Ancestral Roofs

"In Praise of Older Buildings"

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Genteel poverty

At the corner of Hastings and Cambie Streets, across from that
city's infamous Victory Square, and an intersection away from the human misery that is East Hastings, stands Vancouver's absolutely extravagant Beaux Arts Dominion Building (1910).

Many resources tell its story better than I can (being still a bit inarticulate after 6 weeks of travelling, entirely in input mode).

The Vancouver walking tour guides available in PDF from the Vancouver Heritage Foundation and a June 2013 Inside Vancouver article by Miranda Post both do the Dominion Building proud. For now, I just want to recall that sunny early September day I actually made its acquaintance (after years of living in Vancouver, and walking or bussing past it on my trips to Chinatown, or to work in Burnaby) and just stand and look at this most lavish and colourful of Vancouver buildings.


should be a snooty hansom cab, not a democratic bike

those Beaux Arts folk really knew how to decorate surfaces!

the symbolism of muscular cherubs around your cartouche?

1 comment:

  1. What a beauty! Sigh... how I wish that the buildings going up today would look so pretty in one hundred years.

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