819 replies to this topic

[aastra]

When I talk about how establishing shots of the city are conspicuously absent in modern promotional materials, I'm referring to pictures like those below. In the 1930s it was okay to show views like that, but not today.

 

(Then again, many of the buildings being shown off in those pics are gone now, but I digress.)

 

 

 

 

[aastra]

The great buildings are gone and you aren't allowed to show pics like that anymore. I guess these are real changes that I'm talking about now, as versus those changes that aren't really changes at all.

[aastra]

Here's another big change that happened in Victoria. Can you imagine Victorians today expecting the best and making positive comparisons between their city and other ambitious cities? As I like to note, modern Victorians claim to care about heritage and history and yet don't seem to care one bit about the attitudes and ideals that typified the city's glory days. Heck, today Victorians are more likely to regard periods of prosperity as something to be ashamed of.

 

 

Daily Colonist
September 6, 1912

Take Larger Area for New Theatre

Additional Land Acquired by Victoria Opera House Company at Corner of Blanchard and Broughton Streets

The new Victoria theatre to be built shortly on Blanchard street at the corner of Broughton street, will cover a larger area than previously expected, additional land having been acquired by the Victoria Opera Company, Ltd. which yesterday bought for the sum of $28,000 a frontage of 30 feet on Blanchard street by 120 feet in depth, making the site now held by the company 150 feet by 120 feet.

The additional land was acquired in order to build a modern theatre duplicating the Orpheum at Seattle, which is considered one of the best of the amusement houses on the continent, and plans being prepared by Messrs. Rochfort & Sankey, associate architects, are expected to be ready in two weeks...
 

[Rob Randall]

Here's the original Seattle Orpheum (not the 1920s replacement)

 

https://historylink.org/File/4247

Seattle’s newest Orpheum was designed by renowned theater architect (and Seattle resident) B. Marcus Priteca (1889-1971), famous for his work designing houses for showman Alexander Pantages (1876-1936). In typical Priteca style, the building was a multi-purpose structure. The street level had space not only for the theater’s entryway and box office, but for other businesses as well, including (when the building opened) a cigar shop and a Bartell Drug Store. Office space occupied the upper floors. The venue carried a high price tag -- estimates put the cost at anywhere between $1.25 and $3 million.

 

With seating for 2,700 patrons, at the time the Orpheum was the largest theater in the Pacific Northwest. (The distinction was short-lived. The Paramount, then known as the Seattle Theatre, opened six months after the Orpheum and seated neaarly 4,000.) Unusually, the house contained no box seats whatsoever; instead, Priteca designed a pair of small alcoves with no function other than decoration.

 

[aastra]

Finishing up the May 18, 1974 article:

 

 

Daily Colonist/The Victoria Express Weekend Edition
May 18, 1974

The rise, decline and fall of apartment development boom

Those questions and others were asked repeatedly as militant citizen groups came into being and the land-use policies of municipalities with regard to apartments were challenged.

While this groundswell of opposition found its strongest expression in James Bay -- where it eventually succeeded in throwing out the controversial 1967 land-use plan and downzoning the area -- it was very evident, too, in neighboring municipalities.

If the city in the early 1970s had its Bay Village and Reid Centre hassles, Oak Bay had its epic confrontations over the Windsor Park and Riding Academy schemes, and Saanich suffered its shared of headaches in Gordon Head and elsewhere. And apartment-generated emotions are now running high in Esquimalt.

But, as municipal planning officials keep pointing out, metropolitan Victoria has to face the reality that higher density residential accommodation in one form or another is the only solution to the population pressures facing this area over the next quarter-century.

Even in Saanich, which not so long ago seemed almost a bottomless pit of residential potential, the warning bells are ringing.

Says deputy planner Gil Laurenson: "Shocking as it may seem to some people, we are now moving into an era when we will see the end of the creation of new single-family lots -- which are now running at the rate of 800 to 1,000 a year."

With the municipality's urban containment area precluding northward expansion, Laurenson predicts a move toward apartment redevelopment of older residential areas in southern Saanich, including parts of the Gorge and the "panhandle" district.

In such areas of 50 to 80-year-old single-family dwellings on old, wasteful subdivision patterns, Laurenson says renewal with similar housing types would be totally unrealistic. But higher density development and the revenue accruing would justify Saanich's massive expenditures on sewers and open space.

In Victoria, present thinking is that plenty of apartment potential exists in the low-density service areas east and northeast of the central area, as well as in the North Park district.

And, if senior government help is forthcoming in moving the Victoria West tank installations to Colwood, that area would be given over to large-scale residential development.

In Oak Bay, the area north of Oak Bay Avenue near Foul Bay is seen as suitable for apartment growth, while there are some other parts of the municipality where apartment in-filling would be appropriate.

Ample potential, then, exists for the apartment in urban Greater Victoria. How -- or even if -- that potential is exploited in the years ahead is anyone's guess.

Edited by aastra, 08 July 2019 - 07:26 PM.

[aastra]

Hundreds of cheap and ugly cookie-cutter apartment blocks were ruining Victoria back in the 1960s/1970s, but today we defend those buildings as defining elements of the built form of city neighbourhoods. And today we try to shift the ugly/cookie-cutter criticism over to 21st-century condo buildings, even though such new buildings demonstrate no end of improvements re: materials, design, massing, individuality, etc.

 

 

Daily Colonist/The Victoria Express Weekend Edition
May 18, 1974

It's now big boxes, all in a row

Imagine, if you will, an inebriated apartment dweller reeling homeward after an evening's carousing.

The moral of this little fable is... to illustrate perhaps the most obvious feature of the modern apartment -- its consistency in duplicating itself almost endlessly, like some monolithic amoeba.

...it is the external evidence of this remorseless reproductive cycle, spreading across Greater Victoria's skyline with deadening monotony, that has been and still is responsible for much of the public criticism directed against apartment development in general.

Casa This or Vista That, the lawn-fronted, stucco-faced, balcony-hung frame apartment building has become the most predictable feature of our urban landscape in the past 20 years, and there isn't the slightest indication that things will be any different in the years ahead.

Oh, there are minor distinctive features, admittedly -- a mansard here, a mock-Tudor sprinkling of beams there, various other "cosmetic applique" touches in the words of a local architect.

But the basic product is virtually identical to its forebears in almost every case; a squat, slabby block with a central corridor running the length of the building, leading to apartments designed on the modular principle.

The buildings are well-engineered... They provide comfortable, well-heated accommodation at what is, all things considered, a not unreasonable price. They even have such luxuries as sauna baths.

 

(aastra says: There were numerous "housing crisis" news stories back then that described how unaffordable the new apartment buildings were.)

But, but, but... do they all have to look the same? Can't developers and the people who design their buildings exercise a little more imaginative innovation?

...zoning controls themselves tend to "constrain innovative design," in laying down inflexible standards for how much setback should be provided, separation from the flanking properties, parking provisions and so on.

All too often the effect of these regulations is to create a manicured frontage to the apartment which "gives the motorist something to look at," whereas greater latitude in municipal zoning might achieve far more intelligent use of the site to the direct advantage of the apartment tenants.

Victoria architect Terry Williams concedes that the parameters of the design function set by economics are minimal -- "you can only build so much suite for so much money" -- but believes there is still room for good design, and better use of materials than Victoria apartments generally receive.

While esthetics can't be divorced from economics... it must be recognized that design is a function of good planning...

One improvement Williams would like to see is the provision of a greater variety of units within an apartment block, ranging from three and four-bedroom family units on the ground floor to smaller units above and bachelor suites on the top floors.

He also believes the general design of buildings in the city would be improved if municipalities enforced through their own bylaws a section of the Architectural Professions Act, requiring plans for all projects in excess of $50,000 to be submitted under an architect's seal.

 

(aastra says: This point was made in 1974. Don't we have a 2019 news story from Langford about this same issue?)

Architect David Hambleton, who is chairman of the city's fledgling Advisory Design Panel, supports that view. About 95 per cent of all apartment buildings in the metropolitan area are designed by a small handful of design firms with no professional architectural involvement...

(When such a proposal was aired in the city of Victoria about two years ago, Mayor Peter Pollen said it smacked of a closed-shop policy. If the West End of Vancouver was any example, he said, architectural involvement was no guarantee of good product.)

...in the design panel's first year of existence there has been a marked change in the attitude of developers, builders, and designers. Most of them... have been "quite civic-minded" in responding to the panel's suggestions.

Victoria's future for higher density residential accommodation rests to a large extent in the townhouse or attached housing concept, which provides efficient use of ever-scarcer land yet gives the individual a sense of identity, privacy and territoriality.

"I feel there is a transition between the type of person who wants a full-fledged house and the person who wants to live in an apartment. This is the sort of halfway situation where they have something of their own -- a fairly small, compact living unit but in touch with the ground, with its own patio and private entrance."

Edited by aastra, 13 June 2022 - 11:40 AM.

[aastra]

...

 

 

Daily Colonist/The Victoria Express Weekend Edition
May 18, 1974

Developers have problems too

They don't get much in the way of sympathy, but apartment developers have their problems, too.

...building apartments is a much less attractive venture than it used to be -- ironically, at just the time when there is a crucial need for more rental accommodation.

Typical of the larger developers is Robert McAdams... of Park Pacific apartments Ltd. in Victoria.

He cites several basic obstacles in the way of anyone wishing to build an apartment:

Lack of available serviced land;
the dramatically rising price of land;
lengthy re-zoning hazzles with municipalities;
inflated prices for building materials and maintenance;
and the current psychological difficulties of people not wanting to live next door to apartments.

(aastra says: Heck, many people who live in apartments don't want to live next door to apartments!)

As if all this weren't bad enough... the apartment owner is now faced with provincial government rent controls.

"We're subject to inflation like everyone else, yet now we can't raise rents more than eight per cent a year."

"...construction costs went up 20 per cent last year, and they're expected to rise 25 per cent this year... The costs of maintaining an apartment building -- taxes, manager's salary, fuel, even things like garden tools -- can go up as much as 40 per cent."

...the new suites that are available... will have to charge higher and higher rents from the very first."

"Apartments aren't built for the fun of it. They're built to make an income."

McAdams says he and other developers have no objection to the government's subsidizing tenants "who can't pay the market price, the people who really need help."

"But," he said, "why wreck a market which is supplying an essential commodity with blanket rent controls?"

"Whenever you alter supply and demand you create a synthetic market, and in the end, whatever is available is available at higher prices."

The real problem -- not only to the developer but to the public seeking accommodation -- is the prospect of fewer and fewer apartments being built.

"We have to pass on costs," McAdams points out. "The moment we can't pass on our costs, we quit doing it (building apartments.)"

"Our plans now are for more condominiums, single-family homes and office buildings."

The next few years, McAdams says, will see "fewer and fewer apartments built" as a result of higher costs and controlled rents.

Condominiums will likely become more and more popular, not only to the prospective builder but also to the public for whom single-family homes are becoming priced out of reach.

Edited by aastra, 07 July 2019 - 04:59 PM.

[aastra]

This story reminds me of the stories about highrise heart attack risks in the news recently. Obviously some of us aren't cut out for apartment living, just as some of us aren't cut out for suburban living, and just as most of us aren't cut out for rural living. But even so, consider me more than a bit skeptical of the premise that a full backyard is absolutely essential for one's mental health and development.

 

 

Daily Colonist/The Victoria Express Weekend Edition
May 18, 1974

Psychiatric care just child's play

Mark is a six-year-old boy living with his parents on the eighth floor of a James Bay apartment building.

He's a healthy six-year-old...

He also makes weekly visits to a psychiatrist.

...Mark's problem is complex and mainly manifested in aggressive behavior...

At the urging of the psychiatrist, Mark and his parents are moving to a house June 1.

The house has a backyard and that could be all-important to Mark's future sanity.

...Mark shares a common problem with all children who live in apartments -- he has no backyard to call his own.

It may not sound like much, but to a developing child having some place of his own is just as important as being fed nutritious meals...

Children... establish territories. For most children that territory is a backyard...

(aastra says: For most children? Even in cities around the world where backyards don't exist?)

When the territory isn't there, a child may try to establish it in other places... in the classroom at school, on the school playground and in his dealings with other children.

Children in apartments seldom get a chance to play and learn by themselves. That is caused by the lack of a backyard.

Children are not alone in their problems of coping with apartment living.

Although apartment-dwellers aren't the only ones sitting in psychiatrists' waiting rooms, the isolation, loneliness and feelings of not belonging are common phenomena.

The quest for "minimum-involvement housing" has left people without traditional rural roots, without a strong sense of "home" and with a feeling of transience and insecurity...

 

(aastra says: Almost any given day in the news you can read a story about renters resisting eviction from their rented apartments, even when offered large sums of money. Do such stories leave one with the impression that apartments don't foster a strong sense of home?)

Especially for people moving from a rural area to an urban centre, the shock of adjustment can be just too much.

Apartments can cause some unexpected problems -- like marriage breakdown.

...apartments aren't usually the main source of marital strife, they can sure help it along...

"...a couple living by themselves in an apartment... have nowhere to go except out to get out of each other's hair..."

...short of locking themselves in the bathroom, the apartment couple is stuck with each other.

"The only thing left for them to do is actually leave the apartment, which can work fine for some people, but in others it creates a great feeling of anxiety, even if the partner is just walking around the block..."
 

"The husband or wife keeps wondering just exactly where the other person is."

(aastra says: Methinks apartment living is the least of your issues if that's the case. We're saying people who live in houses never go for a walk?)

...what's know as the Fourth Floor Syndrome, the theory that the feeling of isolation from the real world is heightened the higher up you live, obviously doesn't affect everyone.

To many retired people an apartment is the perfect answer. It's a release from the big house, a garden that needs tending and grass that needs mowing.

...a highrise dweller in James Bay's Orchard House, said most of the people he comes in contact with are happy with the roof over their heads.

"I seldom have anyone complain that they feel tucked away or that nobody cares about them."

The difference between coping or not coping with life in an apartment may be in the choosing.

Someone who lives on the 22nd storey by choice knew what he was getting into and was prepared for it.

It's the unlucky ones who live in apartments only because there is no place else for rent who feel the effects of the Fourth Floor Syndrome.

Edited by aastra, 07 July 2019 - 04:59 PM.

[Nparker]

 

In Victoria, present thinking is that plenty of apartment potential exists in ... the North Park district

The potential remains.

[aastra]

Ogden Point. So in 1969, the appearance of the terminal was considered relevant to its function re: hosting cruise ships, but then for several decades Victorians argued that the appearance of the terminal was irrelevant to its function re: hosting cruise ships, but now in very recent years we've decided that the appearance of the terminal may be relevant to its function re: hosting cruise ships.

 

 

April 2, 1969
Daily Colonist

Liner Prospects Hasten Facelift

Long-awaited action is on the way for backward Ogden Point.

There will be a hurried facelifting in time for the old docks to accommodate big passenger liners this summer.

And sometime soon -- probably in four weeks -- a major committee will be formed to take a hard look at the overall question of shipping and how it should be handled in the next 20 years.

David Anderson, MP for Esquimalt-Saanich... said Tuesday from Ottawa that he was unhappy with the way the CNR had operated the docks...

"...because they are losing on the grain operation doesn't mean to say they have the right to let the other facilities decline."

Failure to maintain proper docking facilities at Ogden Point has long been a local sore spot.

...the readying of the docks for passenger liners would involve mainly painting and lighting. There will also be examination by divers to determine if footings are slipping.

The liners, from three major lines, are expected to bring some 7,000 U.S. tourists to Victoria during the summer.

Princess Italia will be the first to arrive, June 14, with 420 passengers bound for San Francisco from Alaska. It will be the first of seven two-day stopovers here by the ship during the holiday season.

The 600-passenger Present Roosevelt will stop for less than a day on each of three occasions, and the 375-passenger Monterey will dock here for five hours June 19 on its initial run from Los Angeles to Alaska. Its sister ship, Mariposa, will make three five-hour stops beginning July 31.

Ships owned by P and O Lines are also scheduled for Victoria stops beginning next year.

The cost of revamping the docks to handle the passenger liners is to be shared by the CNR and the department of transport...

The shipping study... will include all aspects of Ogden Point -- the ability to handle grain, depth of the water, size of the docks, need of roads, zoning -- "What can be expected in the way of freight arriving in the next 20 years?"

The question is of such importance it could have an effect on what the city plans in the way of residential areas...

"...if the whole of James Bay is to become an apartment highrise area over the next 20 years, perhaps the city would want to relocate the docks."

Edited by aastra, 07 July 2019 - 04:42 PM.

[aastra]

I missed the intro to those articles from 1974:

 

 

Daily Colonist/The Victoria Express Weekend Edition
May 18, 1974

LIFESTYLE

(pic of Orchard House in James Bay)

We're living, in case anyone hadn't noticed, in the Age of the Apartment.

High-rises, low-rises, plain and fancy, apartments have become an ubiquitous feature of our urban landscape, providing shelter for an ever-increasing proportion of metropolitan Victoria's population.

How did all this happen? What are the land-use, psychological and other problems inherent in the apartment lifestyle?

In particular, what can be done to tackle the current slump in construction of new rental apartment units?

 

(aastra says: Nothing can be done, apparently. Because the rental inventory remains effectively unchanged between the early 1970s and 2019! It's still roughly ~25,000 units, even though the metro population doubled during that time.)

(Victoria's 0.3 per cent apartment vacancy rate is one of the four lowest in the country, a stark contrast with levels of 7.9 per cent in Calgary and 5.2 per cent in Edmonton).

Edited by aastra, 07 July 2019 - 05:07 PM.

[Nparker]

Ogden Point. So in 1969, the appearance of the terminal was considered relevant to its function re: hosting cruise ships...

50 years later and Ogden Point is still a sorry excuse for a cruise passenger terminal. 

[aastra]

May, 1974:

"Whenever you alter supply and demand you create a synthetic market, and in the end, whatever is available is available at higher prices."

The real problem -- not only to the developer but to the public seeking accommodation -- is the prospect of fewer and fewer apartments being built.

"The moment we can't pass on our costs, we quit doing it (building apartments.)"

 

July, 2019:

We, as an industry that builds homes and communities, want to work with council, staff and the community to improve our housing situation as best we can — but there is only so much the city can do, and ask for, while still ensuring new homes are built to support our existing and growing population.

 

....

Edited by aastra, 07 July 2019 - 09:13 PM.

[aastra]

Victoria has been ruined yet again, and ruined by condos yet again. 2019, 1993, 1976... Victoria gets ruined every day, then perfected overnight, then ruined again.

 

 

Goodbye Victoria, kale and all

...I was born in Victoria 64 years ago. I’ve lived here all my life. Like so many others, I remember Victoria as it was. Affordable. Room for all. Sleepy, dusty, and quaint. Trips to Cook Street Village with my grandmother to buy pastries at Ethel’s Cake Shop; fish and chips, greasy and fragrant at the local eatery;

...we went in the family car to Douglas and Hillside to travel all the way around the roundabout. Then home to ride our bicycles to Beacon Hill Park until supper. It was safe back then...
 

(aastra says: Nobody goes to Cook Street Village anymore, nobody goes to bakeries anymore, nobody eats fish and chips anymore, nobody rides bicycles or goes to Beacon Hill Park anymore... and why is the city so dangerous now? Must be because of the new(est) condos, and not because of any CoV policies, right?)
 

I’m glad, in a way. Victoria has become a city of condos—unavailable to most of us, and only really affordable to a very few. I’m leaving for the northernmost tip of the island

(aastra says: the densest city neighbourhoods or the remote wilderness... those are the choices)...

I’m in shock really, not quite believing how this came to be...

Where did the years go? Where did my Victoria go?
https://www.focusonv...the-editor-r13/
 

Edited by aastra, 14 July 2019 - 11:23 AM.

[Rob Randall]

I guess that's scientific proof that Ethel’s Cake Shop > Bubby Rose's.

[aastra]

Pushing for commuter rail back when Greater Victoria's population was half what it is today and Langford was still dogpatch:

 

 

Daily Colonist
November 3, 1978

City receptive toward idea of E & N commuter service

Victoria Ald. Murray Glazier's proposal for a downtown Esquimalt and Nanaimo railway station and regular morning and afternoon commuter service between the Western Sector and downtown Victoria was endorsed Thursday by city council's finance committee.

The plans involve construction of a terminal building at Pandora and Store and extension of the line from the Esquimalt Road station to the proposed downtown location.

...a new downtown station would open the way for a morning and afternoon commuter service between Langford and downtown.

[Nparker]

...a new downtown station would open the way for a morning and afternoon commuter service between Langford and downtown.

Well the downtown station - such as it was - came and went and only once it was gone and the new bridge was deliberately made unviable for for rail, did the idea of a commuter train service get any sort of serious consideration. Our multi-jurisdictional backwater really is its own worst enemy much of the time.

[Rob Randall]

"Victoria--Tabling Agenda Items And Sending Them Back To Staff For Evaluation Since !868"

[aastra]

58 burglary reports in the CoV in 18 days. So how many unreported burglaries were there? 100? Hundreds?

 

Are 21st-century Victorians any less hesitant to call 911 than they were back then? Not in my experience. Sometimes I honestly can't believe the stuff that people tell me they witnessed but didn't call in.

 

 

Daily Colonist
January 18, 1976

High crime figures chill

Neighborhood Watch meetings are so chilling that one tends to come home and lock both doors.

That's what most of the 18 residents did who left Oak Bay's fifth neighborhood crime prevention meeting held Thursday by police force members.

Neighbors were told burglaries occur regularly in their well-to-do area even in broad daylight.

They were told a 20-year-old suspected sex offender was recently picked up by police nearby.

They were told $82,176 worth of property was stolen in Oak Bay break-ins last year.

And the city of Victoria had 58 burglaries reported so far this year, Constable Al Campbell said.

He and Constable Don Gardner gave tips on warding off burglars... All of the neighbors were concerned with increasing burglary and some had already suffered personal loss through theft.

- Make an empty house look as if someone is there by timing lights to go on an off
- Leave and outside light on so persons attempting to force a door or window will have to work in a pool of light
- Have secure, hardened steel locks on all doors and windows
- Consider installing alarms that are tripped by forced entry
- Be a good neighbor by watching nearby homes and reporting suspicious activity

"Don't be afraid of being called a nosy neighbor,"

"All calls that come into Oak Bay police office are acted upon,"

People were often afraid to report suspected crime for fear of looking ridiculous or being proved wrong, said the police officers.

...some activities people should report:

- Unusual sounds such as gunshots and screams
- Persons or groups going door-to-door then heading for the back of a house, especially if one remains in front as lookout
- People looking mentally or physically unusual who may be on drugs "right here in your neighborhood."
- Persons who may be in the process of being forced into vehicles.
- Gatherings of people for possible drug transactions.

They told of some recent crimes in Oak Bay against careless victims and regular crimes like purse-snatching which they said could be avoided if people left handbags at home on night jaunts.

Oak Bay was the first Greater Victoria core municipality to start the Neighborhood Watch crime-prevention program which has been in effect in Colwood for more than a year...

Edited by aastra, 19 July 2019 - 10:24 AM.

[Rob Randall]

- People looking mentally or physically unusual who may be on drugs "right here in your neighborhood."

 

Good way to keep those pesky muscular dystrophy kids off your street.