed proclamation by the City of Victoria, making September 1 “Tomorrow Run '91 Day”. Here’s a photo of Al (at right) with Victoria Elks exalted ruler Bill Thompson, and Jeff Abbott, who first proposed the Tomorrow Run, which raised $527,400 for the Elks and Royal Purple Fund for children with special needs.

The Globe and Mail’s Tom Hawthorn wrote a great profile of Al, which you can read here. And below is a CHEK News item about the anniversary, with lots of footage of Al running in the 1990s. Congratulations, Al – now let’s get you into the BC Sports Hall of Fame!

Temple of Poseidon

2010-12-15T12:56:00.000-08:00

On January 15 of 1901, the city was abuzz. For decades, the principal way to travel to the mainland had been aboard dilapidated old paddlewheelers and steamships – “barnacles on the wheel of progress,” the Daily Colonist called them – built by the Hudson’s Bay Company. Now, at last, a new player was entering the local ferry business: the mighty Canadian Pacific Railway.

The news was electrifying. Although the Esquimalt & Nanaimo railway had been completed in 1886 and the CPR had been running its Empress liners to Asia since 1891, the CPR’s investment in coastal ferries, reaching canneries and sawmills and ports to the Klondike gold fields, heralded a regional economic boom.

Victorians were not to be disappointed. As Robert D. Turner describes in his wonderful 2001 book, Those Beautiful Coastal Liners, the CPR quickly built “a new and dynamic fleet of coastal steamships, renowned for speed, elegance and fine service, that became the dominant shipping presence along the coast[.]” Under the supervision of Captain James William Troup, the CPR’s B.C. Coast Service built 19 ships (all dubbed Princesses), many of them featuring lush, woody salons and sleeping cabins based on designs by architect Francis Rattenbury. The service’s flagship, the Princess Victoria, could motor between downtown Victoria and Vancouver in under four hours.

To complement the new ferries, in 1904, Troup retained Rattenbury to design a terminal on the Inner Harbour. Rattenbury created a larger version (photo left) of the half-timbered mansions he’d already designed around town, but the Coast Service boomed – passengers on the Vancouver-Nanaimo run grew from 11,000 in 1917 to 147,000 in 1923 – and his terminal quickly became obsolete. In 1920, Troup warned that it was “no longer fit for occupancy, and [that] extensive repairs must be undertaken before the building literally falls down.”

So Troup asked the architect to create a new terminal. “I would be more than delighted to design this building,” Rattenbury replied. By then the harbour included his Parliament Buildings and the Empress Hotel, which had opened in 1908. “So much of it [the harbour panorama] is my life’s work that I would put my whole heart into designing a building that would harmonize and add to the beauty of the surroundings.”

Rattenbury proposed a neo-classical temple, similar to his Bank of Montreal on Douglas Street, flanked by Ionic columns. Since an all-stone building would be expensive, his architectural partner Percy Leonard James suggested using reinforced concrete covered with “cast stone” made of cement and powdered Newcastle Island rock, which could be shaped to create exterior details – such as the fabulous heads of Poseidon, Greek god of the sea, overlooking each corner of the building. (The heads were carved by George Gibson, a Scots artisan who also created the speaker’s chair in the Parliament Buildings, and much of the cast-stone and wood sculpture in Christ Church Cathedral.)

The temple’s interior was equally as grand. The main floor had ornate 17-foot ceilings, a large fireplace, and lounges and waiting rooms finished with marble and Haddington Island stone. The hipped roof of Welsh slate covered two floors of spacious offices. (Troup’s was in the northwest corner so he could monitor the harbour traffic, which he also did from his waterfront home, near today’s West Bay marina.) When the building opened in 1924, it was considered one of Rattenbury’s best, and its success led him to join the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada that year.

The Depression and World War II took their tolls on the CPR’s steamships, however, and by the 1950s, its fleet was sadly out of date. Then, in 1958, a series of paralyzing CPR shipworkers’ strikes compelled premier W.A.C. Bennett to create BC Ferries, and the government’s roll-on, roll-off car ferries won most of the traffic to the mainland. By the 1960s, the Princess Marguerite was the only CPR vessel sailing out of downtown Victoria. The company moved its offices to Vancouver in 1968, leased the terminal to the Royal London Wax Museum in 1970, and sold the building to the province in 1975.

Now the terminal is back in the news. To take advantage of a time-limited $3.1-million infrastructure grant, the Provincial Capital Commission is undertaking a complete overhaul of the building, repairing its chipped concrete, restoring its details – including its floor-to-ceiling windows, which have been blacked over for 40 years – and seismically reinforcing the structure so it doesn’t collapse in an earthquake like a monument in Clash of The Titans. (Iredale Group Architecture’s rendering of the new interior is above right. A PDF of the conservation plan is available here.)

The big debate is about who will occupy it. The wax museum couldn’t secure a long-term lease, so the PCC is taking bids for new tenants. Entrepreneur Bob Wright has proposed a high-tech history exhibit, which some say would only mimic the failed B.C. Experience. Others argue it would be a great home for the Maritime Museum of B.C., but that institution’s been amid rocky waters after sacking most of its staff last spring. And some say – as famed architect Arthur Erickson did in 2004 – that it should be revived as a ferry terminal.

“We have to have a building that’s able to pay for itself over the long term,” says Rick Crosby, the PCC’s chief financial officer. “There could be some brilliant proposals, but we don’t have the capacity to underwrite someone who wants to pay a dollar per year.” Crosby says he’ll be surprised if a bid comes from existing marine transport companies, but anything’s possible. The next chapter in the history of the temple on the harbour is about to be written.

PS Thanks to Rick Horne for use of his 1960s photo of the terminal’s main floor.

UPDATE (March 3, 2011): Today’s Times Colonist has a photo gallery of the reno work inside the CP Steamship terminal, linked here.

The Plot to Destroy City Hall

2010-09-29T11:01:00.000-07:00

If you’ve been thinking that the debates about sewage treatment or the Johnson Street Bridge have gone on too long, they haven’t held a gaslamp to what may be Victoria’s longest-burning issue: the fate of City Hall itself.

Victorians have always been reluctant to buy facilities for our local government. Immediately after the City was incorporated in 1862, our first mayor, Thomas Harris, appealed to Vancouver Island’s colonial officials for money to build a town hall, and was rebuffed. Subsequent mayors appealed to taxpayers for money and were rejected, forcing the city council to hold its meetings in shabby rented rooms on Broad Street. Then, in 1874, the council quietly bought two lots “for municipal purposes” at the corner of Douglas and Pandora. Citizens were outraged. “Not only with secrecy, but with indecent haste have the municipal council purchased a site for the city hall, which they seem determined to have ‘by hook or by crook’,” thundered the daily Colonist.

Nevertheless, voters apparently realized that their local government needed a permanent home, because in 1875 they approved a bylaw to borrow $10,000 for a new city hall. John Teague (left), an English-born contractor and self-taught architect – he had already built the “carpenter gothic” Church of Our Lord – crafted a competition-winning design for the mansard-roofed structure we know today. His city hall opened in 1878, and a few years later (after further acrimonious debate) voters approved several additions, including the clock tower, and a west wing containing the public market and fire station. Teague himself became mayor in 1894, perhaps making him the only politician anywhere to preside over a town hall that he had personally designed.

The love affair with Teague’s building faded after he died in 1902. As early as 1910, mayors started demanding a new city hall for the expanding town, but world wars and economic depression made such an expense impossible. That changed in 1946. Mayor Percy George declared that Teague’s building was “no longer adequate” for the increasing variety of services needed by returning veterans. The council agreed, and the City listed the building for sale. A few weeks later, a developer offered $176,000 to buy the land, demolish the building, and replace it with a department store.

City inspector J.W. Oosterink argued that replacement made financial sense. The existing City Hall needed $60,000 in repairs, he said: its roof was rotten, elderly residents couldn’t negotiate its stairs, and its maintenance costs would keep escalating. “I do not consider it good business to spend a lot of money on a building which we cannot expect to continue to use indefinitely,” Oosterink said. Then he unveiled his own drawings for a new concrete structure (above right), with underground parking and elevators, which he estimated would cost $250,000.

A majority of councillors approved Oosterink’s scheme. The lone holdout was B.J. Gadsden, who pointed out that the City had no realistic plan for its overall finances. “To attempt to build a City Hall in the face of all the other demands for money which we must meet is neither wise nor businesslike,” Gadsden asserted. “We must ensure that the most important things are done first.” Mayor George blasted councillor Gadsden, arguing that any delay would jeopardize the developer’s proposal. But Gadsden’s view prevailed. In 1947, citizens rejected the replacement, 1803 votes to 1216, and the City resigned itself to repairing Teague’s building.

The dream didn’t die, though. In 1957, the futuristic Capital Regional Planning Board – which also envisioned freeways through Vic West, and bulldozing Market Square for a mall – revealed designs for a new civic precinct around the Royal Theatre, with a new city hall, museum, and courthouse. The proposal gained steam when Woodward’s announced that it wanted to replace Teague’s city hall with a $5-million department store, but it subsequently backed out. Another plan emerged in 1960, when a developer offered to create an eight-storey city hall (left), with shops on the ground floor. That also failed – some said having retailers at the government’s front door would be “undignified” – and the City abandoned interest in lands around the Royal Theatre, leading to construction of the YMCA and concrete courthouse there today.

The urge for a new city hall finally waned in 1961, when Victorians elected Richard Biggerstaff Wilson as mayor. A native Victorian (his grandfather founded W&J Wilson clothiers), he admired Teague’s building, and believed repairing it would save money. The Colonist agreed, editorializing that the building possessed “a dignity not to be found in most modern office structures.” So on August 2, 1962 – exactly 100 years from Victoria’s incorporation – Wilson announced the plan for Centennial Square (right), including renos to City Hall and a new legislative wing. Voters approved borrowing $950,000 for the project, and the revived City Hall opened in 1964.

Today, Teague’s building is a national heritage site, and the oldest city hall in western Canada. Over the years, it has been painted cream, gray, and pale blue; it returned to its early brick-red with gray trim in 2004. In 2005 it underwent partial seismic upgrades: a 2006 emergency assessment noted that City Hall is quakeproof only to a “survivability” level, not an “operational” one, and that its computing department could be prone to flooding.

Similar issues plague much of Victoria’s infrastructure. Last month, engineers said the City needs to spend $462 million to upgrade its facilities, and noted that the 70 buildings it owns are only in “fair” condition overall. But with new sewage treatment and an expensive replacement of the Johnson Street Bridge on the horizon – to say nothing of another emergency radio system, operation of the Traveller’s Inn shelters, or a new Crystal Pool or downtown library – it appears City employees will have to make do with Teague’s 132-year-old town hall for many decades to come.

Born of Fire

2010-08-31T15:10:00.000-07:00

“The Savages have an abominable habit of burning the woods,” wrote Captain Walter Colquhoun Grant in 1851. Vancouver Island’s first settler (and the man to blame for importing Scotch Broom), Grant established a farm near Sooke, and reported on his progress to colonial governor James Douglas. Many features of Grant’s new home annoyed him, but especially “the frequency of the fires kindled promiscuously by the natives both in wood and prairie,” and he urged Douglas to reduce treaty payments to them for every fire they set.

Captain Grant didn’t know it, but fire has always been a fact of life here. According to experts in dendochronology (the study of tree rings), huge fires used to rage across pre-colonial Vancouver Island every 50 to 100 years. Two such fires, in the 16th and 17th centuries, were so massive that they burned as much as 8,000 square kilometres of forest – a quarter of the entire island.

Obviously, such fires were terribly destructive, just like the ones that have recently raged elsewhere in British Columbia. But it turns out that fires have also been responsible for creating the city we know today.

As UVic historian John Lutz has noted, the main reason why James Douglas chose this place to build a Hudson’s Bay Company fort in 1843 was its vast “perfect Eden” of prairie and Garry oak trees – today’s Beacon Hill Park – which he thought perfect for farming. What Douglas didn’t know was that these meadows were already cultivated by the Lekwungen (Songhees) peoples, who used controlled fires every summer to burn off grasses and shrubs to encourage food plants, such as blue camas (right). After the fort was established, Douglas began receiving complaints from settlers like Captain Grant, and the HBC stamped out the fires by turning the meadows into grazing land for sheep and cattle, and by offering the natives jobs at the fort – or threatening them with violence. (To stop the natives from rustling cattle, HBC factor Roderick Finlayson once destroyed an empty Lekwungen lodge with cannonshot.)

The terror of fire also affected the development of Fort Victoria, and the town that grew up around it. Douglas established our first fire department during the 1858 gold rush, when thousands of travellers set up tents and shacks here, outfitted with wood-burning stoves. Surveyors laying out Victoria’s downtown favoured wide streets because they would create firebreaks, preventing flames from leaping block to block. In 1862, Douglas passed a law prohibiting construction of wooden buildings more than six metres high in the centre of town, and in 1879, the law was amended to require all new downtown structures to be made of brick or stone.

That didn’t stop the flames. In 1907, a fire that started in an iron works engulfed more than 90 buildings along Herald Street between Store and Government, leaving 250 people homeless. In 1910, another massive fire destroyed “half of the City of Victoria” (said the Times of London), wiping out most of the buildings occupied by today’s Bay Centre (photo above left). When the area was rebuilt, View Street was opened between Broad and Government for the first time. (Before the fire, Trounce Alley was the only way through the block.)

As Dave Parker notes in First Water, Tigers!, his excellent history of the Victoria Fire Department, many regional landmarks have perished in flames. Waterfront resorts burned, such as Oak Bay’s Hotel Mount Baker in 1902, and the Cadboro Bay Hotel (photo right) in 1931. The grand Willows Exhibition Building in Oak Bay burned down in 1907. The Patrick Arena, where the Victoria Cougars won the 1925 Stanley Cup, burned down in 1929; indoor hockey then moved to a Willows rink that burned in 1944 (photo at top), inspiring construction of the all-concrete Memorial Arena. The wooden grandstands of Royal Athletic Park were destroyed by fire in 1964, as were the stables at Sandown race track in 1966, killing 11 horses. Even the Queen’s representatives have not been spared: Victoria’s first Government House burned down in 1899, and its successor did the same in 1957 (photo below left).

(Fire also created local governments. Many current Westshore municipalities, including Langford, Colwood, and Sooke, began in the 1940s as “fire protection districts,” ruled by elected boards of trustees with the power to charge property taxes for fire-fighting.)

Thankfully, Victoria doesn’t experience many big infernos today. Ted Alexis, president of the VFD Historical Society and a retired battalion chief, says only three percent of the department’s calls are actual fires now; most are “first responder” emergencies instead. Lumber mills and other flammable industries have moved from the city core, notes Alexis, and “people take more care than they used to.” Far fewer people smoke nowadays, let alone in bed. Building and electrical codes are tougher. Smoke detectors are commonplace. And fireworks, beach fires, and backyard burning have been outlawed in most municipalities.

The consequence, as some historians have noted, is that fire has practically become a state monopoly: ever-fewer people have much direct experience with setting or controlling it, even though fire is a primary tool of human civilization.

The outdoor fires that first inspired Victoria may soon be revived, however. Thomas Munson, a natural areas technician with the City of Victoria parks department, says he hopes to conduct a controlled grass fire in Beacon Hill Park next year, to study how it will improve the growth of native plants. Similar experimental burns (right) have been conducted in Garry oak meadows near Duncan, and the only problems have been dealing with panicked phone calls from neighbours to fire departments.

“If people smell smoke, it’s not necessarily a threat to their safety or their property,” says Munson. “Our biggest challenge will be public education.” If Captain Grant and James Douglas had received similar lessons 150 years ago, our town might’ve turned out quite differently.

Greetings from Bridgetown

2010-07-14T08:37:00.000-07:00

Tucker Teutsch is a busy guy. He’s the artistic director of the first-ever PDX Bridge Festival, and with a few weeks until opening, he has plenty to do. In his warehouse office, he’s fielding calls from sponsors, choosing art for the program, and working out the logistics for a series of audacious events upon Portland’s historic moving bridges.

The star of the show is the Hawthorne Bridge (left), which marks its 100th birthday this year, making it the oldest vertical lift bridge in the United States. For the two weeks of the festival, Teutsch and his crew – who have created large-scale art installations at events around the world – are outfitting the Hawthorne with an interactive light display, throwing a huge concert, and projecting images of Portland history onto giant screens attached to the bridge. Then, on August 7, they’re covering the Hawthorne’s deck with 25,000 square feet of lawn for a mass picnic, with brunch provided by the city’s numerous food carts. (The festival schedule also lists a film series, museum exhibits, and walking and cycling tours.)

“We’re celebrating the work of the engineers who built this bridge, and have kept it running,” Teutsch explains. But Portland’s old bridges are more than bits of infrastructure – to him, they’re public gathering places, symbols of civic pride, tourist attractions, mammoth kinetic sculptures. “Our goal is to show that bridges have real benefits beyond just transportation,” he continues. “It’s a stick-a-pirate-flag-on-it kind of gesture: ‘We claim this bridge for art’.”

This week, the City of Victoria mailed a survey to residents, asking what three factors we consider most important when dealing with our own 86-year-old Johnson Street Bridge. “Preserving heritage” is just one of the criteria – and if it finishes low in the rankings, our councillors will likely vote on August 12 to scrap the old bridge, convinced that every other value is better served by replacing it. But such beliefs don’t hold everywhere. That’s why I was in Portland, to check out its heritage bridges – and find out why its residents cherish them, instead of letting them rust and then gleefully knocking them down.

Portland’s history proves that old infrastructure doesn’t have to impede the growth of a modern city. Founded in 1851, Portland boomed as a shipping hub for Oregon’s lumber and grain; much of it was sent along the Willamette and Columbia rivers in tall-masted boats, so the city’s numerous railway and streetcar bridges had to be able to lift out of the way. Today, Portland’s gleaming downtown gazes upon five historic moving bridges, erected between 1910 and 1958, that handle 175,000 cars daily. (They lift for ships 2400 times a year.) One of them, the extraordinary 1912-built Steel Bridge, also carries Amtrak trains and the city’s MAX light-rail system, which runs to the airport in the northeast and the high-tech companies of the “Silicon Forest” to the west.

Portlanders have preserved their old bridges largely because doing so is cost-effective: in 1998, after officials heard that replacing the Hawthorne would cost $189 million, they chose to refurbish it for $21 million. In Victoria, much of the estimated $80-million tab (and one-year closure) cited for refurbishing a rail-less Johnson Street Bridge involves seismic upgrading – an expense Portlanders have largely decided to forgo. Multnomah County, which operates most of Portland’s bridges (along with most regional services) has seismically retrofitted just one “lifeline” bridge into downtown. “We haven’t done the others, not because we don’t think they’re important, but because we’ve priortized keeping all our bridges running, and doing maintenance,” says Ian Cannon, the county’s bridge services manager. “It comes down to limited funds.”

Instead, Portland is phasing in the expensive seismic upgrades to its bridges over several decades. (Long-term planning is a local hallmark: Portland drew up plans for its MAX system in the early 1970s, so it was first in line when the U.S. government announced money for rail transit in 1978.) But there’s also a make-it-work attitude in Portland, a belief that governments should try fixing infrastructure before blowing millions on new construction, and this was most apparent when I cycled the old bridges around downtown. Smooth ramps, identified pathways, clear signage – simple, creative solutions had been employed everywhere, spurring a 178-percent increase in bicycle traffic on the old bridges over the past decade.

Innovation is ubiquitous in Portland. I cycled the neighbourhood around Powell’s Books, and passed a condo tower with wind turbines on its roof. I saw the “Zoobomb Pyle”, a city-sponsored sculptural tower of kids’ bikes used by the hipsters who take MAX up to the zoo and then coast down at top speed. I visited the Living Room Theaters, a new set of cinemas where you could drink a microbrew and watch a movie at the same time. I had a snack at Voodoo Doughnut, famed for its maple-glazed with bacon, and stopped by Dante’s, a cabaret that hosts karaoke with live bands.

On one wall of Dante’s, a proud slogan was painted in huge letters, overlooking the street: KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD. Not to worry, I thought. The antique bridges and PDX festival are just more proof that Portland’s inventive spirit is alive and well.

UPDATE (August 1, 2010): Happy 100th, Hawthorne! Here’s a video of the birthday party that Portland threw on its bridge yesterday:

Past The Post?

2010-06-22T23:19:00.000-07:00

In this era of satellites, WiFi and smartphones, it’s hard for us to imagine how people communicated over long distances 150 years ago, and yet they did. Global civilization thrived – and it was principally thanks to the postal service.

In the early days of Fort Victoria, it took an average of four months for mail from England to get here on Hudson’s Bay Company ships. But after the 1849 California gold rush, the U.S. government started sending mail to America’s west coast by routing it overland at the isthmus of Panama, then sailing it up to San Francisco and settlements on Puget Sound. The HBC began routing its mail through Olympia (today’s Washington state capital), sending bags of letters back and forth to Fort Victoria by native war canoe. Soon Victoria was busy enough that express companies like Wells Fargo had offices here, providing banking and courier services to travellers.

The mails were vital to the governance and economy of early Vancouver Island, but they weren’t always handled with care. Fort Victoria’s treasurer, Roderick Finlayson, sorted the colony’s mail in a corner of his office, prompting the legislative committee to complain in 1857 that “letters are exposed under conditions which the committee does not deem safe.” In response, governor James Douglas erected a separate cabin inside the fort, and appointed James Sangster, a former ship’s captain, as postmaster. Unfortunately for Sangster, a quiet man who liked his drink, the 1858 Fraser River gold rush flooded his office with demanding miners, and later that year he committed suicide. Several more postmasters quickly came and went, including John D’Ewes, a disgraced magistrate from Australia’s gold fields who talked his way into the Victoria job – and then disappeared with a £300 advance on his salary plus £280 in postal revenue.

Douglas found steadier men, and took greater interest in using the mails to develop his young colony. In 1862, his government created a dedicated postal service on Vancouver Island, and chartered a steamship to carry mail regularly to San Francisco. In 1865, Vancouver Island printed its own stamps, in denominations of five and 10 cents, displaying a cameo of a young Queen Victoria. Most of these stamps were destroyed after B.C. joined Confederation, and the national postal system, in 1871. But a few survived, and became collectors’ items – so valuable, in fact, that they were later duplicated by such notorious forgers as the Spiro brothers of Hamburg, and Jean de Sperati (photo left), “the Rubens of philately,” whose superb copies are now worth as much as the originals. In 2006, a single five-cent Vancouver Island stamp sold for $86,000 at an auction in New York.

Transporting mail became much easier once the Canadian Pacific Railway finished its national railroad in 1886, and established its Empress steamships to the Orient. In 1894, to reflect Victoria’s maritime importance, the federal government commissioned a handsome post office (right) at the northwest corner of Humboldt and Government streets, built of granite blocks weighing as much as four tons, and adorned with a copper roof, an interior finished in cedar and oak, and (the Colonist reported) “an elevator and all the best modern conveniences.” It opened in 1898, complementing the city’s new Parliament Buildings, and providing a grand entrance to Government Street. Sadly, the feds demolished the post office in 1956, replacing it with the drab customs and immigration offices at the corner today.

In 1952, Victoria’s main post office moved up the street to the modernist Federal Building at the southwest corner of Government and Yates, designed by Percy Leonard James, who also created the Crystal Gardens and CPR steamship terminal (today’s wax museum) with Francis Rattenbury. The feds outfitted the post office’s imposing main hall with marble counters and writing desks, and – in keeping with the Cold War paranoia of the time – installed hidden catwalks over the sorting area, so investigators could watch for mail tampering.

In Victoria’s early days, you had to queue up at the post office to collect your letters, or pay someone to hold your place in line. Household delivery didn’t begin here until 1888, with four carriers delivering mail to homes twice daily. Other services appeared: in 1919, an airplane carried mail for the first time in B.C. on a flight from Victoria to Nanaimo, and in 1920, Eddie Hubbard (at left in photo right, with William Boeing) started the first scheduled airmail route between Canada and the U.S., flying sacks of letters between Victoria’s Inner Harbour and Seattle’s Lake Union, a route that survived until 1937.

With the postwar rise in electronic communications, the demand for postal service flattened. In 1954, Victoria’s household delivery was reduced to once a day, and in 1969, the city lost Saturday delivery. After Canada Post became a Crown corporation in 1981, it began opening franchise outlets in drug stores, reducing the need for big central post offices. Victoria’s downtown post office moved to its current location on Yates in 1991.

With 71,000 employees, Canada Post remains one of the largest companies in the country, delivering 11 billion pieces of mail to 15 million addresses. But its recent annual report identified 2009 as “one of the most challenging years in its history,” forcing the company to cut costs – which may include the loss of as many 60 workers from Victoria, if some mail sorting is sent to Vancouver. Last year, the volume of lettermail declined 4.2%, and the parcel service dropped 6.9%, although it’s popular year-round now and not just at Christmas, thanks to online shopping. (The Canada Postal Guide provides a comprehensive list of what can be shipped: no-nos include batteries, perfume, and cigarettes, but cremated human remains and animal carcasses are OK, as are live bees – not by airmail – and day-old baby chickens.)

Such changes have renewed calls from right-wingers to eliminate Canada Post’s monopoly on mail service – as all 27 countries of the European Union plan to do next year with their own state-owned postal companies – or privatize it outright, in the name of greater efficiency. But that could be a mistake.

“In many smaller communities, the postal service is really the only federal presence,” notes Bill Bartlett, a retired Saanichton postmaster, historian, stamp collector, and passionate defender of Canada Post. Arguably, our postal service binds this country together as much does the CBC or RCMP. It covers the largest area in the world – Russia does not provide mail to most of Siberia – and rates will skyrocket in remote places like Quatsino or Zeballos if their residents have to rely on private companies. Vancouver Island may be getting more electronically connected all the time, but physically it’s just as vast as it was 150 years ago.

Reviving The Elwha

2010-05-26T21:26:00.000-07:00

In September of 1911, a game warden went to inspect the newly built Elwha Dam just west of Port Angeles, and was horrified by what he saw.

Thousands of salmon lay dying in pools at the foot of the dam. Thousands more thrashed around them, smashing themselves against the concrete walls, trying to climb the barricade.

“I have personally searched the Elwha River and tributary above the dam, and have been unable to find a single salmon,” the warden reported. “If they do not get to their spawning grounds it will mean a very serious drawback to the fish industry of this county.”

Thus began what an American writer called “one of the darkest chapters in the history of the West,” killing annual runs of half a million fish, and devastating the Klallam natives who live where the Elwha spills into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. But that chapter is finally ending. This summer, our neighbours across the strait are getting ready to restore the Elwha to its original state, as part of the biggest dam-removal project in U.S. history.

The tale of the Elwha is relevant to Victorians, because we share an ecosystem with Olympic peninsula, and because our neighbours’ conduct holds up a mirror to our own. Considering our governments’ present infatuation with run-of-river hydro and the just-announced $6.6-billion Site C dam, it’s not too surprising to learn that the destruction of the Elwha can largely be blamed upon a Canadian.

Thomas Aldwell (photo left), a young Ontario banker, landed in Washington State in 1890. “Seattle and Port Townsend were both ideal places for an ambitious young man to stake out a claim,” he recalled in his memoirs. “Free land, timber, water – promise was everywhere. But these towns were not the frontier any more. I wanted something newer.”

Port Angeles fit the bill. The town was so primitive at the time that none of its stores or homes had electricity, and its flickering street lights relied upon a tiny steam-powered generator. Aldwell set up a real-estate business, and spent his weekends exploring the Olympic mountains. When he saw the cascades of the Elwha (see the 1887 photo at top right), channeling the Olympics’ 3.6 metres of annual rainfall, he knew he’d struck it rich. “Suddenly the Elwha was no longer a wild stream crashing down to the strait,” Aldwell wrote. “The Elwha was peace, power, and civilization.”

The laws of the American frontier encouraged dams and the private ownership of water to spur economic development, and Aldwell took full advantage of them. He bought up land along the river, ignoring the Klallam people downstream, and with the help of Winnipeg financier George Glines, in 1910 he built the Elwha Dam (photo right). Fourteen years later, upstream at Glines Canyon, he opened an even larger hydroelectric dam, 21 storeys tall.

The dams transformed Port Angeles. In 1914, Seattle tycoon Michael Earles built a giant lumber mill on the town’s waterfront – and directly atop the Klallam’s ancestral Tse-whit-zen village – employing 1,000 men and producing 14 million board-feet a month. (Earles also erected the nearby Sol Duc Hot Springs Resort upon a Klallam site used for vision quests.) In 1920, Crown Zellerbach built a paper mill in town, and Aldwell sold electricity to clients across the peninsula, including the U.S. Navy base at Bremerton.

There were consequences, however. Even though Washington state law required dams to have fish ladders, Aldwell built his without them, and the Elwha’s huge runs of all five species of Pacific salmon declined to a few thousand fish. The Elwha once dumped tons of sediment out to the strait, creating vast clam beds and Ediz Hook, the six-kilometre spit of land that protects Port Angeles’ harbour. (A diagram at left shows how Ediz Hook evolved.) But Aldwell’s dams trapped the sediment instead, starving the clams and forcing the town to spend millions shoring up its breakwater.

The Klallam had always opposed the dams. So in the 1980s, when the dams came up for licence renewal, the Klallam saw their chance. The Sierra Club and other environmental groups joined the legal fight. The lumber mill was gone, they argued, and the old dams didn’t generate half the electricity needed to run the paper mill. The Elwha was a perfect candidate for reclamation, because most of its watershed remained intact, protected inside Olympic National Park. Eventually the U.S. Congress agreed, and passed an act in 1992 mandating the Elwha’s restoration.

Now the $350-million project is officially underway. This is the last year to see the dams or paddle on their reservoirs; next summer, contractors will dismantle the dams and then blast away the foundations, and then volunteers will swarm the newly-exposed banks of the river, sowing more than 400,000 native plants raised in local greenhouses. Here’s an animation of the scheme for removing the massive Glines Canyon Dam:

Restoring the Elwha will benefit fishermen and kayakers, but obviously it means most to the Klallam. The dams also flooded the sacred site of their own creation legend, and next year, they will be able to visit it for the first time in a century.

“People are holding their heads a little higher,” says Robert Elofson, the restoration program director for the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. “We already take a great deal of pride in how successful we’ve been.” He’s not certain the salmon will return in big numbers until the gravel beds and native plants take root, and they will need time. But there’s reason to hope.

Every autumn, even today, a few salmon congregate in the pools at the foot of the Elwha Dam – relying upon their old instincts to fight upstream, and yearning to create a new chapter in the history of their river.

PS You can watch the first part of a documentary film about the Klallam people and the Elwha dams here, and a Seattle PBS item about the restoration project here.

Port Angeles 101

2010-04-22T11:17:00.000-07:00

The Olympic Peninsula Tourism Commission surveyed Victorians last year, and the results were embarrassing. More than half of us said we didn’t know anything about the Olympic peninsula – and 15 percent hadn’t heard of Port Angeles, even though we gaze upon its backdrop of snow-capped mountains practically every day. So in the interests of geographical education, regional fellowship, and par-dollar tourism, here’s a crash course in the history of our American neighbours, 32 kilometres across the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Port Angeles is the seat of Clallam County, named for the Klallam natives of the area. Klallam means “strong people” in their language, which is similar to Songhees, and taught for credit at Port Angeles High School. (You can even read the Klallam word of the day on Twitter.)

The Klallam have several traditional villages along both sides of the Strait – including one at Becher Bay, east of Sooke – but the largest stood at I-enn-nus, at the mouth of today’s Ennis Creek, just east of Port Angeles. The great travelling artist Paul Kane created several paintings (sample left) of Klallam life, including one depicting a famous battle at I-enn-nus that the Klallam fought against the Makah, over the corpse of a whale. (The conflict was resolved after the children of the rival chiefs got married.)

A Spanish captain who sailed past in 1791 gave the name of Puerto de Nuestra de Señora de Los Angelos to the deep-water harbour protected by Ediz Hook, the six-kilometre spit that juts out from today’s Port Angeles. (Ediz, like Ennis, is a mispronunciation of I-enn-nus.) The founding of the town itself is credited to Victor Smith, a slippery treasury agent who bought up most of the land in the area, and then lobbied the U.S. government to move its customs house from Port Townsend to Port Angeles, supposedly to capitalize upon the shipping traffic around Fort Victoria. In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed an order incorporating the town, relocating the customs house, and establishing Ediz Hook as a military reserve. Smith, who was indicted for embezzlement but never convicted, died in a shipwreck in 1865. The customs office returned to Port Townsend soon afterward.

Port Angeles remained quiet for a while, and then boomed in the 1880s, thanks to the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony – a band of prominent Seattle residents who opposed Chinese immigration, and wanted to create a model (all-white) city with cooperative industries. Boasting more than 500 members, the colony built Port Angeles’s first schoolhouse, lumber mill, opera house, and many churches, but dissolved in legal acrimony in 1889.

The town grew nonetheless, and undertook new challenges. Much of the downtown had been built at sea level, allowing high tides to slop raw sewage onto the streets and wash away planked sidewalks. So in 1914, Port Angeles regraded its entire downtown, pumping seawater up its surrounding hills and then sluicing down the dirt (photo left), expanding the waterfront and raising the streets by four metres. Many building owners had to move their entrances up one floor, creating an “underground” of basements still visible on guided tours.

It was a confident time. Farmers at nearby Sequim worked the rich soil to raise potatoes and pigs that they sold in Victoria. Thanks to an 1895 irrigation project – which Sequim commemorates with a festival every May – they converted their rainshadowed prairie into pastureland, and created a dairy industry. By 1913, the county produced a million pounds of butter annually. (You can check out the current bounty at the Port Angeles Farmers’ Market, held at a covered public square conveniently located next to the downtown transit loop. Our neighbours have a few things to teach Victoria about supporting local agriculture.)

The other big industry was forestry. During World War I, the U.S. government ordered thousands of soldiers to start cutting spruce for airplanes, and built a gigantic mill at the mouth of Ennis Creek. But soon there wasn’t much of the forest left to cut. (As you can tell from the 1927 photo at left, the loggers didn’t leave many trees in town, either.) In 1938, Franklin D. Roosevelt created Olympic National Park, and expanded it to nearly a million acres in size, despite logging-industry protests. Today only one big mill remains, owned by Nippon Paper Industries. You can see its plumes from Victoria, as it recycles our newsprint into paper for telephone books.

Instead, the Port Angeles economy is increasingly driven by tourism. Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight vampire romances draw thousands of visitors from all over the world, especially to the Bella Italia restaurant, where the lovers Bella and Edward had their first date over a plate of mushroom pasta. The reliable Coho, now in its 50th year of service, ferries 200,000 passengers across the Strait annually, and much of Victoria’s food. Kayaking is popular. But the sport with the biggest growth potential is cycling, especially along the developing Olympic Discovery Trail (right), which follows the route of a 1914-built railroad that ran from Port Townsend through Port Angeles to the logging camps at Lake Crescent. (The lake also happens to be the site of the area’s most famous murder.)

Many cyclists roll off the Coho and head east along the waterfront on the gravelly trail to Sequim, but I rode west. I pedalled past Tse-whit-zen, a vast fenced-off yard where Washington State spent $100 million readying a factory to build components for the Hood Canal Bridge, until it discovered the remains of a Klallam village underneath; archeologists have since unearthed 1,000 artifacts from the site, and the Klallam plan to build a museum there. Then I rode up through half-built suburbs stalled by the recession, and on to the Olympic View Cemetery on the edge of town.

Port Angeles has been home to a few celebrities: Lindsay Wagner, TV’s Bionic Woman, lives in the area today, conducting spiritual retreats. But likely its best-known resident was the poet and short-story writer Raymond Carver, who created some of his finest work here before he died of cancer in 1988.

I found Carver’s grave, a slab of black marble. I read the letters that fans had left in a little mailbox beside it. Then I looked across the strait to the Sooke Hills, and wondered if he’d thought much about Canada. Maybe not. It was another country, after all. So far, yet so close.

PS If you’re planning to visit Port Angeles, here are a few recommendations. Breakfast: First Street Haven. Bookstore: Port Book and News. Downtown tourist attraction: Arthur D. Feiro Marine Life Center. Bar: Peaks Pub.

The Sands of Time

2010-03-18T12:52:00.000-07:00

“I’m quite emotional about this place,” Eric McMorran, 84, says over a bowl of clam chowder (the best in Victoria) in the restaurant at McMorran’s Beach House, a business that’s been in his family since 1919, and will close forever this Easter weekend. “I grew up here, and I would like to see it go on. But that’s not up to me.”

It’s hard to imagine Cordova Bay without the McMorrans. Eric’s father, George McMorran, arrived here from Ontario in 1890, when his family took a job managing the Rithet farm (now the Broadmead district), and they spent their summers camping down on the sands of the vast bay, crossing paths with a few Songhees natives hunting for deer and digging for clams. (A shell midden near today’s Agate Park marks the site of a Songhees village dating back 1,000 years.)

That idyllic scene began to change in the late 1890s, when the British Columbia government paid a farmer $60 to clear a roadway from Cedar Hill Road around the north side of Mount Douglas, creating today’s Cordova Bay Road. The newly accessible bay started to become popular with city dwellers travelling by stagecoach and bicycle, and by 1902 the Colonist was calling Cordova Bay “Victoria’s Brighton Beach”, populated by hundreds of summertime campers, playing baseball and lacrosse on the sand, and gathering for nightly singalongs around bonfires.

To capitalize on the traffic, George and his friend Fred Dougall subdivided some land near the beach in 1909, naming Doumac Avenue after their real-estate company. The McMorrans built an official campsite on Agate Lane in 1910. Thanks to the growing popularity of automobiles – the car-dealing Plimley family had property at Cordova Bay too – and the opening of a nearby station for the Canadian Northern Pacific Railway, which ran from the city to Sidney and Patricia Bay along today’s Lochside Trail, the campground was always full.

George served as a gunner during World War I, and when he returned, the real-estate business was flat. Taking a friend’s suggestion, he opened a shop to sell ice cream and cigars to beachgoers. He rented a waterfront lot for $5, and erected a 6 x 12 building in four days, opening it on May 24, 1919. On his first day, he did $4.65 in sales.

McMorran’s tea room became the hub of Cordova Bay. In 1926, George added a post office. A few years later, he had the neighbourhood’s first telephone, and pressed his sons into service, delivering messages for customers. In 1928, he built a motor court across the street, renting out cabins for $50 for the summer.

By the 1920s, as many as 10,000 people would come to Cordova Bay to watch the diving contests and hydroplane races of the summer regattas (photo right) that George helped organize. But his greatest ongoing success came from hosting dances. In 1922, he started hiring live bands to play on his terrace. In 1927, he added a ballroom, packing in the crowds several nights a week. Booze helped, too: B.C. prohibited alcohol in venues with live music, but everyone knew you could BYOB at McMorran’s, if you were discreet.

After World War II, Eric and his brother Bruce started running McMorran’s. The consummate host, Eric wore a tuxedo, and greeted every one of his guests at the door. He had a special sprung floor built for the ballroom, with intersecting maple planks so the dancers could spin with the grain of the wood. (“Even today, I insist that anyone coming from the beach wipe their shoes so they don’t grind up that floor,” Eric says.) McMorran’s on a Saturday night was the most romantic spot in town, especially when they’d turn off the house lights, and let moonlight flood the dance floor.

Cordova Bay was changing, though. During WWII, military servicemen started renting cottages on the bay year-round – their children had school classes in McMorran’s ballroom – creating a permanent community, and limiting the space for summer visitors. (The war came close in other ways, too. In 1942, a plane from the Pat Bay air station accidentally dropped five practice bombs on Cordova Bay, and one ended up in the kitchen of a house three doors south of McMorran’s.) After the war, road crews completed Claremont Avenue, connecting Cordova Bay directly to the highway, and it became just another suburb.

McMorran’s dance nights remained popular for decades. But as entertainments multiplied and the population aged, the dances couldn’t sustain the business. In 1994, Eric’s son Wallace returned from 20 years managing Canadian Pacific hotels, and the family poured a fortune into seismically upgrading the building and adding the Charters restaurant. Cordova Bay was no longer an exotic, must-visit destination, however, and the surrounding suburbs didn’t provide many regular customers. Last fall, Wallace decided to put the property up for sale.

“Things change, but whatever happens to it, we hope that it continues to contribute to the village of Cordova Bay,” says Wallace. In commemoration of all they have contributed already, on Saturday, April 3, the McMorrans will hold one last open house. Vintage cars will fill the parking lot, a swing band will play in the ballroom, and Eric McMorran will be there, to greet visitors for one last spin on that maple dance floor.

(Thanks to the Saanich Archives for use of the above photos.)

PS Many tourists passed through Cordova Bay in the 1960s and '70s to see Fable Cottage, an oddball house a few blocks north of McMorran’s. Bernie and “Billie” Rogers designed and built the house themselves, intending to use it as their private residence, but they were so plagued by uninvited visitors that they decided to fill the grounds with kitschy animatronic gnomes and sell tickets. Fable Cottage closed in 1992, and was barged to Denman Island the following year. What does it look like today? Check out this A-News report from December 2008:

UPDATE (March 11, 2011): The McMorran’s building will be revived this summer as the Beach House. Read the news here.

Our Cups Runneth Over

2010-02-18T15:20:00.000-08:00

All was not well at Fort Victoria in November of 1850. Scottish labourers, fed up with the hardships of pioneer life, were threatening to leave the Hudson’s Bay Company outpost and head to California, where they could earn higher wages spurred by the ’49 gold rush. Chief factor James Douglas needed a bribe to keep them here.

“To prevent a general strike and desertion, 2 ozs. of Tea and 1 lb. of Brown Sugar were allowed to each of these men weekly,” he later wrote, “a circumstance I do not now regret as it satisfied them.”

Tea and coffee are so commonplace in the Pacific Northwest today that it’s easy to forget they were once considered luxuries. The HBC crammed its ships from England with goods to trade for furs, and since the natives had no interest in exotic leaves and beans, they were only available to Company employees at Christmas, if at all.

That changed with the Fraser River gold rush of 1858. Victoria boomed, and importers quickly set up shop to satisfy the tastes of American and Chinese miners. By the end of that year, one writer noted, Victoria had “twenty or thirty restaurants and coffee houses ... in short all the beginnings of a large city.”

Perhaps the most successful of those early merchants was James Fell, an English grocer who opened a spice warehouse on Broad Street in 1864, and advertised his wares across the province with the slogan, “Always ask for Fell’s Coffee at the mines.” A devout spiritualist, Fell served as the city’s mayor from 1885 to 1887, and dedicated his profits to philanthropy, buying the collection of books that started the city’s first public library, and helping establish the Royal Jubilee Hospital.

Fell’s enterprise is gone, but we still have Murchie’s Tea and Coffee, which started in New Westminster in 1894, although it didn’t open a Victoria outlet until 1951. The oldest continually-operating such importer in the city is Cairo Coffee Merchants on Fort Street, which has been here since at least 1922.

In Victoria’s early days, the coffee in local eateries wasn’t much better than you’d find at a logging camp: cooks would roast the beans in a pan, grind them up, and boil them into a soup. By 1905, the Colonist was advertising newfangled stovetop percolators that produced “a drink fit for the gods,” and finer establishments used glass vacuum pots. But coffee-making remained complicated, and coffeehouses retained their early reputations as smoky, male domains. (Indeed, some Victoria establishments called themselves “coffee saloons”.) Tea had been the most popular drink in England since the 18th century, and as Victoria evolved from a frontier town into a wealthy colonial city, tea became even more prominent here.

Numerous family-friendly tea gardens sprang up around town, especially at parks and beaches, popular for weekend outings. The B.C. Electric Railway built the Deep Cove Chalet in 1914 at the end of one of its streetcar lines. The large, cream-coloured house that sits nearest the water on Gonzales Bay (photo left) was once a tea pavillion, which operated from the early 1900s to the 1930s. Another tea garden stood in Mount Douglas Park (photo above right); Emily Carr used part of it as a studio in the 1940s.

Most elegant of all was the Japanese Tea Garden (photo below right), built by the Takata family on the Gorge in 1907, and landscaped by Isaburo Kishida, who later designed Japanese gardens for Butchart Gardens and Hatley Castle. Tragically, this tea garden closed in 1942 – when the Takatas were sent to internment camps – and vandals destroyed it soon afterward. Fortunately, Esquimalt plans to build a new Japanese tea house on the site.

Like all international commodities, tea and coffee have been affected by world events. Britain stockpiled tea during World War I, escalating global prices; during World War II, the Canadian government rationed citizens to one ounce of tea or four ounces of coffee per week. In the 1970s, cartels in India (which grows most of the world’s tea) and Brazil (coffee) drove up prices again, stimulating greater cultivation of both commodities in other countries.

Since then, thanks to relative economic stability, global travel, and ever-fussier consumers, the demand for boutique tea and coffee has exploded, and locally too. Around 3,000 people attended last weekend’s Victoria Tea Festival, and the Fairmont Empress currently serves afternoon tea to some 80,000 customers annually. In 1993, the year before Starbucks opened its first outlet here, Victoria only had 17 coffee retailers; today, Starbucks alone has 24 outlets in the city, and over 100 independent espresso-slingers crowd the phone book.

Victoria can also boast one of the first caffeinated websites, coffeecrew.com, started in 1995 by Colin Newell, an IT specialist at the University of Victoria. (Newell’s local roots go deep: his grandmother was a tea-leaf reader at Cairo Coffee Merchants in the 1920s.) So he seemed a good person to ask: why do Victorians seem obsessed with hot, fragrant drinks?

It’s the climate, Newell replied. Scandanavian countries are the biggest per-capita guzzlers of coffee – Britain is biggest for tea – “and where there’s continuous rain, there’s continuous coffee consumption.”

As James Douglas knew, sometimes it’s the small pleasures that keep us here.

Dome of The Night Sky

2009-10-15T16:45:00.000-07:00

In a lab on Little Saanich Mountain, engineers are creating the most sensitive radio receivers on Earth.

In one corner they test a feedhorn antenna, stuck into a wall of sound-dampening foam, by radiating it with a series of inaudible, far-infrared frequencies. In another corner, a finished receiver (photo below right) sits in a sealed case that’s filling up with highly-compressed helium, cooling its components down to minus 269 degrees Celsius – making them so quiet, molecularly speaking, that they can detect the tiniest quivers of electromagnetic activity from distant parts of the universe.

These receivers will record the formation of undiscovered molecules, and the birth of galaxies. They are destined for the 66 dish antennas of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, a $1-billion international project to create the world’s biggest radiotelescope on a 5,000-metre plateau in Chile, set to become operational in 2012.

“With this, you’ll be able to look right down the throats of black holes,” says Jim Hesser, director of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, in his office a few floors above the lab. “It’s a really cool project, so to speak.”

Such mindblowing engineering is just the latest chapter in the DAO’s remarkable history. John Stanley Plaskett (1865-1941, photo left), the founder and first director of the observatory, grew up repairing equipment on his family’s Ontario farm, and eventually ran all the machines used in engineering lectures at the University of Toronto. After obtaining degrees in math and physics, he became an astronomer at the Dominion Observatory in Ottawa, and won worldwide recognition for his studies of binary stars. But he got frustrated by the limitations of Ottawa’s puny (0.381-metre) telescope, and after years of lobbying, in 1913 he got a grant to apply his machinist’s skills to building the observatory of his dreams.

A team of astronomers chose southern Vancouver Island as the location because it had the best atmospheric conditions for starwatching in Canada. The federal government bought the peak of Little Saanich Mountain, and Plaskett ordered the observatory’s huge rotating steel dome from Cleveland and the optical parts of its telescope from Pittsburgh. Horse-drawn wagons carried all the pieces up the slope (photo right), including the telescope’s 1.83-metre mirror, the largest in the British Empire.

Plaskett opened the observatory in 1918, and went to work. In 1922, he announced the discovery of what’s now called Plaskett’s Star (left) – a giant binary star with a combined mass 100 times that of the Sun, and until 2008, the biggest stellar object ever known. In 1929, he achieved even greater fame by accurately measuring the rotation of the Milky Way, calculating that it takes the Sun 220 million years to make one trip around the galaxy.

Plaskett retired in 1935, but the DAO acquired more telescopes, and its astronomers continued to rack up achievements. Andrew McKellar made the first measurement of light from the Big Bang in 1941, and in the 1970s DAO staff ground and polished the 3.6-metre mirror (photo below right) for the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope – the biggest working mirror ever made until the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990. That experience in turn enabled the DAO to develop its Astronomy Technology Research Group, which creates state-of-the-art instruments for observatories worldwide.

In 1995, the National Research Council relocated its Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics to here from Ottawa, and now our mountain with the dome is Canada’s pre-eminent astrophysical research centre, with a staff of over 100 people, managing data from and engineering for at least five international telescope projects. Plaskett’s original telescope is still in use too, making the DAO the oldest active observatory in the country, employed by visiting scientists from around the world.

Indeed, judging by the United Nations of names on the DAO’s directory, it seems astronomy truly is a planet-wide discipline. Hesser, for example, started out in astronomy spending nine years in Chile studying the 14-billion-year development of the Milky Way.

“I’ve realized a dream, learning so much about the world and its different cultures,” says Hesser. Chalk up one more surprising discovery from our observatory on the hill: a shared fascination with the farthest reaches of the universe can help international understanding, right here on Earth.

Fix The Blue Bridge

2009-10-08T09:23:00.000-07:00

This morning, Victoria’s city councillors will sit down and try to figure out what to do next, now that it’s clear they won’t be getting millions in federal stimulus cash for a new Johnson Street Bridge. By all indications, they’re going to push ahead with the $63-million project anyway. The City’s website says “a good case” can be made for proceeding because interest rates are low, so we should borrow as much as possible – a similar rationale used by subprime-mortgaged homeowners when trading in their bungalows for luxury mansions.

Instead, I’m hoping the councillors wake up to the fact that Victoria can’t afford a new bridge. As I wrote in a report to them earlier this week, many other cities have crunched the numbers, and decided to refurbish their aging steel bridges instead of replacing them. We should learn from their experience, and repair the Blue Bridge.

In April, the Delcan engineering firm submitted a condition assessment of the bridge to the council, and it said that repair not only is feasible, but relatively inexpensive. The only work that needs doing immediately involves electrical and mechanical repairs, costing about $2 million. Fixing the bridge’s corroded steel and repainting would be another $3 million.

The biggest part of the $23 million Delcan quoted for repair is for seismic upgrading. But they list a menu of options for that, and some of them – such as seismically isolating the span that holds up the bridge’s huge counterweights - could greatly reduce the bridge’s earthquake vulnerability without much cost. In 1999, San Fransicso seismically upgraded its “Lefty O’Doul” drawbridge (right) – like ours, also designed by Joseph Strauss of Golden Gate Bridge fame – for $10 million.

Since the Blue Bridge has never been part of the city’s emergency plans, though, how much seismic upgrading do we really need? Recently I corresponded with Ed Wortman, an engineer who’s overseen the rehabilitation of several of Portland’s movable steel bridges, he said his city has put money into repairs and steelwork instead of quake-proofing because it’s not worth the cost. After reading Delcan’s assessment, he recommended that we thoroughly repair our bridge without a seismic retrofit. “It would still provide a reliable structure for at least the next 40 to 50 years barring a major quake,” he wrote. “If the ‘Big One’ occurs during that period, Victoria will have plenty to deal with other than the possible loss of the Johnson Street Bridge.”

Of course, repainting the old bridge could also inconvenience downtown businesses. But Mr. Wortman told me that Portland has learned how to minimize bridge closures by planning its repair work in sections, and clearly notifying the public about traffic changes. Vancouver recently managed to overhaul the Lions’ Gate Bridge, and still kept it open to commuters. Ottawa is currently doing the same with its 1899-built Alexandra Bridge (left).

Besides, a few months of restricted traffic may not be a bad tradeoff compared to the effects of borrowing $63 million. Victoria’s assistant city manager has said such a debt would “financially strap the city,” leading to tax increases or service cutbacks. (Victoria police have already said they’re withdrawing from the regional crime unit to save money.) Those cutbacks could hurt downtown as much as any inconveniences from repainting the Blue Bridge.

Cyclists may be disappointed, too. Lately they’ve been arguing for a new bridge by pointing out problems with the existing one, including confusing access to the Galloping Goose trail, poor signage, absent sidewalk ramps, and the slipperiness of the metal deck. As a fellow cyclist, I feel their pain. But a lot of these issues could be resolved with a cement mixer and a few cans of paint and non-slip coating, and far more cheaply than by erecting a new crossing that would consume all the city’s funds for cycling facilities for years. If Portlanders can figure out how to integrate bicycles into their heritage bridges, so can we.

Our heritage may also be greater than we realized. Last week I spoke with Eric DeLony, a historian who ran a national engineering archive for the U.S. Department of the Interior, and knows more about America’s 250,000 bridges than anyone else. He noted that we actually have two bridges, side-by-side – and as far as he is aware, ours is the only parallel-spanned Strauss bascule bridge in existence. “You have something there that’s not just unusual, but actually unique,” he said.

Instead of blowing $63 million on a fancy new tourist-attraction bridge, we should appreciate what we’ve got, and fix it.

PS This post originally appeared as an op-ed in today’s Times Colonist; to read the online comments, click here. Many thanks to Bob Horowitz for letting me use his photo of the Lefty O’Doul bridge.

UPDATE (October 10, 2009): Victoria’s council decided to receive the information in my report, and consider the engineering department’s proposal to remove rail from a new bridge, which would shave $15 million from the $63-million price tag. Story here. The Times Colonist followed up with an editorial, telling the City to start the bridge project from scratch.

A New Bridge, A New Problem

2009-09-23T16:18:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow at 5:00 pm, Victoria’s city council will vote to pursue one of three designs for a new Johnson Street Bridge. Which criteria will weigh most heavily as councillors make the city’s biggest aesthetic decision in decades is anyone’s guess. Will they support the winner of the online survey? Will they be swayed by letters to editors? Will they use research of their own, or will they – like American Idol judges – be governed by personal taste and gut instinct?

All three designs are supposed to satisfy the same transportation requirements – three car lanes, two bicycle lanes, a pedestrian walkway, a multimodal path, and a railway track. They’re all to meet current earthquake standards, and cost around $63 million to build. But there’s one more characteristic that’s common to all three, and crucially important if the City gets time-limited federal-provincial money to build the bridge: There are no working duplicates of these designs.

Not long ago, I got an interesting email from a fellow who attended one of the City’s open houses promoting a new bridge. “I asked about something that has been bugging me about the cable-stayed option ever since the three designs were unveiled,” he wrote. “The Erasmus Bridge, which is noted as the inspiration, is of course a cable-stayed bridge, but as you might know, it does not lift ... it has a separate leaf-bascule at one end [photo above right]. So, I asked if there were any ‘cable-stayed bascule bridges’ in existence.

“I was surprised at how the answers went from something like ‘there must be at least a few’ to ‘I don’t know if there are any’ to ‘the engineers say it will work’,” he continued. “Anyway, I don't think there are any cable-stayed lift spans in existence, and if that’s true I don’t believe such a novel design could have been legitimately vetted in such a short amount of time. I would have liked to have spoken with the engineers themselves, but they weren’t present.”

Intrigued, I wrote to Sebastien Ricard, the creator of the three designs and a director of the London-based Wilkinson Eyre architecture firm, to ask for more details. Below is my Q&A with him, with links to various bridges he mentions.

Q: One of the designs is for a cable-stayed bascule bridge. It seems the Erasmus bridge in Rotterdam which provided the inspiration has the cable-stayed portion separate from the moving bascule portion. Are there any working examples in the world where the cables actually lift the span, or would this proposed bridge be something new?

A: The Erasmus bridge was highlighted through our presentation as an example of Cable Stayed bridge for people not familiar with the bridge terminology to understand what a “cable stayed bridge” is, not as inspiration as such. Regarding example of “cable supported moving bridges”, bascule system, a few examples would be:

Tyne Bridge [photo left] in Newcastle UK, by Wilkinson Eyre Architects built in 2001. - Binic Port Footbridge 1993 Architect Fauniere Lafon France Britany - La Porta d’Europa Construction 2000 in Catalonia (not a cable stayed structure as such but a bridge which is “working” in a similar structural way).

Q: Are there any working examples of the reverse bascule bridge you proposed? (Aside from the one in the Van Gogh painting, of course!)

A: The “reverse bascule” bridge system or high level counterweight bascule system is a very familiar and well know opening bridge technology. The existing Johnson Street Bridge based on Strauss Design is one example.

Other examples would be: Alcacer Do Sal Bascule Bridge - Bordigue Canal Road Bridge, Sete, France - Brother Edmund Ignatius Waterford Ireland 1982-86 - Diffenebrucke Bridge on the Rhine River 1986-87 - Forton Lake Opening Bridge UK, 2000 - Demmin Bridge Germany 1998-2000

Also regarding Rolling Bascule bridges, see below a few examples: Canary Wharf Rolling Bridge [photo right] Wilkinson Eyre Architects - Bizerte Tunisia 1978-1980 - Borensberg Bascule Bridge Sweden - Dvorcoviy Most Bridge, St Petersburg 1977-78 on the Neva River.

Q: If these designs are new, how long would it take to render them into working engineering plans?

A: Our 3 proposals are based on bridge and movable bridge principle which are not new as such (examples of these typologies of structure exist as noted above) but each of these proposals has been tailored to respond to site specific issues and to create a new landmark, a gateway to Victoria: A unique bridge design rather than a “copy” of another bridge which wouldn’t respond to the specific site constraints.

As for every bespoke [i.e. “custom-made to the buyer's specification”] design (whether these are for Bridges or other Architectural/ Structural designs) there is the need to refine the design, test it, up to detail design stage before we can prepare a set of Tender Information. The timing for this work relates to the type of procurement: as to whether or not the design team prepares all the design information or whether the design team completes a set of “detail design information” which is then given to a Contractor who will complete the remaining part of the design.

This type of procurement allows the contractor to start the construction at an early stage, without having to rely on the full information on the design being completed (this type of procurement is typically used in fast track programmes.)

The decision on the procurement methodology hasn’t yet been finalized but will be shortly in association with the City of Victoria.

To Ricard’s credit, these are not cookie-cutter designs. On September 8, when he revealed the three, he repeatedly referred to wanting to “explore” various ideas with each one. In his cable-stayed bridge, for example, the support span actually bows down as the movable span lifts. In his rolling bascule, pedestrians would actually be able to walk through the wheel [drawing below left], and watch the mechanism of the bridge as it raises.

It’s great that Victoria could have a one-of-a-kind bridge. But this does create a new problem. As Ricard said, “there is the need to refine the design, test it, up to detail design stage” to create working engineering plans and procure materials. According to the timeline presented by the City’s engineering department on May 21, work in the water on a new bridge must begin in November. That’s five weeks from now. I spoke with an American bridge engineer who’s been watching this project with interest, and he told me that the City’s schedule is “extremely aggressive”: hundreds of details will have to line up perfectly if the project is to be finished by March 2011. Getting working engineering plans will be only the first of them.

Consequently, even if the City does get federal-provincial infrastructure stimulus funding, it’s highly unlikely a new bridge will be finished by March 2011 when the stimulus money runs out. That won’t matter much to MMM, the firm overseeing the project, because they’ll get paid anyway. But it makes a huge difference to Victoria taxpayers, who will be covering all the bills after March 2011.

It will be exciting to see which design wins the City’s popularity contest tomorrow. Unfortunately, Victorians still don’t know who’s doling out the prize money – and how much of it will be coming out of their own pockets.

UPDATE (September 24, 2009): An emotional day at City Hall. Victoria was turned down for federal-provincial infrastructure money. The council went ahead and chose a new design anyway: the rolling bascule, mainly because it was unanimously endorsed by the Citizens’ Advisory Committee. The City may have a tough time selling it to the public, though. The cable-stayed actually got more votes (2572 or 49.5%) than the rolling bascule (1885 votes or 36.3%) in the online and onsite surveys.

That Old Blue Bridge

2009-08-27T10:13:00.000-07:00

This evening, Victoria’s city council will introduce a bylaw to borrow $63-million to replace the Johnson Street Bridge. Then, on September 8, City Hall will unveil three possible designs for the replacement, as part of a huge PR campaign to generate enthusiasm for a new bridge – and make Victorians forget about the one that’s already there.

Up front, I should mention that I’m a director of johnsonstreetbridge.org, a group that’s criticized the hurried, closed-door process that’s so far marked our city’s most expensive public-works project. But as someone who also writes a local history blog, and values what’s unique about Victoria, I think it’s also necessary to explain the background of the existing bridge before it's sentenced to death.

Politicians argued over the Johnson Street Bridge for nearly 25 years before it was built. In 1888, a steel swing bridge was constructed across the Inner Harbour, bringing the E&N railway into downtown to satisfy Victoria’s demands for a national-rail connection promised by Confederation. But within a decade, Victorians began calling for a new bridge to carry a wider variety of vehicles, including newfangled automobiles, enabling a direct traffic route from Oak Bay to Esquimalt.

In 1911, the British Columbia government bought the Songhees native reserve on west side of the harbour, and then plunged into negotiations over a new bridge, and who should pay for it, with the City of Victoria, the E&N, and the B.C. Electric streetcar company. The parties didn’t reach an agreement until 1919. In a referendum the following year, fed-up Victorians voted six-to-one in favour of a municipal bylaw to borrow money to construct a new bridge.

For designs, the City turned to Joseph Baermann Strauss (photo right). Born in Cincinnati, Strauss was a poet and self-promoting romantic who never obtained an engineering degree, but learned everything about bridge-building while working for construction firms. In Chicago, around 1902, he patented an improved steel bascule (the French word for “see-saw”) drawbridge, using a huge concrete counterweight to balance the span upon a fixed-heel trunnion, or set of axles, ingeniously enabling the overhead truss to fold up as the span lifted. Thanks to the growing demands of automobile traffic, and availability of electric power for lifting motors, Strauss created some 400 bascule drawbridges around the world. His reputation as the “king of drawbridges” in turn got him the job as chief engineer of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. (Strauss is sometimes erroneously called the “designer” of the Golden Gate, but historians have shown that the real credit should have gone to his employees.)

The City of Victoria’s engineering office, led by F.M. Preston, built the Johnson Street Bridge’s substructure and approaches. Another team, using steel shipped from Ontario, assembled the Strauss bascules with the spans pointing upright to attach the counterweights. There were a few hangups – unions threatened to strike because day-labourers worked on the site, and lawsuits plagued the city’s expropriation of land around the bridge – and it did not officially open until January 11, 1924. British Columbia premier John Oliver told the thousands attending the ceremony, “I wish to congratulate the people upon the completion of a protracted and somewhat expensive undertaking.” The final cost was $918,000, some 27 percent higher than first estimated – a cautionary tale for Victoria’s councillors, who maintain that the City can build a new bridge within budget by March 2011.

Such history has value. The top photo, for example, is taken from the August issue of United Airlines’ in-flight magazine, proving that the old bridge is one of the elements that gives Victoria’s Inner Harbour its unique charm. Below is a scene from the 1999 movie Excess Baggage, which the producers shot in Victoria specifically to use the bridge:

This past April, Vancouver heritage expert Harold Kalman delivered a report – which the City has not publicly released, but you can download here – identifying the bridge as a “very significant heritage landmark” of Victoria’s industrial and transportation history. It’s unknown exactly how many of Strauss’s bascule bridges survive today – perhaps a few dozen – but several are identified as historic sites, such as Toronto’s 1931-built Cherry Street Bridge. Nathan Holth, a Michigan researcher who runs historicbridges.org, told me that all movable bridges are rare, mainly because they're built only to cross navigable rivers or canals where the long approaches for a high-reaching fixed bridge would be impossible. He considers ours an “important heritage bridge,” especially unique because it is actually two differently-sized parallel bridges that can be lifted independently.

Admittedly, preserving history also has a price. The City is pushing for a new bridge mainly because an engineering assessment said it would cost $25 million to rehabilitate the old one, although most of that is for seismic upgrading. Steel bridges, especially ones with intricate latticework like ours, contain thousands of difficult-to-reach joints, often hiding corrosion that’s accelerated by salty air. Repairing and repainting such bridges is an ongoing headache, especially compared to ones made of concrete. Nevertheless, some places re-invest in their old steel bridges. Toronto refurbished its Cherry Street Bridge for $2.6 million in 2007, and recently Boston and San Francisco spent tens of millions renovating their Strauss drawbridges as well.

Some say that paying anything to renew our bridge is a waste because it’s “ugly”, but that’s a superficial judgement. The truth, most apparent and impressive when you see it working, is that the Johnson Street Bridge is a giant machine from a vanished age. It’s like a rare and unusual grandfather clock – one which the owner has decided is too much trouble to repair, and now wants to replace with a shiny new timepiece under warranty.

This would be repeating a mistake the City has made before. We once had streetcars, a public market building, and the grand Victoria Brewery, and we demolished them all in the name of “progress”. Now, too late, we wish we had kept them. You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.

PS Thanks to Deddeda Stemler for the opening photo, and Lotus Johnson for the one of the latticework. The Johnson Street Bridge not only inspires photographers, but musicians too: check out these videos by The Bills and an ‘80s punk band, The Wardells.

Oh, Tallulah!

2009-08-19T10:19:00.000-07:00

Once in a while, I dream about opening a bar. Nothing big – something the size of Smoking Lily’s 4 x 11 boutique on Johnson Street, actually – decorated in velvet and faux fur. A kind of Big Bad John’s for drag queens, serving expensive martinis, and adorned with a shrine to Tallulah Bankhead, the most flamboyant tourist to have passed through this city in the last 50 years.

In sober moments, though, I realize that my Tallulah’s would have a hard time keeping up with the notorious reputation of its namesake. Tallulah Brockman Bankhead was born in Alabama in 1902, into a prominent political family – her grandfather and uncle were U.S. senators, and her father was Speaker of the House of Representatives – but she became an actress, famous for her outrageous performances both on and off stage as she blazed through Broadway, London’s West End, and Hollywood.

In her cigarette-scorched, baritonal voice, Tallulah provided gossip columnists with hundreds of shocking bon mots. She openly admitted to drinking heavily and dabbling with drugs: “Cocaine isn’t habit-forming, darling. I should know, I’ve been taking it for years.” She claimed to have enjoyed more than 500 sexual partners, including actors John Barrymore and Johnny (Tarzan) Weissmuller – and Joan Crawford, and Marlene Dietrich too, who called her “the most immoral woman alive.”

“I’m a lesbian,” Tallulah once announced to a stranger at a party. “What do you do?”

Tallulah’s connection to Victoria came through Dola Cavendish, the youngest daughter of James Dunsmuir, the coal baron and British Columbia premier who built Hatley Castle (now Royal Roads University) in 1908. After her brief marriage to Cmdr. Henry Cavendish (wedding photo at right), Dola moved to London, worked in the fashion business, and spent every free minute at West End theatres. She became captivated by Tallulah, who developed such a rabid following during the 1920s that hordes of screaming “gallery girls” threw flowers to her from the balconies after every performance. Dola insinuated herself into Tallulah’s circle, and became the star’s secretary and trusted friend, travelling with her everywhere.

But in 1941, Dola’s sister Kathleen died in an air raid on London, and Dola moved back to Victoria to take care of Kathleen’s daughters. She built a mansion named Dolaura (photo below left), on property her father had willed to her, at 501 Belmont Road in Colwood. From then on Tallulah visited Victoria regularly – with Dola shouting at the airport, “Make way for Miss Bankhead!” – and stayed at Dolaura for weeks at a time.

Tallulah’s house parties were epic. Freda Bemister, who worked as a housekeeper at Dolaura in the 1960s, recalls that one time a drunken judge got his car stuck in the mud outside the house, and the tow-truck driver was rewarded by drinking champagne from Tallulah’s shoe. “I never made a pot of coffee the entire time I was there,” says Mrs. Bemister, whose husband was often recruited to go buy more cases of Dola’s favourite gin. “Miss Bankhead never ate breakfast. Instead, she asked for mint juleps.”

Tallulah, a born exhibitionist, also spent much of her time parading around the house in the nude, enjoying the feeling of the ocean air on her naked body. “The cook wouldn’t serve Miss Bankhead dinner unless she had her clothes on, which wasn’t very often,” says Mrs. Bemister. (Tallulah often acted without panties, too: during filming of her best-known movie, 1944’s Lifeboat, director Alfred Hitchcock heard so many complaints from other actors that he famously said he wasn’t sure whether the problem should be referred to the makeup department, or hairdressing.)

Although Dola rarely left the mansion, Tallulah did get out to enjoy Victoria’s arts scene. Through the painter Flemming Jorgensen, married to one of Dola’s relatives, Tallulah got to know members of The Limners collective. (That’s Jorgensen and Tallulah at right, in 1959.) In 1963 she performed at the Royal Theatre in a touring comedy, and in 1964 she endowed several seats at the McPherson Playhouse to help pay for its renovations.

Tallulah even enlisted Freda Bemister to read a script for a trashy 1965 psychodrama, entitled Die! Die! My Darling. “‘Tell me if you think this suits me,’ she said,” Mrs. Bemister recalls. “It did.” (You can watch the whole thing here, although better is Tallulah’s “Celebrity Next Door” episode on the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Comedy Hour, playlisted here.)

Dola died in 1966, leaving Tallulah $30,000 in her will. Tallulah provided a bed of roses for the funeral, and a pillow of gardenias for Dola’s head. Tallulah died two years later, of double pneumonia; reportedly her final words were “Codeine – bourbon.” The federal government took over Dolaura but let the mansion fall into ruin, and tore it down in 1996.

Tallulah’s legend has endured, however. She inspired female impersonator Craig Russell, and the Cruella De Vil character (left) in Disney’s 101 Dalmations. Her autobiography, the #5 bestseller of 1952, remains in print and available for Amazon’s Kindle. And Looped, a comedy based on an incident when Tallulah took eight hours to re-record a single line for her last movie, is currently playing on Broadway.

Victoria playwright Laura Harris is also workshopping her own drama, My Darlin’, about the relationship between Tallulah and Dola. “They both had weaknesses, and through those weaknesses they became great friends,” says Harris, who promises a “voyeuristic” play of imagined conversations between the two women – that also hint at their romance, which has long been speculated about but never confirmed. “No matter how you see it, it was a loving relationship that lasted for many years,” Harris says.

Reportedly during one of Tallulah’s last visits to Canada, a customs officer checking passports asked her if she was the Tallulah Bankhead. She replied, “I’m what’s left of her, darling.” Even 41 years after her death, what’s left of Tallulah is hard to ignore.

PS Thanks to Royal Roads University Archives for providing many of the above photos.

UPDATE (August 26, 2009): A letter appeared in this week’s Monday Magazine, regarding the above post:

In the very early 1960s, I worked for a veterinarian. I was 17 or 18 and very naïve, especially about women – especially older women. Mrs. Dola Cavendish (Dola Dunsmuir in your article) had one of her dogs in the clinic and it was due to go home, but no one was available to pick it up. The vet asked if I could take it home for Mrs. Cavendish; I agreed. I understood Tallulah Banhkead was in town and staying with her.

I knew about Tallulah, but didn’t think I had seen her in the movies. Reputation said she might be a cross between a vamp and a tramp – on and off the stage. Upon arrival, I was shown in with the dog. Tallulah rushed over and held my chin, saying, “Oh, dahling, isn’t he so sweet!” Uh oh, I could feel my face go a very deep vermilion. “Do come and sit down,” she said. I could see they were drinking, so I stammered that I was told to return to the clinic immediately.

A short meeting with Tallulah was much too big for this teenager!

Gerry Harris, Victoria

Paving Paradise

2009-07-23T21:13:00.000-07:00

There are two seasons in Canada, some say: winter, and roadwork. Since we’re enjoying the latter, it’s time to consider the history of roads – without which summer vacations, countless pop songs, and much of our contemporary economy would not exist.

Several of Victoria’s earliest roads originated as trails, cut by the Songhees natives to reach their seasonal hunting grounds. When canoeing back from the north, the Songhees sometimes landed at Cordova Bay to avoid the rough water at Ten Mile Point, and hiked past Cedar Hill (today’s Mount Douglas) along a trail to the Inner Harbour. That trail later became Cedar Hill Road. Another trail split off and ran to their village at Cadboro Bay, where they launched canoes for salmon fishing. Today, that trail is Cedar Hill X Road.

Colonial officials commissioned other early roads. Governor James Douglas requested a trail to Sooke in 1851, which became a rough version of today’s Sooke Road in the 1870s. After three sailors drowned trying to row from the Esquimalt naval base to Fort Victoria, an admiral ordered his men to cut and pave a gravel road to the fort in 1852 – thus building the first true roadway in British Columbia, now known as Old Esquimalt Road. (That’s part of it in the photo above, behind the Songhees settlement on the Inner Harbour.) In 1854, the colony commissioned a road to Craigflower farm, which provided much of Fort Victoria’s food, and that route today is Craigflower Road.

It became a challenge to finance a rapidly-expanding road system, however. In 1860, Douglas passed a law requiring landowners to donate six days of labour per year to road construction; when they howled with outrage, he imposed a property tax instead. Many Vancouver Islanders also opposed merging their colony with British Columbia in 1866 because they didn’t want to be saddled with the mainland’s huge road-building expenses – a problem Douglas solved by charging tolls on the mainland’s busiest routes.

Further pressure came from owners of the new vehicles that started appearing in town. Victorians got caught up in the cycling mania that swept North America in the 1890s, and city cycling clubs fed up with muddy streets joined a continent-wide “Good Roads” lobbying movement, which intensified after the arrival of the first automobiles in Victoria in 1899. Businessmen, doctors, and church ministers bought many of the city’s first cars – at left is a photo of a few members of the city elite, motoring in Beacon Hill Park in 1906 – and they insisted that better roads would expand the local economy.

Indeed, some sectors of the economy quickly made use of cars and improved roads. As G.W. Taylor noted in his book, The Automobile Saga of British Columbia, 1864-1914, “The real estate industry was the leading business in Victoria at this time; practically the whole male population being preoccupied in the buying and selling of land. The firms engaged in this business in Victoria totalled over two hundred and fifty, and many were possessors of automobiles.”

Sometimes the political pressure was personal, and direct. Major J.F.L. MacFarlane, fed up with the 1864-built wagon trail he had to take over the Malahat to get to his farm in Mill Bay, decided in 1903 to survey his own route through Goldstream (photo right), and then gathered Victorians’ signatures on a petition – the sheet grew over nine feet long – demanding a proper road. The provincial government, anticipating an election, agreed to build the Malahat Drive along MacFarlane’s route. When the road officially opened in 1911, he was the first to drive upon it.

By this time, the principles of road engineering had been well-established, mainly based upon the work of J.L. McAdam, a Scot who demonstrated early in the 19th century a method for building durable roads, using bits of stone jigsawed together and filled in with gravel. Such “macadamised” roads couldn’t stand up to heavy downtown traffic, however, and the city began experimenting with other surfaces. It paved Wharf Street with vitrified brick, but many complained that the noise of iron cart wheels upon the surface was unbearable. So in 1899, the city began paving with blocks of wood.

The early trials were a disaster. Even though many cities like Toronto and Vancouver already had wood-block pavements, Victoria didn’t study their work and used blocks of untreated fir that rotted away after a few years. In 1907 the city built a huge creosote plant to preserve the wood, and began paving on a massive scale. In January of 1908, labourers paved Government Street with 330,000 pieces of fir, and in April the city ordered a million more. By the end of that year, nearly all downtown streets west of Douglas and south of Herald were paved with wood blocks – including Waddington Alley (photo left), the only place in the city where you can still see them today.

What replaced them, of course, was asphalt. This sandy petroleum goo, which naturally occurs in rare asphalt lakes, was first used for paving roads in the ancient city of Babylon. At the end of the 19th century, however, inventors came up with ways to produce asphalt from oil, and it quickly became the pavement of choice – smooth, durable, and easily applied with a few men and a steamroller. In 1909, property owners voted to have Douglas Street covered with asphalt instead of wood. By 1917, the city had 89 kilometres of asphalt streets.

After World War II, asphalt conquered the planet – in the United States some 61,000 square miles of land are now under pavement, an area the size of Wisconsin. But perhaps we are beginning to recognize limits to such growth. Following the oil price shocks of the 1970s, some cities started recycling their road surfaces – in 1984, Victoria became the first town in Canada to have its own asphalt recycling plant – and since then, community groups like Portland’s Depave have sprung up, dedicated to “the removal of unnecessary concrete and asphalt.” Sometimes, all people really want is a footpath through the bush.

PS Many thanks to Janis Ringuette for providing research materials for this article, and City of Victoria streets manager Hector Furtado for answering my questions.

The Legend of Knockan Hill

2009-06-16T11:08:00.000-07:00

“Victoria is a strange place,” wrote Franz Boas in his 1886 diary. “I have never seen such a mixture of people among such a small number of inhabitants.” Just 28 years old and freshly arrived from Germany, he was impressed by the city’s Chinese residents, black settlers, and “endless Indians of various tribes” – the perfect place for an ethnographer starting a career.

Over the next eight years, Boas (right) passed through Victoria many times on journeys up the coast, collecting native folktales and other artifacts, rightly fearing they would disappear as colonialism encroached upon First Nations communities. In 1895, he published (in German) Indian Myths and Legends from the North Pacific Coast of America – the best record of British Columbia’s early lore, and the book that launched Boas’ reputation as “the father of American anthropology.” The book was finally printed in English in 2002, thanks to Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy, directors of the Victoria-based B.C. Indian Language Project.

Unfortunately, Boas did not record many stories from the capital region. He visited the Songhees settlement on the west side of the Inner Harbour in 1886, but had difficulty finding anyone to speak with him. Many villagers mourned the recent death of a chief’s child, and feared that Boas worked for the E&N railway, which threatened to run tracks through their settlement – and ultimately did, in 1888. As he later wrote, “The close vicinity of the city has had a very detrimental influence for the Songhees.”

But Boas did hear one Songhees legend: “The Wives of the Stars,” about Knockan Hill, which rises just north of Portage Inlet.

According to the story, there once were two sisters who gazed up at the night sky and wished that two of the stars would be their husbands. When they awoke, they discovered that the stars were men, and had taken them up to the heavens. Soon they missed life on Earth, so they dug a hole in the sky, lowered a rope, and climbed down, landing on Ñga’kun – a name derived from a Salish word for “rocks on top”, Bouchard and Kennedy note, and anglicized as “Knockan”.

“A young man who obeys the laws scrupulously, bathes frequently and has never touched a woman, is able to see the rope on Mount Ñga’kun,” the tale concludes. “It is invisible for other people.”

Boas wasn’t the first white man to hear this story. Robert Brown, a Scottish botanist, had also recorded a version of the Knockan Hill legend and published it in his 1873 book, The Races of Mankind. Brown superficially labelled it a variation of the fairytale of Jack and The Beanstalk – “a strange myth found among nearly all nations, savage and civilised” – but his rendering also contains some interesting differences.

Instead of landing on a hill, the sisters “found themselves near the valley of the Colquitz not far from their own home with the rope lying beside them. So they coiled it up, and Hselse [a spirit] made it into a hill [Knockan] as a monument, to remind mortals not to weary for what is not their lot. And after this the girls went back to Quonsong [the Gorge], and became great medicine-women, but remained single, all for love of the ‘little people’ above.”

(You can read Boas’ version of the legend here, and download a Word document of Brown’s complete version here.)

Today, Knockan Hill is a charming 11-hectare park straddling the Saanich-View Royal border. At its south end sits Stranton Lodge (1248 Burnside Road West), an arts-and-crafts-style cottage (left) built in 1934 by Tom and Maude Hall, two teachers originally from England. Their former back yard, purchased by Saanich in 1973, contains a trail that winds through a forest of Douglas and grand fir (with an active eagle’s nest), up to a Garry oak meadow with panoramic views of Mount Baker and downtown. The Friends of Knockan Hill clear invasive Scotch broom from this grassy peak, to preserve camas and other native food plants – good work that tries to correct both the environmental and cultural wrongs of our past.

It’s a fine spot to watch the stars, look for the rope from the heavens, and meditate upon Franz Boas’ first impressions of Victoria – a strange place, and wondrous too.

Gorilla Radio Interview

2009-05-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

Chris Cook's Gorilla Radio on CFUV is the best activist radio program in town. This past Victoria Day, Chris had me on to talk about local economic elites and First Nations history. You can listen to a podcast of the show here.

King of The Boondoggles, Part II (with video)

2009-05-16T21:10:00.000-07:00

Quite a spike in traffic to this blog recently, mainly because of an earlier post about Frank Hertel, the oily businessman who used research-and-development tax credits to buy up Victoria real estate in the 1980s, and then fled the country, charged with tax evasion. On May 9, Hertel was arrested in London, England, after 23 years on the lam. The federal government is applying to have Hertel extradited back to Canada.

As I said previously, and the Times Colonist elaborated today, Hertel did rather well hiding out in Venezuela. But the T-C neglected to mention what Hertel has been up to lately, and exactly why the RCMP nabbed him last week.

Early in 2007, I started corresponding with a man in Germany who saw my blog and wanted more information about Hertel’s time in Victoria. As he told me, he knows people who invested heavily with Hertel in the 1990s, and have been tied up in litigation ever since. In response, he has continued to provide me with details about Hertel’s recent activities in Europe.

Hertel has been returning to Germany regularly since 1994 to raise money for various schemes, especially a “hybrid” method of drilling for oil that simultaneously taps geothermal energy to power the wells. In 2004, Hertel registered a UK company, IEC Europetrol, with a head office in London – a city he apparently visited regularly.

Currently, Hertel is principally operating as IEC International Energy Corporation, with offices in Phoenix and the British Virgin Islands. (His company names may change, but Hertel keeps using the old Data 70 IEC logo he slapped 25 years ago on his Carey Road office building, photo above right.) Last December, IEC signed a deal with the government of Albania, using Hertel’s hybrid technology on that country’s Visoka oil field. Here’s a video of Hertel making the announcement, and promising to bring Albania a green energy “revolution”:

Will his investors be satisfied? The Visoka field has been online for 36 years, and produces just 240 barrels a day. But that may have been enough for rivals to notify the RCMP about exactly when Hertel was flying into London: according to a comment by “mmeier” from Hamburg to CBC’s online version of the story, the Mounties acted this month only because they “got a tip off by people who wants to stop the IEC making business with Russia and Albania”. Stay tuned for more details.

UPDATE (May 20, 2009): Hertel remains in custody in the UK because he can’t come up with £500,000 for bail, the T-C reports today. His next court appearance is Friday, May 22.

UPDATE (September 21, 2010): Hertel is out of jail. According to this item in today’s T-C, a London court ruled that Hertel could not be extradited to Canada, because prosecutors failed to prove that his alleged actions would have been an offence in the UK. His lawyer says Hertel will remain in the UK until it’s clear whether or not Canada will appeal the verdict.

Ugly Victorians

2009-05-15T10:58:00.000-07:00

I’m taking this month off to finish a book proposal, so here’s an oldie but a goodie from the original Secrets book, updated in time for the Imperial festivities of Victoria Day.

As anyone who visits quickly notices, Victoria is whiter than a Klan rally in a snowstorm. The 2006 census showed that visible minorities make up only 10 percent of greater Victoria’s population, while the provincial average is 25 percent. Could it be that ugly aspects of Victoria’s history have deterred some people from moving here?

The Last Stand of Mifflin Gibbs: Philadelphia-born Mifflin Wistar Gibbs arrived here in 1858 with 250 American blacks who’d been persecuted in California and sought refuge under a British flag. Gibbs opened a grocery business, and later became a popular city councillor, but he was also barred from sitting in the best seats of Victoria’s concert halls. So one night in 1861, Gibbs and several black friends tested the rule by sitting in the dress circle of the Victoria Theatre. One performer refused to take the stage, and a storeowner handed out onions to throw at Gibbs’ party. When a bag of flour was tossed on the black pioneers, Gibbs and a friend threw punches at their attackers. All involved were arrested, but the result of the “riot” was the posting of notices that blacks were welcome only in the theatre’s gallery. After it abolished slavery in 1863, Gibbs went back to the United States.

Then We Take Berlin: On May 7, 1915, a German U-boat torpedoed the liner Lusitania off the coast of Ireland. Nearly 1,200 passengers died, including 21-year-old lieutenant James “Boy” Dunsmuir, the beloved son of Victoria coal baron James Dunsmuir. Members of James’ Victoria-based regiment were enraged, and the following night they took revenge upon the bar in the German-owned Kaiserhof Hotel (now the Demitasse café), where they threw spitoons and smashed mirrors. The mob then vandalized a German social club on Government Street, and Simon Leiser’s warehouse on Yates. (Leiser’s bust was removed from the Royal Theatre for safekeeping, but it was never returned and its location remains a mystery.) The mayor had to read the riot act and call in the cavalry to quell the disturbance.

Yellow Peril: Victoria’s often been afraid that it’s about to be overwhelmed by immigrants from Asia. In 1878, the B.C. government passed its first law against Chinese immigration, and over the next 30 years created dozens more – requiring English-language fluency, for example, or forbidding long men’s hair – even though such laws were repeatedly struck down by the federal government or the courts. Undaunted, in 1909, premier Richard McBride told a convention of his Conservative party, “We stand for a white British Columbia, a white land, and a white Empire.” Chinese residents didn’t get the vote in B.C. until 1947, Japanese residents not until 1949. Some might wonder if local attitudes have improved that much: when four shiploads of Chinese refugee claimants arrived off Vancouver Island in August of 1999, the Times Colonist published the headline “Go Home” on its front page, with results of a phone-in “poll” showing that more than 3,000 readers wanted the boat people deported immediately.

Mr. Christie, You Defend Bad Cookies: Known nationally as the defence lawyer for anti-Holocaust teacher Jim Keegstra and hate-literature peddler Ernst Zundel, Doug Christie has been the centre of controversy almost since the day he moved to Victoria in 1970. A strict vegetarian who neither smokes nor drinks, Christie works out of a windowless parking lot attendant’s booth across the street from the downtown courthouse, and continues to crop up in the news as a fringe political candidate and advocate for the indefensible. In 2007, Christie represented Nazi prison guard Michael Seifert, who was eventually extradited from Canada to Italy to serve a life sentence for war crimes.

Want to know more about the influence the conquering British had – and still have – in Victoria? UVic students have created an “anti-imperialist walking tour” that reveals the unpleasant histories behind several city landmarks. Check out the online tour here.

A Drop to Drink

2009-04-15T08:51:00.000-07:00

Victorians endured a couple of rainy weeks at the beginning of April – but the rest of the world hasn’t been so lucky. Bush fires ravaged Australia, activists at the World Water Forum demanded that water be recognized as a fundamental human right, and California has faced water rationing. So it’s a good time to celebrate a blessed component of our local infrastructure: Victoria’s water supply, the product of a century of engineering, foresight, and legal wrangling.

As noted on this blog previously, Victoria originally piped in its water from Spring Ridge (today’s Fernwood), and then, starting in 1874, from Elk Lake. By 1904, though, it was clear that even vast Elk Lake wasn’t sufficient. Many of Victoria’s 30,000 residents were connected to the water system, often preventing enough pressure for fire hoses – a dangerous predicament in a wood-built town. So the city’s leaders looked westward, to the rain-drenched Sooke Hills.

They were not the first. In 1892, Theodore Lubbe, a successful fur merchant, had started building a series of dams in the headwaters of the Goldstream River, and then piping the water – which gained tremendous pressure as it fell from his hilltop reservoirs – to the Esquimalt naval base. He also earned good money selling the water to a hydroelectric station downstream (left) that generated power for Victoria’s streetlights and streetcars. The city took a dim view of Lubbe, however. It argued that the province had originally given Victoria exclusive rights to all water within 20 miles (32 km) of the city, and it sued. In 1906 the case went all the way to the Privy Council in England, and Victoria lost.

What to do? The following year, the city recruited Arthur L. Adams, a San Francisco water expert, to assess Victoria’s options. After surveying the region, Adams reported that Sooke Lake “would prove an almost ideal source of supply,” providing up to 23 million gallons daily, “sufficient for several hundred thousand people.” In a 1908 referendum, Victorians approved Adams’ plan, and the city went to work, buying up summer cottages on the lakefront, and building a 43-kilometre concrete flowline (right) all the way around the hills – thus avoiding Lubbe’s property – to the Humpback reservoir and a new water main to the city. Mayor Alexander Stewart turned on the taps at the Sooke dam on May 28, 1915. “Few cities in western Canada,” the Victoria Daily Times announced, “will be able to boast of such a satisfactory supply as will be afforded by the system which is opened to-day.”

Such a strategic asset created its own concerns. World War I raged at the time, and the city declared the watershed a restricted area, guarded by soldiers on the lookout for German espionage. (Caretakers still patrol the watershed today, mainly to shoo away hikers and would-be marijuana farmers.) During WWII, the federal government also ordered Victoria to start disinfecting its water with chlorine as a security measure. The city continued the practice after the war, despite public protests, because the Greater Victoria Water District started logging the watershed in 1949 to finance improvements to the water system. (Victoria has never added fluoride to its water, thanks to region-wide referendums against fluoridation in 1959.)

Duly protected, the abundant water enabled Victoria to enjoy an industrial boom. During the 1950s, for example, the Sidney Roofing and Paper Company, which stood on the site of today’s Ocean Pointe resort, used as much as a quarter of the city’s total daily supply, consuming 200 tons of water to make every ton of its paper. The water district had already acquired Lubbe’s facilities at Goldstream – his biggest customer dried up when the huge Jordan River power station came on line in 1911 – but by the 1960s, the city’s water system needed to expand again. At a cost of $5.6 million, it dug a nine-kilometre tunnel through the rock (click on photo left), connecting Sooke Lake directly to a treatment facility and the Humpback reservoir, and built a larger dam, opened in 1970, that tripled the system’s daily capacity.

The 1990s, however, proved the most challenging decade for Victoria's water system.

1992: The water district board decides the system still doesn’t have enough capacity for extended dry periods, and begins work to raise the Sooke dam, triggering protests that the water will be contaminated by decades of logging, and that the focus should be on conservation instead of greater capacity.

1994: The B.C. Supreme Court rules that the water district has never had legal authority to commercially log the watershed, but can log to build new water facilities.

1995: More than 100 Victorians fall sick with toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection – the first time the disease is linked to municipal water. Investigators determine the outbreak was caused by the feces of wild cats at the Humpback reservoir. The water department closes the reservoir and, on the orders of the region’s chief medical officer, begins construction of a $12.5-million disinfection plant that uses ultraviolet light to neutralize micro-organisms that aren’t killed by chlorine. When the UV plant (pictured below right) opens in 2004, it's the biggest on the continent.

1996: As the water district clears timber to prepare for the expansion of Sooke Lake, the province appoints special commissioner David Perry to assess the governance of the water supply. Perry recommends creation of a new, accountable regional water commission. A year later, the commission approves raising the dam.

1999: The Capital Regional District secures the Sooke watershed by negotiating a 1,300-hectare land swap with Kapoor Lumber, a company that has been logging in and around Sooke Lake since the 1920s. The company is owned by the two daughters of Kapoor Singh, both doctors, who use the profits to run a clinic in the Punjab.

The Sooke Lake dam was finally raised in 2002, and the city’s water wars have been pretty quiet ever since. Victoria’s system now boasts a capacity of some 25 billion gallons, enough to supply the city for two years without any rainfall. In 2007, it recieved an “A” for reliability and public health in a national comparison of municipal water; that year, the CRD also bought the 8,761-hectare Leech River watershed for $59 million, anticipating that the city will need its water in 25 years as well. Unlike many parched places, it seems Victoria has enough water to keep on growing.

CRD Water is giving free tours of its Sooke Lake facilities from May 4 to 9, to mark National Drinking Water Week. For reservations, call 250-413-4207.

PS As you can tell from the story above, our water system heavily relies upon old-fashioned gravity. The system also has to fight against Newton’s discovery, however, because many Victorians live on hills, and water has to be pumped up to numerous reservoirs to serve them. The city’s oldest reservoir is on Smith’s Hill, now Summit Park, but the most distinctive of them sits on Mount Tolmie. (Some people think the reservoir is the concrete slab on the very peak, but that’s the old platform for a WWII radio building. The reservoir is further down, at the end of Cromwell Road.) Built in 1960 (photo left), it contains six million gallons of water and is covered by nearly two acres of concrete. A few years ago it had to be seismically upgraded, for fear that it would unleash a deadly wave on homes below if it cracked open. But why does it have a roof, when other reservoirs are open to the sky? Answer: because planners designed it at the height of the Cold War, and wanted to keep the water safe from nuclear fallout.

PPS Dustin Creviston has created an excellent Wikipedia page on the history of the Sooke flowline, and where to see it. Check it out here.

The Original Salmon Kings

2009-03-19T15:11:00.000-07:00

Some of the prettiest commercial artwork ever created in this province were the labels designed for canned salmon, British Columbia’s biggest export product at the end of the 19th century. Recently at an antique fair I was flipping through a collection of these labels, adorned with cliché Mounties and stoic natives, birchbark canoes and pristine mountains, when a particular one caught my eye.

Many labels were for canneries from the Fraser River, or rich waterways further north, but one proudly declared it was from Victoria. This was my introduction to the dynasty of J.H. Todd and Sons, once the most durable salmon business in British Columbia's history.

Canning was invented in France in the early 19th century so Napoleon’s armies could pack food on their conquests of Europe. By 1871 industrial canning had been perfected, and that year a Scotsman established the first salmon cannery on the Fraser River, capitalizing on its huge runs of sockeye – the best salmon for canning, thanks to its high oil content and generally uniform size of the fish. Over the following decade, salmon canneries sprouted along the B.C. coast like mushrooms.

Jacob Hunter Todd (left) witnessed this growth. An Ontario-born farmer, Todd had made a fortune in Barkerville during the Cariboo gold rush, selling provisions to miners. (His grocery store remains a heritage site in Barkerville today.) He moved to Victoria to establish a dry-goods store on Wharf Street, but in 1882, when he saw the rush to the fishing business, he sank his wealth into a cannery of his own on the Fraser River, near Richmond.

Todd didn’t know much about fish, but he did know how to run a profitable business. Canneries were exempt from the labour laws of the time, so he hired Chinese and Indian workers exclusively, and built up a fleet of his own boats, each flying his horseshoe logo (a tribute to miners’ superstition), to supply the cannery with fish. Todd, who always paid by the piece and never by the hour, was a notorious skinflint: once he asked two Indians to paddle him from the cannery to New Westminster – a considerable task, against the Fraser's current – and rewarded them at the far end with pieces of hardtack biscuits.

Todd then established lucrative markets for canned salmon in England. The Horseshoe brand won prizes at London exhibitions, and was advertised across the city as the “working man’s feast”, half the cost of fresh meat. (A London window display of the time is pictured at right.) In 1898, B.C. exported 826,330 cases of salmon, most of them to the UK. Canned salmon became standard rations in the British army, and Todd became one of Victoria’s wealthiest citizens.

He also dabbled in politics. Todd won the nomination to be the city’s Conservative candidate in the 1878 federal byelection, but gave it to John A. Macdonald, who’d lost his seat in Ontario, so Macdonald could return to parliament; in exchange, Todd reportedly got the PM’s assurances to build the long-promised Esquimalt graving dock. When Todd died in 1899, Victoria's flags flew at half-mast. But as Valerie Green’s 1990 book Excelsior! The Story of The Todd Family describes, his sons continued his legacy. Bert Todd served several terms as city alderman and mayor between 1914 and 1925. Charles Fox Todd, the eldest, grew the family salmon business bigger still.

In 1902, to stop Americans from nabbing Fraser River-destined salmon in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the Canadian government permitted canneries to construct fish traps along southern Vancouver Island. Charles Fox Todd’s five traps near Sooke were the most successful of them all. Built of wire netting and hundreds of fir pilings, the traps ran nearly a kilometre out to sea, creating a maze from which migrating salmon couldn’t escape. (A diagram at left, courtesy of the wonderful Sooke Region Museum, shows how the traps worked.)

In 1905, Todd built a cannery on Esquimalt Harbour to process the fish he trapped in Sooke, as many as 300,000 in a single season. Not everyone was pleased with his success, though: Todd also built guardhouses to protect his traps from poachers and vandalizing fishermen he’d put out of work. One of these “trap shacks” remains on the waterfront hiking trail in East Sooke Regional Park.

Todd also made enemies by refusing to join price-fixing schemes when the salmon runs were poor. Henry Doyle, the businessman who amalgamated many canneries into the huge B.C. Packers conglomerate in the 1920s, wrote that Todd and Sons were “dangerous”: “Their wealth, and the trade they command, make them formidable, while their methods have always been selfish and competitors have never considered them reliable.” Although Todd donated large sums to Victoria charities, Doyle said “he has few friends, and is simply a money-making machine – albeit a very successful one.”

Consequently, when Todd died in 1941, his firm remained one of the few independent canners left in British Columbia. His sons and grandsons took over the business, and in 1946 built a huge cold-storage facility on the Inner Harbour, directly below today’s Bastion Square. By the 1950s, it was said that seven out of 10 cans of salmon on B.C. household shelves were Todd’s.

But the good times were ending. Derek Todd, 87, a grandson who managed the business after returning home from World War II, says that in the 1950s Britain was too poor to afford canned salmon, and B.C. Packers dominated markets in eastern Canada. New seiners could catch more fish than the traps did, and industrialization had polluted the Fraser. “Then the fish disappeared, and that was the end of that.” In 1969, J.H. Todd and Sons closed for good. B.C. Packers divided the assets, and tore down the cold-storage plant and the Esquimalt cannery.

The family tradition did continue, in a sense. David Anderson, the former Victoria MP, is a great-nephew of Charles Fox Todd; as a teenager he toiled in the cold-storage facility, which informed his tenure in the 1990s as federal fisheries minister. Basing one’s livelihood on the size of salmon runs has always been an unpredictable business, Anderson says, “but if you time it right, it’s extremely lucrative.” That’s why the fights for fishing rights have always been so vicious, and why, in 1999 he negotiated renewal of the Pacific Salmon Treaty with the United States, despite the protests of B.C. fishermen. Limiting the commercial catch was the only way to preserve the resource, and the coastal ecosystem.

“In the end, you don’t manage the fish, you manage the people,” Anderson says. Clearly, a lesson learned from generations of experience.

PS A great B.C. Archives film explaining the process of salmon canning is online here. Also, check out this hilarious mock-documentary about the perils of working at a cannery– and scenes of Alaska fish traps – by Victoria filmmaker Andrew Struthers:

UPDATE (March 24, 2009): Although wild salmon runs are far smaller than they once were, it would be a grave mistake to give up on the fish. Alexandra Morton, a courageous biologist, recently won a court decision taking B.C.'s (mainly Norwegian-owned) salmon farms out of the control of the industry-cozy provincial government. Sign her petition to protect wild salmon here. Also, the great D.C. Reid, the Times Colonist's fishing columnist, points out in today's paper that destruction of local salmon habitat is accelerating. A telling excerpt:

Q: I am a retired fisheries scientist from Ontario. Your thoughts on logging damage being the number one problem salmon face makes sense. We drove the circle route from Sooke through Port Renfrew, to Cowichan and Duncan. The logging devastation absolutely sickened us. This trip is touted as a tourist attraction. What a great way to turn the tourists off BC. Where does the DFO fit into all of this? They have some top notch people. We were led to believe that B.C. folks are environmentally oriented. If that's the case then why do you allow this total disregard for the environment and destruction of the natural beauty?
A: I could go on for days, but I'll restrain myself. My eyes tell me that all over the island, the logging rate tripled for the past five years, and the allowable slash that remains has also tripled, meaning they are cutting down all the trees but only taking a few. Both the DFO and the provincial government are to blame. The new, run-of-river electricity production stands to have as great a negative impact as logging.

Sea of Slaughter

2009-02-18T09:37:00.000-08:00

Over the past couple of weeks, three elephant seals have hauled out on city beaches to rest while their fur moults. Crowds of people have showed up to take pictures, curious to see a slippery wild animal up close. But it’s our behaviour that’s just as curious, because it shows how much our relationship to seals has changed: 50 or 100 years ago, Victorians would have clubbed those seals to death.

Every year in March, vast herds of the northern fur seal (Callorhinus ursinus) swim past Vancouver Island, enroute to their summer breeding grounds in Alaska. For centuries, the Nuu-cha-nulth natives had hunted these animals for their thick pelts (far richer than the hairy coats of harbour seals), so when the Hudson’s Bay Company established Fort Victoria in 1843, the natives began offering the pelts for sale. The HBC men were intrigued: sea otter populations were already declining, and the company needed another source of fur. By the 1860s Victoria-based schooners were hunting fur seals along the coast, employing crews of natives armed with harpoons.

Thanks to the HBC, in the mid-19th century fur became affordable in Victorian England. London magazines declared that seal-fur cloaks, touques, and muffs were the height of women’s fashion, and when the Franco-Prussian War ended in 1871, demand boomed across Europe. By 1882, 13 sealing schooners were based in Victoria, selling 20,000 pelts to the London fur market. Then word reached the docks about huge rookeries on the Pribilof Islands, near the southwest coast of Alaska, where two million fur seals haul out to breed between July and November. The race to the north was on.

It was chaos. Foreign hunters clubbed thousands of seals on the islands (see the 1892 photo at top) and sailed away. The American government dispatched warships, claiming the entire Bering Sea as its exclusive territory, and it seized dozens of foreign sealing schooners and threw their crews in jail. But as more vessels arrived it became impossible to police the open water, and the killing escalated.

In 1894, at the height of the industry, Victoria's harbour bristled with the masts of nearly 100 schooners, comprising four-fifths of the entire northwest sealing fleet. That year they brought in 97,474 pelts from Alaska, and the city boomed. Sailors packed the saloons, and stories circulated about notorious Victoria-based captains like Gustav Hansen, the “Flying Dutchman” who’d poached hundreds of Pribilof seals under American gunfire, or Alex MacLean, who was wanted in seven countries and rumoured to have killed dozens of men. As a new biography reveals, Jack London used MacLean as the model for the villainous captain “Wolf” Larsen in his 1904 novel The Sea-Wolf, which has since been made into numerous film versions, starring Edward G. Robinson, Charles Bronson, and Tim Roth.

Under an agreement with the Americans, the hunters were required to use harpoons, but many used guns, and by 1897 they were killing so many seals that the price of skins plunged. The waste was terrible: for every three animals they shot, two sank before they could be harvested. By 1902, only 200,000 northern fur seals remained. Forced to the bargaining table, in 1911 the U.S., Canada, Russia and Japan negotiated the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention, outlawing the open-water hunt in exchange for a percentage of a controlled hunt on the Pribilofs. It was the first international treaty dealing with the conservation of a species.

Not much remains of Victoria’s sealing era today, aside from the “steamboat Gothic” mansion at 507 Head Street, built in 1893 for Captain Victor Jacobsen. (The house, pictured right, is topped with a “widow’s walk” that his wife could pace, waiting for him to return from his nine months at sea.) The old schooners rotted away at anchor. The city’s last living sealer, Max Lohbrunner, lived until the 1960s aboard an old whaling ship, tied to the city garbage wharf; whenever City Hall tried to evict him, he would show up waving the 1911 treaty, claiming it entitled him to remain on the harbour. (After Lohbrunner died, a salvage company dynamited his ship. Its harpoon gun stands in the Maritime Museum of British Columbia, and the ship itself rests on the seabed, just offshore from the Canoe Club.)

Seal-killing didn’t end in 1911. Commercial hunters in B.C. wiped out 500,000 harbour seals and sea lions between 1879 and 1969, selling their skins for leather and their meat for pet food. The federal government also paid fishermen a bounty (up to $5 per snout) to kill thousands more, in the belief that seals were destroying the salmon fishery. During wartime, the Canadian government actually waged military operations against seals: in 1917, the fisheries department used explosives to blow up 300 seals on sandbars along the Fraser River, and in 1944, the Royal Canadian Air Force staged air raids on the Fraser, dropping fragmentation bombs and strafing seals with machine-gun fire.

After the commercial hunt ended in 1969, harbour seals began to rebound. Today they’re near their historic numbers in B.C. waters, of about 100,000 animals. Dr. Peter Olesiuk, a Fisheries and Oceans Canada biologist in Nanaimo, says only a few “nuisance” seals are killed these days, to keep them from interfering with fishing operations or endangered salmon runs. “Overall salmon’s a pretty small part of their diet, about four percent. But they’re opportunistic predators.”

North Coast politicians talked about reviving a commercial hunt as recently as 2003, but Olesiuk says there’s no point. “Harbour seals and sea lions are not a particularly valuable species compared to fur seals or harp seals,” he says. “There don't appear to be any viable markets.”

Every March, activists in Victoria and around the world protest against the seal hunt in Newfoundland. The old-fashioned brutality of clubbing harp seals certainly makes for shocking television, but perhaps our outrage is misplaced. While there are more harp seals in Newfoundland than ever, the northern fur seal’s population has dropped from 1.7 million in the 1970s to 1.2 million today, and it may be relisted as a threatened species. It turns out the Alaska seals are being killed by stray fishing gear and plastic garbage. We may be kinder than our ancestors, but we’re just as lethal.

UPDATE (April 30, 2009): I recently wrote a review of the new biography of Alex MacLean for the Times Colonist – and in the process, came across a bunch of YouTube videos that help illustrate our seal-hunting history.

The northern fur seal doesn’t come ashore in Victoria, so readers might wonder what they look like. There’s a cute video of a pup at the Vancouver Aquarium posted here, but I also love this one, of adults swimming through a kelp forest. They’re far more elegant than the bullet-shaped harbour seals that hang around our shores:

Henry Wood Elliott was an American painter and conservationist who lobbied for the protection of the northern fur seal a century ago. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has posted this biography, with lots of scenes of the Alaska seal rookeries:

Part two of the bio is here, and part three here.

Finally, here’s a trailer for a 2008 version of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf, with Tim Roth as “Death” Larsen (i.e. Dan MacLean, the brother of Victoria sealing captain Alex MacLean), the sinister brother of “Wolf” Larsen:

The Heritage Cult

2009-01-14T08:24:00.000-08:00

The news seemed innocent enough. “There were a hundred and fifty young men, of all walks of life, present at a meeting held in Pioneer hall last evening,” the Colonist reported on March 9, 1899. The intent of the gathering on Broad Street was to create a new society, for “social and recreative [purposes] and for mutual help”. Only the mention that its constitution was “secret in nature” gave any hint that the group would become one of the most controversial in B.C. history.

The Native Sons of British Columbia was the kind of weird organization you’d get if you crossed the Hallmark Society with the Loyal Order of Water Buffalos – or the Ku Klux Klan. Modelled after the Native Sons of The Golden West, a patriotic order created in California, the Native Sons of B.C. was open to any man born in the province over 18 years of age who swore to uphold the values of British Columbia’s white pioneers, and evoke their spirits in secret ceremonies.

Initiates would enter a darkened hall, pledge allegiance to the order, and then, accompanied by torchbearers, receive instruction from dressed-up characters out of B.C.’s past. (First Figure: “I was a member of that lusty crew that sailed from Britain’s shores in 1578, under command of that gallant Admiral, Sir Francis Drake ....”) Sometimes the initiate had to wear a knapsack containing a blanket, pick, and shovel, as if he was a prospector during the Cariboo gold rush.

Once admitted, he could then identify himself to other members by secret handshake, “bending the right arm at the elbow exposing the open palm of the hand on the level with the right shoulder,” or other signals. Priceless example: “A sign of recognition at night or distress call is given by utterance of the words ‘Beaver, Ahoy’ which if heard by a Native Son will be answered ‘I am here, Native Son’.”

(A PDF of the complete Native Sons ritual book can be downloaded here.)

Though never as popular as the Freemasons or Odd Fellows, the Native Sons did accumulate several hundred active members across the province, in 13 chapters organized along the lines of Hudson’s Bay Company trading posts. Forrest Pass, a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Western Ontario who’s studied the Native Sons, says most of its members were clerks and labourers and shopkeepers. “Victorian-era fraternal societies appealed to men who had a yearning for the exotic,” Pass says. “The Native Sons succeeded by equating the legacy of the pioneers with the lower middle class.”

Whatever the reason, the Native Sons found a following. By 1900 the Victoria post had 276 members, and it entered a huge float in that year’s Victoria Day parade (photo at top). By the time of World War I, their patriotic declarations were front-page news, and when they presented their annual Good Citizen award in Vancouver, as many as 10,000 people attended the event. Members’ wives formed a sister organization, the Native Daughters of B.C., in 1919. Prominent citizens became Native Sons, including premiers Simon Fraser Tolmie (1928-33) and Byron Ingemar Johnson (1947-52), along with Victoria mayors Reginald Hayward (1922-24) and J. Carl Pendray (1924-28).

The most active of them all was Bruce A. “Pinkie” McKelvie. Managing editor of the Colonist, and later a writer for the Province newspaper, he breathlessly romanticized B.C.’s early history in such books as Tales of Conflict: Indian-White Murders and Massacres in Pioneer British Columbia. McKelvie (left) served as Grand Factor of the Native Sons four times before he died in 1960, and was buried at St. John The Baptist church at Cobble Hill according to the society’s official funeral rite, which he'd created himself. (‘The officers and members shall group themselves about the open grave, wearing regalia and in addition each shall carry a sprig of Douglas Fir, or other native evergreen.”)

Thanks to their devotion to the past, the Native Sons did make many practical contributions to the province. In the 1920s, they successfully lobbied our Empire-oriented school system to start teaching local history, and convinced B.C. to pass the first laws in Canada protecting totem poles, petroglyphs and other works of First Nations art. They saved the Nanaimo Bastion (the symbol of their order) from demolition in 1904 and ran it as a museum, and were instrumental in preserving Fort Langley, and Craigflower School. The old Hastings Mill Store, at Vancouver’s Point Grey, is still maintained by the Native Daughters, who have about 30 active members today.

But such nostalgia had a dark side. At their annual conventions in the 1920s and ‘30s, the Sons and Daughters declared that all “Orientals” should be excluded from voting in federal elections, or even deported. (Pass says the Native Sons’ shopkeepers feared competition from Asian merchants.) And even when commemorating the past, they encouraged portrayals of pioneers triumphing over the aboriginal population. In 1924, the Native Sons commissioned a series of paintings by John Innes of “epochal events” in B.C. history (that's his rendering of the landing of the SS Beaver above left); later some ended at up at Simon Fraser University, where First Nations students demanded that such “Eurocentric fantasy history” paintings be removed. In 1929, McKelvie got George Southwell designated a “provincial artist,” which led to Southwell painting the now-notorious murals in the B.C. legislature.

Time marched on, and the Native Sons couldn’t keep up. After World War II they recanted their anti-Asian declarations, and tried to embrace environmentalism – they opposed logging in the Stein Valley – but their numbers steadily declined. The Victoria post disbanded around 1990. Today only one or two very old members of the order survive, and it was practically airbrushed out of all discussions of B.C.'s history during the province’s 150th birthday last year.

“They’re an embarrassment to some,” Pass says, mainly because of their opposition to Asian immigration, “but that didn’t make them particularly distinctive in the 1920s and 1930s. That’s what they’re remembered for, but it wasn’t their main reason for their existence. And there were all these sites that wouldn’t have been preserved if they hadn’t been around.” (Photo of Native Sons and Daughters in Nanaimo in 1945 above right.)

Our history is more complex than we are willing to allow. That, perhaps, is the lesson of the Native Sons – and something we should remind ourselves every time the B.C. government tells us we live in the Best Place on Earth.

Awash in Suds

2008-12-21T12:40:00.000-08:00

“The question ‘why printers did not succeed as well as brewers?’ was thus answered: ‘Because printers work for the head, and brewers for the stomach; and where twenty men have stomachs, but one has brains.’”
– The British Colonist, March 19, 1859

It is said that without beer, there would be no English civilization. That was true in British Columbia: in 1792, during his first survey of this coast, Captain George Vancouver wrote in his journals that his crew created a “very salubrious and palatable” beer from local pine needles. So perhaps it’s no coincidence that the first commercial brewery was established in B.C. the same year that the province was founded.

In 1858, would-be prospectors on the way to the gold fields of the Cariboo turned Victoria into a tent-city boom town. Many of them were Germans – including William Steinberger, a businessman in his 20s from Köln, who’d earlier sought his fortune in California’s gold rush. Having witnessed how breweries thrived in San Francisco, Steinberger saw an opportunity to profit from liquid gold in Victoria. He bought up some surplus grain from the Hudson Bay Company’s Craigflower Farm (sales to the Russian enclaves in Alaska dried up during the Crimean war) and, that summer, established western Canada’s first commercial brewery on the shores of Swan Lake.

Clearly demand was strong, because the following year Steinberger moved downtown, establishing a larger operation at the southeast corner of Government and Discovery streets. By 1863, six local breweries were supplying the city’s numerous saloons, packed with sailors of the British Royal Navy, which formally established its base at Esquimalt in 1865. The successful brewers became prominent citizens: Charles Gowen, who founded the Phoenix Brewery in 1868, later became a Victoria city councillor, and Arthur Bunster, who started the Colonial Brewery in 1859, served in the B.C. legislature and the federal parliament.

“These guys had to be good,” says Greg Evans, executive director of the Maritime Museum of British Columbia, who did his M.A. thesis on Vancouver Island’s early brewers. “They were an innovative, pioneering group.” Not only did they have to compete with bottled British ales imported by the Royal Navy, they had to ship in many of their ingredients and equipment from San Francisco, and had few of the tools (such as artificial refrigeration) that modern brewers rely upon today. Nevertheless, in 1886 the Vancouver Brewery, located on Herald Street, received a gold medal at the Paris Exposition for the superior quality of its ale and porter.

The ingredients helped. Victoria’s soft, low-mineral water is especially suitable for mild ales, stout, and lager; indeed, several early brewers made a point of setting up at Spring Ridge (today’s Fernwood district) so they could claim they used only pure spring water. In the 1860s local farmers began planting hops (photo left) to flavour their beer, and by the 1880s their wares were so good that Ontario brewers demanded “Pacific” hops from the Saanich peninsula. Unfortunately, our damp climate has never proved suitable for barley, the grain providing the malt that’s cooked and fermented into beer, so there’s never been a truly all-Victoria brew – but Evans says a local farmer is trying the crop again, so a 100-mile beer may be possible very soon.

In many ways, the local production of beer has mirrored the history of the city. What started out as a pioneer experiment became an industrial enterprise, and by the 1900s breweries were some of the largest businesses in town. Steinberger’s Victoria Brewing Co. had changed hands several times and in 1892 its owners Joseph Loewen and Ludwig Erb constructed a towering stone-and-brick brewery at Government and Discovery streets. (The tower uses gravity to carry ingredients down through each stage of the beer-making process). In 1893 they grew even larger by merging with Charles Gowen’s Phoenix brewery.

Victoria-Phoenix’s closest rival was Silver Spring, started by Robert Tate and his sons in Vic West in 1902, and then incorporated by Harry Maynard into the former E&N Brewery at Catherine Street and Esquimalt Road (see the 1926 photo at right), kitty-corner to the E&N roundhouse. Few small breweries could compete with these giants, and after Prohibition ended in 1919, only Victoria-Phoenix and Silver Spring survived.

Even they couldn’t withstand the onslaught from national brands, however. Struggling to compete with Molson and Labatt, in 1928 the city’s two breweries merged, and in 1954 they became part of a larger company, Lucky Lager Breweries. To no avail: Labatt bought all of Lucky’s breweries in 1958. Labatt demolished the Silver Spring brewery in 1961 – only the brick powerhouse remains – and then concentrated its local production at the old Victoria-Phoenix brewery at Government and Discovery.

It was a lousy time for Victoria beer drinkers. By the 1960s the only choices in liquor stores were the bland national pilsners, and brewery strikes in 1965 and 1978 shuttered many city pubs. Labatt renovated the Victoria-Phoenix brewery (left) – and won a Hallmark Society award for restoring its stonework – but then decided in 1982 to move its production to the mainland, and tear the old building down.

“With the buildings as they are it would be economically impossible to develop the property,” a Labatt spokesman told the Times Colonist. Sadly, this was before the market existed for downtown condos, and the recession-plagued city was more interested in encouraging “modern” developments like the Songhees than in preserving old industrial buildings. (“The heritage people in the community have gone much, much too far,” mayor Peter Pollen told the TC. “It is now becoming an impediment to the orderly development of the city.”) Labatt flattened the landmark to make way for a hideous concrete slab strip-mall – see time-lapse photos of the demolition here – and today all that survives are the brewery's old bottles and labels, which are traded by collectors and reprinted on T-shirts.

In a way, though, we can thank such ignorance for the beer culture Victoria enjoys today. In 1982, when the national breweries simultaneously jacked their prices, the B.C. government accused them of price-fixing, and passed laws allowing Canada’s first microbrews. Spinnakers brewpub opened in Vic West in 1984, and Vancouver Island Brewery started the following year.

“As a result, Victoria is one of the strongest and most knowledgable beer markets – and beer cultures – in Canada,” says Evans, “and in this funny roundabout way, we’re back to the range of choice that our grandparents enjoyed.” With the new Driftwood Brewery we have seven quality breweries in town (maybe eight, if the rumours are true that Hugo’s will be revived in the Strathcona Hotel), turning out some of the best lagers, ales, porters and stouts in the country.

Just last month, in fact, Evans joined members of Victoria’s German community at Spinnakers for a Kölsch especially brewed to celebrate their place in the city’s 150-year brewing history. William Steinberger would have been proud.

PS Some 1960s and 1970s colour photos with the Victoria-Phoenix brewery in the background are posted here and here.

UPDATE (February 22, 2011): Today, Driftwood releases its D’Hiver Cuvée (“Winter Batch”), an effervescent, Belgian-style beer notable because it uses locally grown and malted barley, produced by Saanichton farmer Mike Doehnel – the closest thing Victoria has yet to a 100-mile beer. Cheers!

Hail To The Chiefs

2008-11-19T08:49:00.000-08:00

Huge crowds lined Government Street to see the American president, an articulate, charismatic gentleman elected to lead his country out of a terrible economic crisis. No, Barack Obama has not been here yet, although he might drop by in 2010 to take up Gordon Campbell on his invite to the Olympic games. If Obama does, he will be in good company. Presidents have been to Victoria before, and under similar historical circumstances.

Back when ships were the principal means of long-distance travel, we here on British Columbia's coast often saw American presidents before Ottawa did. The first presidential visit to Canada was by Warren G. Harding in 1923, on his way back from Alaska on a national “Voyage of Understanding” to prop up his scandal-plagued administration: Harding landed at Campbell River and spent the day fishing, then steamed on to Vancouver and made a fatuous speech in Stanley Park. (Considered one of the worst presidents in history, a week later he died in San Francisco – poisoned, some say, by his long-suffering wife, or food he ate in B.C.)

The first president to actually visit Victoria was the great Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who spent a few hours here on September 30, 1937. He didn’t visit Ottawa until 1943.

FDR arrived at Ogden Point aboard a destroyer, accompanied by his wife Eleanor and their grandchildren. “The President, sitting in front of the torpedo tubes amidship, wore a grey fedora hat and a black overcoat. He was smoking, and smiled cheerily,” the newspapers reported. They were diplomatic about his disability: “President Roosevelt was helped from his chair to the top of the gangplank, but walked down alone holding the sides.”

He travelled in an open car through downtown with lieutenant-governor Eric Hamber (left); armed Secret Service men stood on the car’s running boards. “Victoria has seldom displayed such enthusiasm for any distinguished visitor,” the papers said. “As the President drove up Government Street, gaily decked with the Stars and Stripes, the Union Jack and Canadian ensigns, the crowd, in places eight deep, cheered enthusiastically. Mr. Roosevelt was loudly acclaimed all the way to Government House.”

“Ever since I have been in the White House I have continued a practice started in 1884 of coming to Canada every year, a pretty good record, I think,” he told reporters. “I am especially happy to be in British Columbia today.” Photographers took so many pictures that they left piles of used flashbulbs on the ground. FDR lunched with premier Duff Pattullo and discussed the long-proposed Alaska Highway, soon to be of vital strategic importance. (The front page of the Colonist that day had a story about Japanese forces attacking Shanghai.) Then he drove back to the ship.

“I am really sorry to go,” Roosevelt said. “It would have been grand to make a longer stay. It has been perfectly grand here. I hope to come again.” Five thousand Victorians stood in the rain to bid him farewell, singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” as he sailed to Port Angeles.

Vice-presidents have shipped into Victoria too. Adlai Stevenson, VP to Grover Cleveland, visited in 1893 to check out the Esquimalt graving dock; John Nance Garner, FDR’s first veep, stopped here in 1935 on his way to a ceremony granting independence to the Philippines. And in 1988, just before he became president, George Bush senior dropped by for some fishing at Oak Bay.

“He got fish, and we didn’t talk politics,” recalls Bob Wright, head of the Oak Bay Marine Group. Bush had an evening free in Seattle, so his handlers thought he’d like to catch a few salmon. “They said they were tapping our phones three days ahead to check us out,” Wright says. Sharpshooters were posted on Mary Tod Island, helicopters buzzed overhead, and so many officials tried to get on Wright’s boat that he warned it might capsize. “But it was a nice evening, and they limited out on their fish.” The next morning, the provincial government commandeered an entire B.C. ferry to take Bush over to a black-tie event in Vancouver.

Other future presidents have played tourist in Victoria. In August 1962, Richard Nixon landed at the Butchart Gardens wharf on a yacht owned by a Seattle businessman. While his wife Pat and daughters went shopping downtown, Tricky Dick spoke with reporters about his run for the governorship of California, alongside his friend, Seattle lawyer John Erlichman, who was later indicted in the Watergate scandal. “The Nixon that I remember from that interview was an affable and charming fellow,” says G.E. Mortimore, who wrote for the Colonist at the time. “Much different from the dark figure he became in political folklore, and the vindictive plotter that one chapter in presidential history showed him to be.”

Bill Clinton, on the other hand, stayed in character. Darrell Bryan, CEO of the Victoria Clipper ferries, recalls that Clinton came up from Seattle the summer before he ran for president, along with other state governors such as Missouri’s John Ashcroft. After a stay at the Empress, Clinton continued his journey on the Royal Sealink ferry to downtown Vancouver – and briefly sat in the captain's chair, piloting the ship even though he wasn't licensed to do so. “There was some controversy,” Bryan says.

Of course, retired presidents have been here too. Clinton returned in 2006 to speak at the Save-On Foods Memorial Centre, for as much as $175 a ticket. His former VP, Al Gore, spoke last year about climate change for $200 a ticket. George W. Bush says that he's also going on a speaking tour after he retires in January, so he might come to Victoria. But it’s hard to imagine that he would command quite the same prices, or respect.

The Referendum Question

2008-10-22T12:37:00.000-07:00

My absentee ballot for the U.S. election recently arrived in the mail from Seattle. I’m a dual citizen, and with little surprise to anyone, I’m voting for Barack Obama.

What is a surprise are all the other questions on the ballot. Along with elections for state positions from governor to commissioner of public lands, and several judges, I’m supposed to vote on eight different amendments to the King County charter. I’m asked to consider a sales-tax increase to expand Seattle’s rapid transit, and a property-tax levy to upgrade Pike Place Market. There are three citizen-initiated propositions too – including a law permitting assisted suicide.

Quite a contrast to elections on this side of the border, where we do little more than mark an X beside a name, then go home and sulk for another four years.

Political scientists say this difference exists because Canadians retain the British tendency to defer to the Crown, whereas revolutionary Americans make a point of leaving decisions to We The People. But as I noted last month, democracy in Victoria 50 or 100 years ago was far more American in practice, especially in municipal elections. Victorians went to the polls every year to elect their councillors (and police commissioner) until 1973, and the ballot nearly always included one or more referendum questions, asking for voter authorization on everything from construction of the Johnston Street bridge (approved in 1920) to Sunday shopping (1981).

Consider the variety of referenda held in our region’s four core municipalities, over the space of a decade:

1956: Voters in Victoria, Saanich, Esquimalt and Oak Bay turn down a $5.6-million region-wide school construction program. Saanich residents vote in favour of refinancing their waterworks, and building another library. Oak Bay voters approve construction of a new municipal hall, and ban the sale of raw milk.
1957: Victorians approve a new library agreement with surrounding municipalities.
1958: Victorians vote 3,992 to 1,994 in favour of amalgamation with Saanich, but Saanich residents are two-to-one against it, 5,090 votes to 2,731. Victorians also approve construction of the View Street parkade, and downtown pedestrian malls.
1959: Although dentists call for fluoride to be added to city water, Victorians vote against it 6,833 to 4,031. A week later, Saanich, Esquimalt and Oak Bay residents also refuse fluoridation.
1961: Saanich voters approve sale of beer by the glass.
1962: Victorians approve spending $950,000 to create Centennial Square, including renovations of the Pantages Theatre (now the Macpherson Playhouse). Saanich residents refuse amalgamation again, but with only 55% opposed.
1963: Victorians approve a $375,000 renovation of the Fisgard Street police station.
1964: Esquimalt residents vote to amalgamate the “panhandle” region of View Royal into their municipality.
1965: Voters in five out of seven municipalities reject creation of a regional hospital authority, limiting the power of the new Capital Regional District.

(A detailed timeline of all the referendums held in Greater Victoria over the past century can be downloaded here.)

Since then, the capital has been returning to its deferential British roots. Victoria last went to its voters in 2002 to approve the deal for the Save-On Foods Memorial Centre, Esquimalt in 2003 for sewers, and Saanich and Oak Bay in 1999 for the $10 CRD parks levy. This election year, none of the four are asking referendum questions.

Westshore municipalities, on the other hand, are keen on direct democracy. This November 15, Sooke is asking residents whether they want to create an endowment for their regional museum. Metchosin's asking whether it should push ahead with plans to extend its boundaries. Colwood and Langford are asking residents whether they want the B.C. government to upgrade the E&N railway. A positive result in that referendum won’t legally bind Campbell’s Liberals, but it will send a message – in advance of next spring’s provincial election – that voters want action on rail transit.

“Often it’s a political decision: ‘Let’s ask our citizens’,” says Rob Buchan, Langford’s clerk-administrator, explaining Langford’s use of referenda. “A question builds interest, and we’re very active in terms of community-building.” (Notably, Langford didn’t ask voters whether they wanted the controversial Spencer Road interchange.) Besides, all municipalities use voting machines, so the cost of adding a question to the ballot is negligible. “People are coming out to vote anyway.”

Councils certainly have reason to be afraid of giving the public the last word. Why spend months planning a project if it can be nixed by cranky, lazy voters? In 2001, Westshore municipalities asked to borrow $8.5 million for water system upgrades, but the residents refused – and less than 10% of those eligible bothered to vote. Cities are also more complex than they were a century ago. Councillors oversee development planning, transit, parks and rec facilities, policing, sewage, water, and many other concerns. How could an ordinary citizen know enough about such operations to intelligently vote on them?

But that’s the cynical view. “People want to be asked. Then they’ll do the work,” says Sher Morgan, chair of the Saanich Civic League, a voters’ group that sprang up in response to the abysmal 19% turnout in Saanich’s 2005 election. Morgan did 300 door-to-door surveys of her district, and she repeatedly heard that people wanted to be more involved in municipal affairs, but didn’t know how. “Referenda are a great form of inclusion. They get people thinking,” she says. “And they might make us more respective of what councillors do.”

Most importantly, referenda might actually help the councils themselves. All too often, our councillors seem only to react to announcements or court decisions, allowing the evolution of Victoria to be dictated by developers, interest groups, city staff, or other levels of government. Many of the historic votes described above, by contrast, required politicians to draw up their own strategic plans and present them to the voters. If municipal councils started declaring their priorities – and backing them up with votes of public confidence – they might actually regain some authority.

Would you agree to a $20-per-household annual levy across the CRD to build affordable housing? Do you support a ban on non-biodegradable plastic bags and takeout food containers? Should Victoria create a network of bicycle-only streets? Considering the dire state of our oceans, would you agree to a ban on the local fishing and commercial sale of salmon? Do you approve rewriting the Beacon Hill Park trust to permit commercial events? Are you in favour of: A) amalgamating all of greater Victoria into one municipality; B) amalgamating the current municipalities into three bodies (Westshore, Victoria, Saanich Peninsula) or; C) the status quo of 13 separate civic governments plus the CRD?

Lord knows, some questions need asking.

UPDATE (November 13, 2008): A nice article by Jack Knox in the Times Colonist today about referendums and this blog. (Thanks for the hits, Jack!) If you want to pursue the debate further, there's a discussion about referendum questions on the Vibrant Victoria forum, starting here.

UPDATE (November 25, 2008): This week's Maclean's magazine has an article about ballot initiatives in the United States. Most interesting is this bit:

Ballot initiatives got their start in the U.S. in the late 1880s in mostly western and some southern rural states, often driven by farmers wanting to wrestle some power away from state legislators they considered to be dominated by railroad interests, according to Smith. The first state to allow ballot initiatives was South Dakota in 1898, but the first state to actually use the process was Oregon in 1904.

Seems direct democracy has a strong pedigree in the Pacific Northwest. Read more here.

The Arts, Applied

2008-10-07T16:06:00.000-07:00

I hope Stephen Harper's moronic comments about the arts being an "elite" pursuit cost him a majority government on Tuesday. As anyone not blinded by ideology knows, artistic skills are crucial to architecture, design, marketing, and numerous other parts of our modern economy that Harper claims to care about so much.

A great place to see proof of this is the BC 150 Applied Arts Project, created by Vancouver's Emily Carr University of Art and Design. The project's online galleries are filled with examples of beautiful products created here in Victoria, such as Jan and Helga Grove's 1960s ceramic tableware, stamps minted by BC Airways, shipping labels for apples and salmon, and underappreciated architectural landmarks like Strawberry Vale School. None of them would have come into existence without cultivated, encouraged artistic talent.

I was particularly happy that the project included Barney Oldfield's 1940 "Spirit of Tomorrow" car (left), which I'd read about but had never seen. The Central Saanich inventor is a local legend: not only did Oldfield design and build one of the few streamlined cars in existence, he also created a curious revolving house that's still standing (and turning) today on Little Saanich Mountain, near the Dominion Observatory.

I don't know how Barney would vote if he were alive today. But he'd probably agree that anyone who dismisses the value of design also lacks the "spirit of tomorrow" that Canada desperately needs.

Campaign Fever

2008-09-16T17:49:00.000-07:00

“Outside the city hall and around the polling stations in the market building the crowds were thick all day,” reported the Daily Colonist, describing Victoria’s 1907 municipal election. “Among those who stopped to gossip, argue or smoke a campaign cigar, busy workers moved or endeavored to turn votes in their direction. Bets were flying around freely. No fewer than three men moved among the crowd calling for takers for $50 bets on Mr. Patterson, while money for mayor Morley was just as free, although in smaller amounts.”

“The counting of the votes was a time of intense excitement,” the story continued. “Throngs of citizens crowded around the city hall and filled the corridors until it was impossible for one to move. Some climbed up on the windows, whence they could watch the men counting the votes for mayor, while scores of interested wardsmen flattened their noses against the windows in vain endeavor to hear what was going on within.”

It’s a scene that's difficult to imagine a century later – not because people would be watching the results on TV, but because they cared about the results at all. In the 1907 election, some 55% of the city’s registered voters cast a ballot. In our city’s most recent election, in 2005, the turnout was 26.4%, scraping close to the all-time low of 23.9%, set in 1963 when mayor Richard Biggerstaff Wilson ran for re-election unopposed. This year, with federal and U.S. elections dominating our attention, the turnout could be the lowest ever.

What happened? Countless editorialists have puzzled about our declining interest in municipal affairs, even though it’s the local level of government that most affects our daily lives, from the water we drink to the number of police officers on the streets. Indeed, the entire structure of any city really is an accumulated history of municipal government. But it’s a history that’s rarely appreciated.

This is especially tragic when one considers the struggles that have been involved just in achieving the right to vote. When Victoria was incorporated in 1862, provincial law only gave the vote to male British subjects who owned land worth at least £20. Women who owned land first got permission to vote in municipal elections in 1873, although the right was taken away by the province in the early 1890s, restored in 1896, and taken away again in 1908; women did not get full voting rights in B.C. until 1917. (Hence their large turnout in the photo atop this article, taken in 1918 outside a provincial polling station on Government Street; click on the picture for a magnified view.) Victoria’s Chinese community voted in early city elections, but were excluded in 1876, and didn’t get the vote back until 1947. The white authorities restricted the political rights of other racial groups, including First Nations. But not all: Mifflin Gibbs, a black grocer, was elected to city council in 1866, and Victoria’s second mayor, Lumley Franklin, was Jewish. (Both pictured above.)

Even if you were entitled to vote back then, it wasn’t exactly convenient. The secret ballot wasn’t used in Victoria until the late 1870s; in the city’s first elections, eligible citizens voted by walking up to the enumerator and publicly announcing which candidate they supported, a risky act in a small town. Elections were held midweek, and at only one downtown polling station, making it hard for workers to cast ballots. It was only after 1963’s shockingly low turnout that officials moved the local election day to Saturday (this year it’s November 15), and installed multiple polling stations around the city. In addition, cities were required to hold elections every year. B.C.'s Local Government Act lengthened the mayor’s term of office to two years starting in 1948, and a councillor’s term to two in 1973; the current three-year terms weren’t introduced until 1987. A century ago, with annual campaigns, following municipal politics was practically a part-time job.

If Victorians treated voting as an important duty, maybe it’s because the stakes seemed higher. When a city needed to borrow money to finance a capital project, provincial law required the city to get taxpayer approval first. As a result, Victoria’s election ballots included one or more referendum questions nearly every year. Victorians approved the city’s first public library and its first sewers, the tapping of municipal water from Sooke Lake, the replacement of streetcars with buses, the construction of Memorial Arena and Centennial Square, and numerous other projects that determined the burg we have today. (Our most notorious referendum, of course, is the one held in 1992, in which we voted 57 to 43% against treating our region’s sewage – the rare time a city has become internationally famous for not building something.) In 1998 the province changed the Local Government Act to let municipalities borrow more freely, and since then the city’s only referendum was the 2002 approval of the $30-million deal to build the Save-On Foods Memorial Centre. There are no referendum questions in Victoria this year.

The other big difference from municipal elections past is the tone of the campaigns themselves. Today’s candidates are infinitely more civil than the electorate they hope to govern. (So far, most of the 2008 crop has been so timid as to be practically invisible.) It was hardly thus a century ago, when all-candidates’ meetings were prizefights of oratorical wit and cunning, and election night was one of the biggest events of the year.

Mayor Alfred Morley (caricatured at right) won the hard-fought 1907 election against T.W. Patterson, and in 1908 he defended his title against alderman Dr. Lewis Hall. Morley made personal virtue the platform of his 1908 campaign; at one point his lieutenant publicly claimed that “the controlling force behind [Hall] is drink and prostitution, [and] a large sum of money has been raised by assessment upon those engaged in the traffic for the purpose of fighting the election of mayor Morley.” The tactic backfired. The Colonist and the Daily Times endorsed Hall against Morley’s “incomprehensible” slurs, and Hall won by 121 votes, with a nearly 60% turnout.

In a packed room at city hall, Morley congratulated the victor. No one knew it then, but two years later Morley would be back in the mayor’s chair, to oversee relocation of Victoria’s water supply to Sooke Lake – the volume of which was so great that it would ensure city’s expansion for decades to come. Also there that night, among Morley’s supporters, were women from the Victoria branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the group that led the local fight for suffrage. (WCTU leader Frances E. Willard, pictured left, was here in 1883, as was Susan B. Anthony in 1871.) A week before the 1908 civic election, the women had won a temporary injunction to retain their right to vote, and 486 of them cast their ballots before the province could rewrite the election laws. It was the last vote they would be allowed to cast for another nine years.

No one knew that then, either. But they did know that what they were doing would change the course of civic history. That’s why they got involved.

More Tunnels Exposed

2008-08-30T14:39:00.000-07:00

The good folks on the Urban Exploration Resource forum note that excavations for the forthcoming Atrium building at the corner of Yates and Blanshard appear to have unveiled a pair of tunnels, shown in the photo at right. What are they exactly? Page 17 of Victoria: Secrets of The City, the predecessor to my book, may provide the answer:

Telus's main exchange at 826 Yates Street has an L-shaped tunnel two stories below the building that runs from Yates to Johnson and then down another 300 feet to the intersection of Blanshard and Johnson. The vault is a repository for hundreds of phone lines.

The Freshwater Playground

2008-08-20T08:30:00.000-07:00

Whenever first-time visitors come to Victoria, one sight on the Pat Bay Highway that always seems to surprise them is Elk Lake. Victoria's many lakes are one of the great unpublicized features of this city, and the most popular of them is Elk/Beaver Lake Park, which had over a million visitors last year. But it’s likely that not even the locals in those crowds know much about its curious history.

Elk and Beaver lakes were part of the traditional boundary between the territories of the Saanich and Songhees natives, who gathered medicinal plants in the area, and cattails for woven baskets. The lakes were first identified by their current names in 1855, on the Hudson’s Bay Company map of the “Lake District” north of Victoria. The colonists probably named the waters for the animals they found nearby. According to reports in the 1858 Victoria Gazette, hunters were shooting two or three elk per day near Elk Lake. Beaver Lake, then a separate body of water, was little more than a swamp created by beaver dams.

It wasn’t long before the colonists decided they needed that water. Officials were worried about the risk of fire around Victoria, and riots broke out in 1861 when local tycoons tried to seize control of the public wells at Spring Ridge (today’s Fernwood neighbourhood). To meet the demand, in 1872 the chief engineer for the province proposed a solution. If the city built a dam on Colquitz Creek, the levels of Elk and Beaver lakes would rise by two metres, turning them into one big reservoir. (See map at right.) The city approved the $100,000 project, and ordered 13 kilometres of cast-iron pipe – which had to be shipped from England – to channel the lake water down to Victoria. (You can see riveted sections of this old water main near the park entrance at Pipeline Road, as shown in the bottom photo.) The new water system opened in 1875. By 1882, as many as 1,200 buildings were connected to it.

Unfortunately, Elk Lake wasn’t an ideal source of municipal water. So many houses began connecting to the system that in 1886 the city had to build a pumping station midway along the pipeline to maintain sufficient pressure. (Today that station is the Keg restaurant at 3940 Quadra Street.) Victorians complained that small fish and tadpoles were coming out of their household taps, so in 1896 the city built vast sand-lined “filter beds” to purify the water. (The filter beds are now under the parking lot at the south end of Beaver Lake.)

Victoria boomed in size and strategic importance during World War I, and in 1915 it began switching its water system over to the larger and cleaner supply in Sooke Lake. Although Elk Lake continued providing water to parts of the Saanich peninsula, in 1922 Victoria designated the reservoir as a public park, securing its future as the city’s premiere recreational playground.

Just as it is today, the most popular corner of Elk Lake back then was Hamsterley Beach. In 1928, Algernon and Letitia Pease, who’d been successful selling strawberry jam from their Hamsterley Farm (its former water tower is a distinctive part of the UVic campus), used their money to develop a resort on Elk Lake, dumping truckloads of sand on the shore, and building a Tudor-style tea room and dance hall named the Toby Jug. It was a tremendous hit: on nights when live bands played, cars of revellers from the city were lined up along the road for miles.

The Toby Jug was torn down in the 1950s, and the well-meaning harmony of its time has largely faded – to be replaced by the screeching discord of various recreational groups asserting their rights to use the water. Rowers, who started training on Elk Lake in 1952, often have run-ins with local anglers, who complain that the sculls are disturbing the annually-stocked rainbow trout. Floatplanes have been banned, and boats with motors over 10 horsepower are restricted to the lake's northwest corner, following incidents in 1994, when a powerboat hit a jet-ski and fractured a young woman’s back, and in 1996 when another powerboat sliced a canoe in half. Even figuring out who's supposed to resolve these conflicts is messy: Elk Lake's boating rules are written by Transport Canada but enforced by Saanich Police; the Capital Regional District controls the land around the lake, but the water itself is the responsibility of the province’s environment ministry.

The ecology of the lake has suffered too. Over the decades, would-be farmers have dumped catfish, yellow perch, and – most notoriously – bullfrogs in the lake to breed and fatten local dinner plates, and the invaders have nearly wiped out the native fish. In 1996, Elk got a “borderline” rating and Beaver was considered “poor” in a provincial water quality study, mainly because of runoff from septic tanks and pesticides and manure from nearby farms. But the ecosystem does seem to be recovering. The waters aren’t as choked with overfertilized weeds as they were 15 years ago, and though Colquitz Creek is still dammed to a tenth of its natural volume, hundreds of coho and chum salmon make their way up it from the Gorge every year to spawn, thanks to the restoration work of the Habitat Acquisition Trust and other conservation groups.

All things considered, Elk Lake is still a pretty special place. Residents of Vancouver or Calgary or Toronto often drive for hours just to enjoy the simple pleasure of swimming outside in relatively clean, fresh water; in Victoria you can take the plunge only minutes from downtown, and immerse yourself in history at the same time. Seriously, if big-city tourists say there’s nothing interesting to do here, tell them to go jump in a lake.

Electric Cars Are Go!

2008-08-19T07:16:00.000-07:00

Last night, Oak Bay council passed a bylaw permitting low-speed electric vehicles on its roads – the first municipality in British Columbia to do so. According to the new bylaw, little green cars like the ZENN (at left) are allowed on roads with speed limits up to 50 km/h, which covers every street in the municipality. Kudos to mayor Chris Causton, and Oak Bay's council and staff, for displaying great political foresight. If the rest of the Capital Region follows suit, EVs will really be getting somewhere.

A Movie We Could've Made

2008-08-07T10:17:00.000-07:00

Back in 2006, when the $12-million BC Experience tanked after a few weeks in business, it occurred to me that the money would’ve been better spent by investing it with Atom Egoyan. As readers know, this city is rich with weird stories. If the most respected filmmaker to grow up here was commissioned to dramatize a few, I calculated, his film would promote Victoria a thousand times more effectively than any tourist attraction.

Too late. Guy Maddin has made just such a film about his own home town, the fantastic My Winnipeg. Thick with urban legends and demented takes on municipal history, its sensibility is completely in tune with the Unknown City books. The movie (budget: $600,000) opens tomorrow at the Odeon cinemas downtown. Go see it. And then dare to ask, What If ?

PS We can learn from this. Movies and TV shows glamourize their locations, and bring in tourists. All too often, though, the stuff shot here pretends to be set in Seattle or California. Why not offer an extra tax break to films and shows that are identifiably set in Victoria?

The Flying Firemen

2008-07-16T07:53:00.000-07:00

There were few clear trails on the rocky southwest face of Langford’s Skirt Mountain. Craig Davidson and his sister Bonnie Stacey had to claw through alder and thick brush on the slope. It was difficult work. Especially because they were looking for the place where, 40 years earlier, their father had died.

Their dad, Alex Davidson, was a pilot. During World War II he tested Hurricanes and Spitfires, and trained Czechs to fight with the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain. He went to university after the war and had a family, then ended up in Victoria, running training flights in old Harvards and test-piloting planes for Fairey Aviation, the company that converted the giant Martin Mars flying boats into waterbombers. (One of those planes is active this week in California.)

The sciences of forest management and fire control weren't as developed back then, and the need for fire-fighting aircraft was huge. But the Martin Mars planes belonged to the logging companies, and the B.C. Forest Service didn’t have waterbombers of its own, so in 1965 Davidson started his own outfit – The Flying Firemen – using two converted war-era PBY-5A Cansos, based at the Pat Bay airport.

The Flying Firemen were kept very busy. In 1966, Davidson bought a third Canso and recruited Robert “Paddy” Moore (photo far right), a fellow WWII ace and Fairey test pilot based in Nova Scotia, to join the company the following year. It was smart planning. In the summer of 1967 a heat wave swept across British Columbia, and fires broke out everywhere. On Sunday, July 16, at about 4:30 p.m., Davidson got an urgent call. A blaze had erupted on Skirt Mountain, near Goldstream park.

Davidson and Moore skimmed their #2 Canso along Saanich Inlet, scooping up more than 1000 gallons of water and dumping it on the flames. A crowd gathered along the Trans-Canada Highway to watch as the pilots roared back and forth between the inlet and the fire, for more than two hours. And then, on a low pass, the left wingtip struck a tree, and shattered. The crowd gasped as the plane smashed into the mountainside and exploded, killing the pilots instantly.

The tragedy was front-page news for weeks. Transport Canada determined that the probable cause was “misjudgement of altitude”, but could not say who was flying at the time. (Photos from the report are above.) Papers across the country reprinted the photograph below, of a rescue worker looking at the charred airframe.

It was probably the most shocking postwar plane crash in Greater Victoria’s history. And yet, 40 years later, it seemed to have been publicly forgotten. (I note that it didn't even qualify for the "This Day in History" feature in the Times Colonist.) I wondered: Was there any trace of it left? So last summer, as the anniversary of the accident approached, I contacted Alex Davidson’s children, Craig and Bonnie, and we went to see what remained.

Les Bjola, one of the developers of the Bear Mountain golf resort atop the peak, told me he’d seen the wreck near the gravel pit, above the highway. Even with that bit of information, we spent three hours combing the craggy, overgrown slope, until Craig called out, “It’s here! There’s debris all over the hill!”

A landing-gear strut lay tangled in the bush. One of the rusted engines sat in a clearing; someone had tried to remove it, even though tampering with an old plane wreck is prohibited by the province's Heritage Conservation Act. Bonnie and I found Craig standing beside a chunk of the fuselage. He was quiet.

Craig was only 16 when his father died. He was in a car near Calgary, when he heard on the radio that a waterbomber had crashed in Victoria. “I hoped it wasn’t him, but I had a feeling it was. I knew all the guys; it was my summer job, helping the mechanics, gassing the planes up, polishing windshields. So I knew it was bad news.”

His dad’s partner kept the business going, and Craig worked for the Flying Firemen the next year. But on August 8, 1968, another one of their Cansos crashed in the Sooke Hills near Jarvis Lake, killing pilot Tommy Swanson and engineer Tom Worley. “When we lost the next plane, I’d had enough.” Craig became a commercial fisherman.

His father’s vision survived, though. In 1969, a former Alaskan named R.L. “Bud” Rude bought The Flying Firemen; he got in trouble with the tax department, and sold the company to Alex Wood, who grew it into the largest amphibious waterbombing outfit in the world. (The company ceased business in 1996, a victim of competition from federally-subsidized CL 215 waterbombers built by Quebec-based Canadair.) Cansos are still in use today; if you’re driving up the Island highway you can see one that's for sale, parked on the tarmac at the Nanaimo airport.

There’s still no memorial for the Flying Firemen. Development plans for Bear Mountain do include streets named Alexander Davidson Crescent and Paddy Moore Place, high atop the peak where the pilots died. But perhaps the best tribute to who they were rests in the thoughts of their families.

Paddy Moore’s widow Kathleen lives near Beacon Hill Park. She told me they met when they were teenagers in northern Ireland, and he was a trainee pilot; her father often shouted when Paddy flew low over their house, trying to impress her. He later won a Distinguished Service Cross for “gallantry, skill and devotion” while fighting in the Pacific.

They had only been in B.C. for two weeks when Paddy died. Sidney, where they lived, was just a village then. “I could write a book about the kindness of the people of Sidney,” she said. Her neighbours brought her cakes and the mail, and the local tailor fitted her three sons with suits for the funeral. Test pilots came from as far away as England and Africa for the service. “A bond was formed between those men,” she explained.

What they likely shared was the joy of flying, the thrill of pushing an aircraft's limits – and the knowledge of their own fragility.

“I felt sad when I saw the wreckage,” Alex Davidson’s daughter Bonnie told me. “My dad was 43. I’m nearly 60, and my children are in their 30s, nearly the age he was when he died. I thought of how much life they have left, and it was sad. He never saw his kids grow into adults, or his grandchildren.”

UPDATE (March 16, 2009): As of today, the Skirt Mountain crash site is now included in the B.C. Archeology Branch’s database of protected heritage sites.

UPDATE (November 19, 2009): Elwood White, author of Wings Across The Water: Victoria’s Aviation Heritage, is researching a book about The Flying Firemen. Last month, he attended a reunion in Sidney of the former pilots and crew members – who also reminisce about the company in an online forum.

Market Forces

2008-06-18T13:33:00.000-07:00

Last week, Monday Magazine listed 10 Things Victoria Needs, and a few readers noticed that “public market” wasn’t on the list. Vancouver’s Granville Island and Seattle’s Pike Place Market are beloved by residents, and successful tourist attractions to boot. So why doesn’t Victoria, a touristy city that’s close to the best year-round farmland in Canada, have a market building of its own?

It turns out there are reasons for this gap in our infrastructure. Sad to say, central public markets have a weirdly uneven history in Victoria.

The city’s first market was built by private businessmen in 1861, but only lasted a few months: the owners blamed its failure on public indifference, and competition from Chinese farmers who peddled vegetables door-to-door. In 1878, white farmers successfully petitioned the city to build another indoor market, but the construction was so shoddy that the farmers stayed away.

There was debate about the real need for a public market, even at that time. Some argued that it would promote local agriculture and reduce Victoria’s dependence on imported food, but one newspaper editorial pointed out that “the produce of Washington Territory, Oregon and California could be transported as cheaply as that of Comox, Cowichan and even Saanich.” Nevertheless, voters eventually passed a resolution allocating $50,000 to build a new market – and in March of 1891 the city burned down a part of Chinatown just west of City Hall to make way for the construction.

John Teague, the architect who created the 1878-built City Hall, also designed the market. It was a grand, two-storey structure of brick and granite, with a 70-metre-long facade of arches facing onto Cormorant Street (today’s Pandora Avenue). Inside, the main hall had room for 60 stalls and a bandstand, and was surrounded by a second-level gallery, all illuminated by a peaked glass roof. With a gala Christmas party, the Victoria Public Market officially opened its doors in December of 1891.

It was a disaster. As historian Jean Estes noted in a detailed 1975 Daily Colonist article, many farmers were already selling their wares directly to retailers, and avoided the bureaucracy of the city-run market, which was governed by a 67-item bylaw. The city ended up renting stalls to a strange assortment of tenants. One visitor in the late 1890s reported that she saw “a portrait painter’s studio, a real estate agent, the Sanitary Inspector, and the most ghastly of all things – the public morgue was an annex of the market.”

In 1899, taxpayers approved renovations to the building, turning its eastern half into the city’s main firehall. (The city's first fire engine, pictured left, sat in the market for many years.) In 1901, the Victoria & Sidney railway used the main hall as its downtown station, but abandoned the building five years later because the grade on Fisgard Street was too steep for its locomotives. The market sat empty after that, and the city considered using it as a pound for stray animals.

The market did revive, and was most successful during the first and second world wars, when patriotism and worries about food security were at their height. (Everyone pulled together: during WWI the B.C. Electric Railway ran a freight car from Deep Cove, picking up produce at farms along the Saanich peninsula and delivering it to the market by 7:15 a.m.) But in the 1950s, after gasoline rationing was lifted, shoppers were happier driving to the flashy supermarkets that were springing up in the suburbs. The old market showed its age, too: beams had to be installed to support the buckling roof, and an engineer’s report said the cost of upgrading the building would far surpass any rent from the few active stalls. In 1959 the fire department moved to its new headquarters on Yates, and the city council voted to raze the market and turn it into a parking lot.

The market didn’t go without a fight. An Italian-born flower vendor named Attilio Randy (pictured right), who’d had a stall in the market since 1914, launched a protest. He gathered 1,600 names on a petition and held a sit-down strike, refusing to move from the building as bulldozers waited outside. Only a public market could protect small farmers and locally grown food, he told reporters. “Small farmers are part of the civil defence,” he said, arguing the need for “food security” on Vancouver Island. “Today, many small people have deserted their land because of inability to dispose of their produce, yet millions of dollars in vegetables and fruit are imported every year.”

But after four days, tired and beaten, the 72-year-old Randy moved on, and the building was demolished. He sold his flowers from a street stand for a few years, and died in 1973. A few bricks from the old market were incorporated into the Centennial Square fountain that’s on the site today. (For more about the market, see the excellent “Victoria Vignettes” films narrated by historian John Adams on the city archives’ website.)

The dream of a public market lived on, however. After witnessing the success of Granville Island, the City of Victoria discussed building a market on the failed Reid development site across from Bastion Square, but existing merchants complained about the possible competition. In 1983 a restaurateur opened a Victoria Public Market in the Sports Traders building at 508 Discovery, but it struggled even though it had free parking in the lots across the street. The same year, a Vancouver-based company opened the Harbour Public Market at 1810 Store (now Value Village), with 97 merchants and more space than Granville Island, but it went into receivership in 1984 and closed in 1986.

Martin Barnett, who had a stall for his Rising Star bakery at Store Street, says the Harbour market failed because vendors fled the increasing rents. “People can’t pay $40 a square foot to sell fruits and vegetables. The math doesn’t work.” Like many vendors he relocated in 1985 to a market in Hillside Mall, which was more successful, but that disappeared in 1990 when the mall owners realized they could get more rent from a franchised food court.

“I come from England, and the markets there evolved over hundreds of years in places where people met, and towns grew up around those markets. That’s why I think it’s difficult to plan for a market to happen,” Barnett continues. Granville Island and Pike Place succeeded because they were already surrounded by apartment buildings, and no competing supermarkets existed nearby.

Certainly, Victoria’s circumstances are changing. As the price of fuel skyrockets, imported food will become much more expensive. (At least, until it's transported by sailing ships.) The bulk of our population is still sprawled out in the suburbs – which partly explains the sprouting of “pocket markets” in public spaces across the city – but more people are living downtown, and farmers would prefer to sell their wares under one centrally-located roof, out of the wind and rain. Perhaps a developer could be persuaded to build a new market, or some other large space will open up. Who knows? The way gas prices are going, a car dealership might become available very soon.

UPDATE (September 23, 2010): Victorians do indeed have an appetite to create a new downtown market, and this weekend they’re holding a local food festival to raise awareness of their plans. Read more about the project at victoriapublicmarket.com

A Yellow Submarine with Teeth

2008-06-14T14:02:00.000-07:00

The Sawfish is a formidable creature. Weighing three tons and as big as a minivan, it has eight eyes and sonar to search for prey. Its mouth consists of huge black pincers, and a 140-centimetre chainsaw. But the Sawfish is no monster. On the contrary: it saves lives, creates jobs, and wins awards from environmentalists. That’s because the Sawfish is a remote-controlled submarine, designed to harvest sunken trees.

“Quite something, isn’t it?” asks Jim Hayhurst. He’s the VP of communications and marketing for Triton Logging, the Saanichton company that invented the Sawfish, and standing before the machine in Triton’s workshop, I have to agree. The Sawfish can dive to more than 100 metres, using sonar to navigate through murky water, and its eight cameras provide a live video feed to a pilot sitting in a barge on the surface. In less than five minutes, the Sawfish can find a tree, drill airbags into the wood, slice the tree off at the trunk, and then send it floating to the surface to be milled – without the risks to divers of typical underwater salvage logging, or the destructive road-building or laborious treeplanting required with conventional forestry. Last year Popular Science magazine named the Sawfish one of the best new environmental technologies on Earth. (You can also see a video of it here.)

There are as many as 300 million trees under water worldwide, most of them in the 45,000 reservoirs formed by hydroelectric dams. Hayhurst says that Triton can harvest that timber at a cost comparable to land-based forestry. Loggers can work faster on land, but Triton has access to volumes of big, old-growth trees which are getting harder to find in above-ground forests. Triton claims the global inventory of submerged wood – preserved from rot by the low-oxygen environment of deep water – is worth $50 billion.

This particular afternoon the new Sawfish is heading to Lois Lake, a reservoir created by a dam built in the 1930s near Powell River. Triton’s been logging there for the past six years, harvesting Douglas fir and Sitka spruce. But the pine-beetle crisis has flooded British Columbia’s timber market with cheap wood, so the submarine is just going to Lois Lake for testing, before it’s sent off to join two other Sawfish already at work in Malaysia.

Currently, Triton is focusing its efforts on the sunken trees of Lake Kenyir, a 38,000-hectare reservoir created in the 1980s and surrounded by one of the world’s oldest rainforests, rich with tropical hardwoods such as teak, red meranti, and yellow balau. Triton has a working partnership with a Malaysian firm that’s turning the wood into furniture, doors, windows, and decking. Triton’s also applied to the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation to expand the project, training Malaysians for technical logging jobs, including operating the Sawfish themselves.

It’s been quite a journey for Triton, which got started back in 2000 when CEO Chris Godsall, then only in his early 30s, recognized an opportunity while working for a B.C. salvage-logging company, and raised money from family and friends to build the first Sawfish. Triton now has a staff of 55 in four countries, including Thailand and Brazil, and its timber, which has received the coveted “SmartWood” label by the Rainforest Alliance, has been used in Japanese temples and California mansions. Victoria’s Dockside Green development is building townhouses with Triton wood, and Mountain Equipment Co-op used Triton’s rough fir and pine for the slatted walls of its outlet on Government Street.

Other logging companies have offered to buy a Sawfish or two – which have been reported to cost $1.2 million apiece – but Godsall’s turned them down. Triton prides itself on maintaining custody of its wood from lake bottom to finished product, and that could be muddied if other companies used the submarine. The Sawfish is more than just a tool: it’s the key to Triton’s unique identity in the lumber business.

“The Triton brand is valuable to countries and communities that want to be seen as responsible – economically, environmentally and socially,” says Jim Hayhurst. “Maybe that’s a tall order for a little yellow submarine, but it seems to resonate.” Generating good-news stories, it seems, is just one more of the many attributes of the amazing, made-in-Victoria Sawfish.

Our Main Street

2008-05-14T08:38:00.000-07:00

It has witnessed the motorcades of visiting royalty, and funeral processions for dead premiers. It’s been the site of V-E and V-J celebrations, and – as it will be again this Monday – Victoria Day parades. End to end, it’s probably the most valuable stretch of real estate in Greater Victoria; when Parker Brothers issued the first Canadian version of Monopoly in 1982, it was the equivalent of Boardwalk, the most expensive address in the game. But Douglas Street, our main drag, never seems to get the respect it deserves.

It did not show up on the first maps of Joseph Despard Pemberton, the surveyor general for the colony of Vancouver Island, when he laid out the city in 1852. As Victoria boomed, however, Pemberton quickly sketched the grid of downtown, wisely naming its longest north-south street after his employer, governor James Douglas. By 1863, maps showed Douglas Street stretching off to the north as the principal road to Saanich – and included its notorious five-way crossroads with Government and Hillside, which annoys drivers to this day. (A 2005 survey of motorists rated it the “most hated” intersection on Vancouver Island.)

Soon, Douglas Street also became identified as the best possible gateway to Beacon Hill Park. By 1905, the city had pushed the road across the mud flats of James Bay and all the way to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, paving over the western edge of the park in the process. Governor Douglas probably would have approved of the Mile Zero marker placed at the end of his street in anticipation of the Trans-Canada Highway’s completion in 1962: historians say he discussed the idea of a road across Canada as early as 1859.

But it was downtown that Douglas Street grew to prominence. The city repeatedly expropriated land until the roadway was 100 feet across, permitting streetcars, carriages, wagons and automobiles. It became home to the city’s grandest buildings, such as the 1,000-seat Victoria Theater, built in 1885 at the corner of Douglas and View, perhaps the largest playhouse north of San Francisco until it was damaged by fire in 1910. Douglas was the city’s place of business, and its first “skyscrapers”, such as the eight-storey Campbell Building constructed in 1912 (the site of today’s Royal Bank) and the 10-storey B.C. Permanent Loan Company building, visible in the 1920s photo above. In the 1940s, Yates and Douglas was known as “Pusser’s Corner” (pusser is naval slang for purser, the officer who handles the money) where sailors would hang out in dress uniform. So many stylish women were on the sidewalks that a photographer did a good business taking their portraits (example at left) out front of the Bank of Montreal.

Alas, this Swing-era glamour faded as cars grew to dominate the city, especially north of downtown, where Douglas Street became overgrown with drive-ins, muffler shops, and motels. (A few nice details survived, such as the 1910 prefabricated wooden bank at 2420 Douglas, and the 1912-built Baptist church that’s now the Ukranian Cultural Centre.) By 1960, the street’s traffic was increasing at the alarming rate of seven percent annually, and the province wanted faster connections to the nearly-completed Trans-Canada Highway and BC Ferries terminal at Swartz Bay. Something needed to be done. As a director of the Capital Region Planning Board declared in a report that year, on Douglas north of Hillside, “the street scene is one of utter chaos.”

It got worse when the Town and Country mall opened in 1961, and Mayfair mall in 1963. The Capital Improvement District Commission put up $1.2 million in today’s money to fix Douglas, on the conditions that Victoria and Saanich eliminate swaths of on-street parking and left-turn lanes, drawing screams of outrage from merchants. (A 1963 front-page headline, “Left-Turn Restriction ‘Death Blow’ to Shops”, shows how little has changed.) The municipalities did it anyway, but continued to fight over management of the road (the Saanich-Victoria boundary is at Tolmie Avenue), which is why north Douglas remains a crazy quilt of rules and streetscapes today.

Gradually, some things did improve. In the 1960s Saanich outlawed billboards and planted oak trees along both sides of the street to conceal its gaudier storefronts. A 1967 beautification project removed the old wooden poles and overhead wires. In 1978, after 20 years of intergovernmental bickering and stop-and-go construction, the province finally completed its highway connections to Blanshard and Douglas. (We should be grateful that the NDP never got a chance to dig a tunnel under the Town and Country mall, as it proposed in 1973, to connect Blanshard to Highway 1.) In 1999, Victoria spent $2.8 million repaving Douglas downtown, widening the sidewalks, and installing benches and bike racks.

And yet, Douglas Street still feels like Gertrude Stein’s Oakland: there’s no "there" there. Perhaps, for too long, it has been viewed mainly as a thoroughfare, and not as a destination in itself – a problem not likely solved by the installation of the much-discussed high-speed busway. But there is hope. Condo developments such as The Falls and The Hudson, and the radically overhauled Town and Country (now Uptown) mall should bring more life to the street. On May 1, Victoria planners presented their updated blueprint for downtown, calling for greater density along the “North Douglas Spine” of the city. With some political and economic backbone, Douglas Street just might return to its former grandeur.

(Many thanks to the Saanich Archives and Gamester for the photographs.)

PS (November 3, 2008): Interesting interview with Saanich councillor Vic Derman on CFAX today, talking about his Natural City concept. What caught my ear was his assertion that the Douglas Street corridor already provides 33% of all the employment in the capital region. So it's a good candidate for a streetcar, yes?

A New Photo Archive

2008-04-30T09:38:00.000-07:00

Good news for digital history buffs: the Saanich Archives have placed a big chunk of their photographic collection online. The search function is occasionally whimsical (an entire category devoted to "menageries"?) but effective, and it leads to all sorts of interesting images that haven't been seen widely before. At left is the Cadboro Beach Hotel, on the site of today's Gyro Park, after it was destroyed by a spectacular fire in August 1931 (index# 2007-171-003).

The Crank and The Seaman

2008-04-16T14:29:00.000-07:00

In his Politics, Aristotle said that good citizens were like sailors. They had different functions, as rowers or navigators, but they had a common purpose, to keep the ship safe. "Similarly, one citizen differs from another, but the salvation of the community is the common business of them all."

It's likely that Aristotle would have admired Jarrett Teague (photo left). A leading seaman based at Esquimalt, when he is not on tours of duty abroad, Teague is dedicated to preserving John Dean Provincial Park in Central Saanich, and the memory of Dean himself, one of the most distinctive citizens to have called Victoria home.

Teague, who grew up in Sidney, remembers visiting the park as early as his eighth birthday. He became fascinated by the place: its native legends, its stands of old-growth Douglas fir (the last on the Saanich peninsula), and its history. For school projects he interviewed old residents and collected photos, he says, "and I found myself, at 16, being able to tell a story that no one had really told before."

John Dean was a self-made man. Born in Cheshire, England in 1850, at the age of eight he was an orphan; he left school at 12 to become a builder's apprentice, and emigrated alone to Canada in 1873. "I always thought of him as this old guy," says Teague, "but in his first diary [stored at the B.C. Archives], he's 22 years old. Goes to Toronto, sleeps with 25 girls, gets jobs, gets laid off, loans money, is betrayed, gets locked out of his boarding house. He goes down to Galveston, Texas, builds houses, puts some money in his pocket. He owns three houses, a horse, a pistol, can do whatever he wants. He was 33 when he arrived in Victoria in 1884. He kept on earning money. He wasn't a greedy man, and he wasn't a rich man, but he was always ahead."

He not always happy, however. Dean tried to build a hydroelectric plant near Prince Rupert and was defeated by politicians who stole the idea and built it themselves. Back in Victoria, he spent time on Chatham Street trying to reform prostitutes, and one of them broke his heart. (Her pressed flowers are in his diaries.) Dean moved to Rossland, became a successful realtor, then returned to Victoria in 1908 – and spent the next 35 years waging a public one-man war against ineffective and arrogant government officials.

Dean ran three times for mayor between 1926 and 1929, on the platform that Victoria's natural beauty was being destroyed by haphazard construction approved by politicians, instead of professional planners. He lost those campaigns, but continued publishing hundreds of letters to editors (a practice daily papers discourage today by limiting the frequency of missives from the same author), providing observations from his travels around the world, and commenting on such subjects as causes of the Depression, beer parlours, wasted water, and elevator bylaws. In 1938, when the city considered replacing streetcars with buses, Dean wrote a 15-point analysis in favour of rail transit, proving that he was ahead of his time. ("Sending money away for oil," he noted, "when we have hydro power galore, appears foolish.") To celebrate his 90th birthday, Dean mailed 250 letters to politicians complaining about the shabby military construction visible from the huge windows of his mansion "Seascape", at 572 Head Street in Esquimalt.

Certainly, some who remembered him said that Dean was a miserable old coot. Although he loved giving his money away to small children, he never saw his dreams for Victoria fulfilled, and remained a bachelor all his life, a fact he blamed on his constant travelling. In 1936, he bought a plot in Ross Bay Cemetery and erected a gravestone with the error-ridden epigraph, "It is a rotten world, artful politicians are its bane. It's saving grace is the artlessness of the young and the wonders of the sky." Dean had his photograph taken beside the gravestone (shown below) and mischeviously sent it to all his friends. He died in 1943, at the age of 92.

But Dean did leave a substantial legacy. In 1905 he'd bought 32 hectares on Mount Newton, and in the middle of the forest built "Illahie" (photo left), his summer lodge, using materials he'd hauled from town on the Interurban railway. One summer, Freeman King, the local Boy Scouts troop leader, persuaded Dean to let Scouts camp on his property, and Dean was so impressed by how clean they left it that he decided to turn it into a park. In 1921, he gave his land to the province, creating the first donated provincial park in British Columbia. After Dean's death, Illahie fell into disrepair, and the forest service tore it down in 1957. But Dean's neighbours followed his lead and donated their own land to the park, and by 1960 it was 173 hectares in size.

"He was a man of great foresight," says Teague, who's now 33, and has self-published two books about Dean and the park. "Everybody shares John Dean, so I can't say he's had a greater influence on me than anyone else. He was quick to comment, he could cut right through nonsense and tell when people were trying to stall things. I certainly try to do that."

Teague certainly also shares Dean's reverence for the landscape. Since his teens, Teague has volunteered thousands of hours as the unofficial "Keeper of Illahie", building stairways and signposts, clearing trails, digging trenches to prevent washouts, and keeping the park immaculately clean. As he notes, to the Saanich peoples, Mount Newton is LÁU,WELNEW, "the place of refuge" where their ancestors escaped a great flood, and it must be treated with respect. "The First Nations have a deep connection to how they use the land here, for sweatlodges and initiations. It's a special way to share the mountain: it's a legislated park and a spiritual centre too. That's an amazing testament to what we can do, to share the wealth."

Last week, Leading Seaman Teague shipped out with the HMCS Protecteur on a seventh-month mission to the Persian Gulf. Here's hoping that he'll be safe, and the park too while he's gone.

Subterranean Wonders

2008-03-18T16:25:00.000-07:00

As I stepped into the darkness, I could feel space opening up around me. I switched on my flashlight, and saw that I’d entered a chapel of geology. An arched ceiling of igneous rock. Vaulting tapestry walls, streaked with green oxidized copper. And water dripping down, down ... into nothing.

My puny light only caught something to illuminate below me when it reached the toes of my boots. Now I saw the awful truth: I was six inches from a ledge, plunging into a darkness the light could not penetrate.

Jesus. One more step and I would’ve fallen into a crevasse.

My friend Andrew came up behind me. “Wait.” He turned on his torch, and tossed a rock into the hole. We watched it pinball off the rocks, then drop – and heard a splash. Illuminated ripples danced off the walls, 20 metres below. One more step and I would’ve shattered my bones and drowned, deep inside Langford’s Skirt Mountain.

Until recently, few Victorians had any idea that the Western Communities are studded with mysterious caverns. That changed, of course, in 2006, with the fight over the SPAET cave, which the Songhees claimed was a sacred site used by their ancestors, and which the Bear Mountain golf resort subsequently bulldozed for a road down to the Trans-Canada Highway. But one of the little-known consequences of the standoff was that it spurred local adventurers to do an inventory of all the caves in greater Victoria – and as it turns out, some of the most thrilling places to explore around here are steadily disappearing.

“Of the 21 on record, 10 already have been destroyed,” says Adrian Duncan, a retired engineer and president of the Vancouver Island Cave Exploration Group, which has been documenting caves since the 1970s. One on Atkins Road in Colwood was blown up to make way for houses, and another under the Royal Oak Burial Park has been filled in. The entrance to the largest cave in the capital region, at the north end of Langford Lake, is covered by a trailer park. “It used to go about 120 metres, and you had to use a rope to get down it. A nice, sporting caving trip. It had an active stream in it, too. But you can’t get into it now.”

Today, Duncan’s attention has shifted to the other side of the lake, and a cave in the path of the planned Bear Mountain interchange. Last year he issued a media release calling on the District of Langford to move the road, noting that the 40-metre-deep limestone cave is the longest currently accessible in greater Victoria – one of the few capital cities in North America with caves within its boundaries. In other parts of the world, he notes, karst formations (the fissured limestone in which caves often form) are protected, partly because they control the flow of groundwater, but there are only guidelines for working around karst in British Columbia. “Besides, karst is terrible stuff to build on. I have little doubt that piece of limestone in Langford has plenty of cavities and passages that we’ve never been in.”

Tim Stevens, the engineer overseeing the interchange project, says he’s heard Duncan’s complaints. “The blasting will be done in a way that will not damage the cave,” he says, and the road’s been realigned to pass 10 metres away from it. As for cavers’ worries about the rest of the area, Stevens says, “They say there’s karst under there, but it’s just pure conjecture. We see no concerns. There’s nothing significant that’s going to be underneath the road.”

Even if the Langford Lake cave survives physically, though, something will be lost by building a freeway beside it. And what that might be, I learned from my own experience up the slope on Skirt Mountain.

After nearly falling to my death, I went home and did some research. It turned out the cavern Andrew and I were exploring was a failed copper mine. According to Maureen Duffus’s excellent book, Old Langford: An Illustrated History, the Ralph Mining Company dug some 600 metres of shafts on Skirt Mountain’s western slope between 1897 and 1903, removing hundreds of tonnes of ore and transporting it downhill by aerial tramway. Ralph only gave up after repeated tests showed that the copper was contaminated by magnetic iron oxide.

A few weeks later we returned with experienced climbers and proper equipment, and our team descended into the abyss. The flooded room at the bottom of the crevasse was huge, the size of a country church, with vaulting ceilings to match. It was so large that it must have been a natural formation, but there were obvious signs of mining work as well. Tunnels tall enough to stand in branched off in all directions, some of them disappearing down into the water (photos above). Collapsed beams, once used for winches and pulleys, lay at the bottom of shafts to the daylight. Iron rails (photo right) for ore cars were piled on the floor.

It was a place of old memories, perhaps as vibrantly real to a historian as the SPAET cave was to the Songhees. It was a type of place that is becoming increasingly rare. All too often these days, what’s authentic, mysterious, and wild gets steamrolled to make way for the fake, tame, and predictable. But that’s where the money is.

UPDATE (September 24, 2010): One mine/cave that’s much smaller but easier to access is in Mount Douglas Park. Watch a fun little video of a father and daughter exploring it, here.

Victoria vs. Langford: The Next Round

2008-03-13T08:28:00.000-07:00

The fight over the Bear Mountain interchange has grown hotter still. There's not one but four stories today relating to the conflict.

Langford is reducing the sum it wants to borrow to backstop the interchange from $25 million to $9 million because the Municipal Finance Authority won't allow it, noting that Langford is $10 million in debt already. Langford mayor Stew Young has also sent a letter to Victoria city councillors, blasting them for questioning his creative financing and meddling in his municipality's affairs.

Stew Young has also received some negative correspondence of his own – from the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, which sent a letter demanding he withdraw his threat to sue activists for the $100,000 cost of having them arrested. Hey, Stew: this is what democracy looks like! Apparently not in Langford, though, where the municipality has also threatened to fine a woman $100 for publicly displaying signs – like the one above left – on her own property.

PS Make that five stories. Monday's Jason Youmans points out that Highlands mayor Mark Cardinal, who has spearheaded Bear Mountain-friendly zoning in his own neighbouring municipality, is actually working on the interchange. Such conflicts of interest are going to make for fascinating civic elections in November – although we may need UN observers present to trust the results.

PPS As always, Bob Dylan said it first (in 1962!) and better than anyone else:

There's a bran' new gimmick every day
Just t' take somebody's money away.
I think we oughta take some o' these people
And put 'em on a boat, send 'em up to Bear Mountain ...
For a picnic.
– "Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues"

You can listen to the song here.

All in Bloom

2008-03-12T07:53:00.000-07:00

Ho-hum. The results are in from Tourism Victoria's flower count: 2,437,696,512. That's a quarter of what citizens noted in 2002. So either nature is faltering here, or citizenship. Or maybe it's because the economy's hot, and people don't have time to count their blossoms. In any event, it's an excuse to mention that a street-by-street list of all of the city's flowering plum and cherry trees, currently in gorgeous bloom, can be found here.

Victoria vs. Langford: The Two Solitudes

2008-03-03T10:45:00.000-08:00

For a graphic illustration of the radically different political cultures of urban and rural Greater Victoria, check out this video from Friday morning. In the left corner (with the video camera), a couple of female UVic-based activists protesting construction of a $32-million interchange that will service the Bear Mountain golf resort. In the right corner, about 100 Langford labourers ticked off about delays caused by the protests – and one foul-mouthed old man.

More raw video of the confrontation, taken by CHEK television, is here. (CHEK's edited and "packaged" version, for comparison, is here). On CFAX 1070 today Frank Stanford editorialized that the activists were out of line for calling the labourers “goons” in a press release. Watch the clips and judge for yourself.

The Bear Mountain controversy has been heating up. On Saturday came news that the developer is being sued for falsely promising, among other things, that the interchange would be finished by the end of 2008. Perhaps the parties are feeling pressured to get their stuff built and sold ASAP, before an American-induced recession kicks in. They should hope potential investors don’t read this article in the New York Times, noting there’s been “a vast overbuilding of golf courses” in the U.S. and that the number of players is steadily declining.

UPDATE (March 6, 2008): The intrigue grows. This week's Monday suggests that the developers encouraged the labourers to confront the protesters, and a letter says the construction (destruction?) company is run by the brother-in-law of Bear Mountain CEO Len Barrie. A new video catches Langford councillor Denise Blackwell giving protesters the finger, and local musician Aidan Knight has written a song about the conflict. The TC's Jack Knox has written a good summary of the issues. He's right: not everyone can find time to get to a council meeting or even watch the 6 o'clock news, and as a result this debate is increasingly being decided in the court of YouTube.

Victoria's Would-Be JFK

2008-03-02T13:39:00.001-08:00

The cover has been blown. For several weeks we've read in The Globe and Mail and other papers that Jack Worthington II, the purported illegitimate son of John F. Kennedy, has been living in British Columbia. On Friday, the detail finally came out that he's residing in Victoria.

I've known about this for a while, because a friend of mine owns the secluded house that Worthington is renting in Gordon Head. But it seems Worthington hasn't been entirely cooped up: as the Vanity Fair article investigating his claim to Yankee royalty mentions, Worthington plays regularly with the Victoria Polo Club. You can also read an account of his horsemanship on the website of Dan Pedrick, the club's secretary, posted here. Undoubtedly the numbers of their spectators will be up this coming season.

UPDATE (May 20, 2009): After Vanity Fair dismissed his claims to American royalty, Worthington left his wife in their rented Gordon Head mansion and headed to New York, where he’s now describing himself as “single” and of “JFK Issue”, according to his MySpace page.

The Last Streetcar

2008-02-19T10:23:00.000-08:00

A crowd gathers around: tourists, railway buffs, kids with plumes of cotton candy. Chattering with excitement, one by one they present their tickets to the uniformed conductor and climb aboard. Then, with a clang of a bell, the streetcar is off, rolling along the historic waterfront at speeds up to 30 km/h, to a shopping mall at the other end of town.

This idyllic scene could be in Victoria, but it isn’t. It’s in the interior town of Nelson, where a heritage streetcar has been running since 1992 – and drawing on few resources beyond ingenuity, determination, and civic pride.

“It’s a struggle for us, but it’s worth it,” says John Hopwood, president of the Nelson Electric Tramway Society. NETS is entirely run by volunteers: they laid the rails themselves, using cast-off track from the Kettle Valley Railway, and they machine their own parts for their century-old streetcar. They receive no city or foundation money, and are still paying off a $100,000 startup loan they got 15 years ago. But they carry 14,000 passengers every summer – not bad for a town of 10,000 residents.

What’s most interesting to Victorians, however, sits in the society’s barn. Hopwood swings the doors open, and there stands our city’s last surviving streetcar: #400, a 1921 “Birney” car that ran the #2 route from Cloverdale Avenue, down Douglas Street, through downtown and out to the steamship wharves at Shoal Point (today’s coast guard station). After Victoria voted to get rid of its streetcars in 1947, #400 spent two decades rotting in the bush, serving as a sawmill bunkhouse at Cowichan Lake. But in 1970 the Royal B.C. Museum restored it and put it on display, before loaning it to NETS in 1990. Now the streetcar’s fully wired and ready for passengers, and Hopwood hopes to put it into regular service. “Victoria’s going to have a hard time getting it back,” he says with a grin.

The same could be said about rail transit in Victoria generally, because our city’s been talking about reviving streetcars for at least 20 years. The closest the chat approached reality was in 1992, when the province and the city drew up the Victoria Accord calling for a “Downtown - James Bay streetcar loop,” and a BC Transit- commissioned study claimed it would get a million riders a year. That dream died when Bob Cross (who opposed the streetcar) became mayor, and since then the province and BC Transit have only pushed more buses on the city.

“You can’t really compare Nelson to Victoria,” says Ron Drolet, BC Transit’s senior VP of customer service. “Their streetcar concept is based on heritage, it’s not fast or comfortable. The fact is, Nelson’s city transit system is still based on buses.” Modern commuter rail, he argues, is prohibitively expensive (such as the new $52-million, two-kilometre South Lake Union Tram in Seattle, largely financed by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen). That’s why BC Transit is advocating rapid bus lanes, such as a controversial pair proposed for the middle of Douglas Street, which Drolet says could be the “starter component” for rail transit 20 or 30 years from now.

Some people can’t wait that long. On January 28, Communities For Commuter Rail (C4CR), an initiative of city halls and citizens from Victoria to Sooke, released the West Shore Tram Line Assessment, a report arguing that it would only cost $16 million to establish a commuter train from downtown to Langford on the old E&N tracks; since then, politicians have said the train could be up and running in two years. But Drolet is skeptical. The plan “came out of nowhere,” he says, and much more work needs to be done to see how the train would be integrated into Victoria’s overall transit system. (Would the train end at the Johnson Street bridge, for example, or would an expensive new station be built at Centennial Square?) “You can’t simply put steel wheels on steel rails and expect magic.”

Obviously, such caution frustrates rail proponents. “BC Transit is very much bus-oriented. That’s its staff’s experience,” says Irwin Henderson, a spokesman for Island Transformations, a rail-advocacy group. The C4CR initiative, he notes, was created because “mayors were frustrated by BC Transit’s vision being limited to its immediate funding.” And the C4CR momentum is building. The Westhills project in Langford will put as many as 16,000 new residents along the E&N line, and the developers want rail transit. So does the general public: Henderson points to a recent survey by Agency Research Consultants, noting that 65% of Victorians are willing to pay higher property taxes for a West Shore commuter rail line, but only 29% would pay for a bus-only route; 71% said they’d use rail transit, nearly double the number that said they’d take a rapid bus.

So perhaps Nelson’s old streetcar can teach Victoria a few lessons after all. As Nelson has already proven, rail wins enthusiastic community support of a kind that buses will never enjoy. And you don’t need a $500-million Skytrain line to win riders, or break even. The hard part, it seems, is convincing all the levels of government to get on board.

Tunnels Exposed

2008-01-30T10:11:00.000-08:00

“This city pretends that things have been covered over and sealed up,” John McFetrick says, pointing to the sidewalk. “But they’re still there.”

Standing in front of the Swans hotel, you might think he’s talking about its shuttered basement, and its possible connection to the mythic tunnels of Victoria’s Chinatown. But the 42-year-old filmmaker is also referring to the city’s economic underclass, its homeless population – and as he sees it, both senses of the underground are intimately related.

McFetrick explores this link in his short film Under The Garden City (screening again this Thursday, February 7 at Plan B nightclub at 7:00 pm as part of the Victoria Film Festival). Tying Victoria’s biggest social issue to its most popular urban legend might seem a stretch – or at least it did until last December, when several homeless people supposedly set a fire in the former Empress hotel laundry tunnel under Douglas Street. To McFetrick, the incident proves his thesis. “The fact is, there are spaces under Victoria, and they’re being used by street people. And the city doesn’t want to acknowledge those spaces, or the people in them.”

McFetrick started working on the film in 2005. Armed with a modest Canada Council grant, the UVic writing grad started hanging around in darker corners of town, chatting up street people about hiding places, and paying for info. (“I guess I should consider the grant a redistribution of wealth,” he chuckles.) At the same time, he initiated a discussion thread on the Urban Explorers’ Resource online forum to find others interested in literally getting to the bottom of Victoria’s underground.

Three years later, the UER thread has evolved into an extraordinary amateur record of Victoria’s gastrointestinal system, containing hundreds of photos taken by adventurers inside the city’s storm drains, sewers (the one under Bay Street is pictured right, thanks to J. Peterman), service corridors, and two officially acknowledged tunnels. (The other one runs from the Parliament Buildings under Government Street to the Douglas Building.) McFetrick has, in turn, incorporated video from these explorations into his impressionistic 20-minute film – revealing to Victorians, for the first time, the guts of the vast extended basements around Market Square, and a two-kilometre-long sewer tunnel not far from downtown.

He’s especially proud of the latter footage. The sewer tunnel isn’t unknown – there are archived photographs of men digging it just after World War I – but suggests there could be more like it. “Skeptics say you can’t have tunnels in a city built on bedrock. But this proves otherwise,” McFetrick says. “This was a mining town. We had explosives factories. All sorts of things could’ve been done.”

Like what? McFetrick says he believes there are some underground passages in Chinatown, despite the official story that such things don’t exist. He points out that many businesses along Fisgard Street have basements (Silk Road, for example, has its spa downstairs), which have never really been opened up to archeologists. He’s interviewed old city engineers, though. “Pencil-pushers don’t know anything. Speak to the guys who worked the shovels 40, 50 years ago, and they’ll tell you something’s there.”

It seems every city on the west coast has legends about Chinatown tunnels. And in a few cases, those stories have turned out to be true: Portland already has “Shanghai Tunnel Tours”, and last fall historians (left) discovered tunnels in Fresno, California during a neighbourhood revitalization project.

The prospect of a sanitized underground doesn’t cheer McFetrick, however. In many cases, he says, it’s better to let the mystery be. “It seems cities only admit to their tunnels when they see an economic benefit. It would be sad if Victoria did it at the expense of those who need shelter the most.”

For more on tunnels, see my previous post here.

Harbeck's 1907 Film, Complete

2008-01-20T10:04:00.000-08:00

At last, here is the entire film that William Harbeck shot in Victoria in 1907.

For background on Harbeck's fascinating life, see my previous post here. As I mentioned at the time, it's possible to see part of this film in the downtown Hudson's Bay Company store. But that version is incomplete, and confusingly intercut with footage from Vancouver. This is everything Harbeck shot in Victoria, including footage taken from a streetcar travelling through downtown. And it's certainly easier to watch the film on the web instead of navigating the Bay's furniture department.

Some notes accompanying the Library and Archives Canada DVD:

[This was a] panorama or panoramic, a very popular attraction in nickelodeons in the early days of film exhibition, in which scenes were filmed from the front of a moving vehicle, often a railway train. The film comprises street scenes filmed from the front of moving streetcars and harbour scenes filmed from moving watercraft. The streets travelled by streetcar are Douglas (heading south), west on to Yates, and south again on Government. Seen are the Empress Hotel, where construction is nearing completion, the Parliament Buildings, the CPR piers and sheds, and Laurel Point. Automobiles, bicycles, horse-drawn vehicles, and other streetcars are in evidence. [The vehicles are travelling on the left side of the street because British Columbia didn't switch to right-hand drive until 1921.]

Seen from the water are Victoria's inner harbour with the ships of the sealing fleet tied side by side, the Point Ellice Bridge, the Gorge, and the Tillicum Bridge over the "Reversing Falls" (with a prominent view of a rock which has since been blasted away), Selkirk Water and Halkett Island (also known as Island of the Dead), the Johnson Street Bridge with a steam-hauled passenger train of the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway crossing it, the factories of the British America Paint Company and the B.C. Soap Works at Laurel Point, the Pendray House, CPR ferries, and more views of the Parliament Buildings, the Empress Hotel, and the Customs House.

UPDATE (April 10, 2009): There's been quite a bit of interest in Harbeck's work lately. The University of Victoria's history department has created an entire website about the film, with an annotated version online indicating the various landmarks. As well, the Hallmark Society has prepared its own interactive website dedicated to the film. The society will officially launch the site to celebrate their 35th birthday on Saturday, April 18, at 2pm, in their offices at #18 Centennial Square.

Raeside's Empress Birthday Cartoon

2008-01-20T08:53:00.000-08:00

A priceless editorial cartoon by Adrian Raeside in this morning's Times Colonist, to commemorate the hotel's 100th birthday today:

Resurrecting The Electric Car

2008-01-16T19:31:00.000-08:00

From a distance, the little hatchback in the corner looks like a Toyota Yaris, Honda Civic, or any of the other sleek compacts built by big automakers. But step closer and the details suggest it’s a different machine indeed.

Where the gear shift would be, there’s just a switch: forward, neutral, reverse. Open the lid to the gas tank, and where the fuel nozzle would go, there’s a household electrical socket. And there’s no tailpipe.

This is a ZENN car, a “Zero Emissions, No Noise” electric vehicle (EV) built in Quebec. ZENN’s been in the news a lot lately: last November, CBC reporters (and Rick Mercer) skewered Transport Canada for continually delaying approval of the car for use in this country, despite the Harper government’s purported concern about climate change, and the fact the car’s been for sale in the United States since 2006. Embarassed, Ottawa quickly endorsed the ZENN, handing responsibility for regulating it to the provinces. But you can’t buy one in Canada yet, which is why I’m here in Berkeley, California, to take one for a test drive.

“The timing for this has never been better,” ZENN dealer Marc Korchin tells me. No kidding: oil’s hit a $100 a barrel, hydrogen’s just a gas emitted by politicians, and ethanol threatens the food supply. (The Economist recently noted that an SUV gas tank of ethanol contains enough corn to feed one person for an entire year.) Instead, it looks like cars of the future are going to be powered by electricity. As a result, EV dealerships like Korchin’s Go Green Motors have been sprouting across the U.S. like organic broccoli.

But will EVs electrify car buyers? There’s only one way to find out. Korchin hands me the keys. “Have fun,” he says, grinning.

I turn the ignition, but the car remains silent. “No Noise” is right: only when I flip the switch to forward and step on the pedal does the ZENN start to whirr like a forklift. I turn off the driveway and merge into four lanes of traffic. None of the other drivers seem to notice my vehicle, or care.

Perhaps that isn’t surprising, because EVs really aren’t new. Many of the first automobiles were electric, until gasoline stations became widespread. (The Vancouver Electric Vehicle Association runs a 1912 model that was driven around Victoria by a little old lady well into the 1960s.) In the 1980s, local inventor Sarabjit Gandhi created the Gaselle (pictured right), one of the first gas-electric hybrid cars, which he drove from New York to Vancouver for Expo '86. And as the recent documentary Who Killed The Electric Car? points out, hundreds of electric cars and trucks built by General Motors, Ford, Honda and Toyota were on the roads in California until 2003 – when the carmakers got that state’s zero-emission vehicle law overturned, then recalled all the EVs and destroyed them.

Today, the carmakers say those EVs were weak and that consumers didn’t like them, even though the cars could run at highway speeds for up to 200 kilometres on an eight-hour charge, and there were waiting lists of buyers. (More likely is that the companies realized EVs were unprofitable. Electric motors have only one moving part, and often run for decades without pricy dealer servicing.) Since then they’ve focused on trucks and SUVs, leaving the next EVs up to independent developers.

Over a dozen startups around the world are currently working on EVs. Later this year Tesla Motors, a company run by a co-founder of PayPal, is releasing its Tesla Roadster, a $100,000 sports car that can do 200 km/h. The actor George Clooney (left) bought the first Tango, a bobsled-like two-seater being developed in Spokane, Washington that cuts through traffic like a motorcycle. Norway-based TH!NK is working on a car that will sell its batteries’ surplus electricity back to the power grid. But the Canadian ZENN has been the first to hit the road.

Berkeley is a lot like Victoria, a university town with tree-canopied streets, cyclists, seniors, hippies, and no snow. Here, the ZENN seems to be in its element. Weighed down by 300 kilos of batteries, it sticks to the asphalt around a sprinkler-wet turn. It brakes crisply at a school crosswalk. Even though I’m six feet tall, it feels roomier than my Ford Escort.

Its limitations only become obvious when I hit a straightaway. I stamp the pedal to the floor, and the whirr becomes a whine. Top speed: 26 mph, or 40 kilometres per hour.

These numbers have led some to complain that the $14,700 ZENN is little more than a glorified golf cart. But as Korchin tells me back in the showroom, there are lots of urban two-car families that use one vehicle just for picking up groceries and schlepping to and from work, and the ZENN’s fine for that. In the two weeks he’s been open, he’s sold 11 of them.

“I’m selling a paradigm: the right tool for the job,” he says. “You wouldn’t hang a picture with a sledgehammer. But as it is now, we’re all driving sledgehammers.”

That’s the holdup with the new EVs: the formula to make them a must-have consumer hit hasn’t been perfected yet. They’re still too expensive, or odd-looking, or limited in speed and range like the ZENN, which goes about 55 km on a single charge.

“Car buyers have to pay more up front, and they really pay attention to sticker prices. But there is a significant market for EVs,” Tim Lipman says, while giving me a ride back to the subway in his Honda Accord. Lipman, a director of the University of California at Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center, says that a few years ago he did an analysis showing that mass-produced EVs would save buyers money when gas hit $2.50 US a gallon. “Now that we’re over $3, it’s much more interesting.”

Another gripe Lipman’s heard about EVs is that they aren’t as green as proponents claim. What about the used batteries? That may be a problem with the lithium-ion supercells being developed by Tesla, but not with the lower-power batteries in the ZENN, which are 98% recyclable. What if the electricity comes from dirty sources? Lipman says that even in California, where 20% of the power comes from coal, the state would still cut its overall greenhouse-gas emissions in half if everyone switched to EVs, because electric motors are six times more energy-efficient than gasoline engines. (In hydro-powered British Columbia, the proportional reductions would be even greater.) And EVs charge mainly at night, so they wouldn’t burden the grid. “You could get a lot of EVs out there without having to build more power plants.”

The math for new EVs may be starting to add up, but governments haven’t necessarily figured that out yet. You can get a $2000 ecoAuto rebate from Transport Canada if you buy a Ford Escape hybrid SUV, but there’s no rebate for a ZENN. Insurers like ICBC charge the same rates for a low-speed EV as a regular car, even though they’re less likely to be involved in catastrophic accidents. Even the speed of EVs is a product of bureaucracy as much as technology: so far, B.C. is the only province with rules allowing low-speed vehicles, which is great, except that – as in California – they’re only permitted on suburban streets (not freeways) if they travel no faster than 40 km/h. The ZENN can do nearly 60 but few laws allow it, so the company has to install speed regulators in its cars.

And more competition is coming. Recongnizing the demand for greater electric power, HyMotion, an Ontario company, is selling kits that convert highway-ready, rebate-friendly hybrids like the Toyta Prius into “plug-in hybrid” vehicles (PHEVs) that charge their batteries off household current and run only on electricity at city speeds. General Motors is already advertising that its own affordable PHEV, the Chevy Volt, will start rolling off the assembly line in 2010. If other carmakers follow suit, the upstart EVs will have a tough fight in the marketplace.

That’s a big If, judging by Detroit’s crappy environmental record. In the meantime, there’s the simple little ZENN. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction. To green Victorians, it just might be the right tool for the job.

PS As a reader has pointed out, despite Transport Canada's recent stamp of approval for the ZENN, the feds seem determined to keep it and other low-speed vehicles off the roads, judging by regulatory notes posted here: "Given the fact that LSVs have no safety performance requirements, occupant safety would be compromised if they were to travel in mixed traffic with other full-size passenger vehicles." It's bullshit. Motorcycles and scooters don't meet those safety requirements either, but no one's banning them.

PPS Talk about EVs would be academic if Detroit drastically cut the weight of its vehicles. A 376-mpg car is possible, as you can read here.

UPDATE (July 1, 2008): With the price of oil pushing $150 a barrel, EVs have quickly become mainstream news, and General Motors has announced that it's ramping up production of the Volt. (The Atlantic Monthly has an extensive article about GM's challenge, which you can read here.) There's only one problem that no one seems to be talking about: the Volt is a freaking sports car. It is doomed to fail. The company that builds a family-friendly electric hatchback is going to clean up – and it ain't going to be GM.