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[VicHockeyFan]

Future built with bricks from the past
The Brothers Bawlf, Nick and Sam, to be honoured for role in preserving Victoria's heritage
Carolyn Heiman, Times Colonist
Published: Monday, May 28, 2007
Around the time when the arrival of golden arches in a community created a positive stir, two Victoria brothers saw a shining future in the past -- and in particular eight decaying buildings at the foot of Johnson Street.

Together -- but each bringing his own perspective -- Nick and Sam Bawlf transformed a skid row-like area with its junk stores facing three streets into the two-level, open air Market Square retail development. It was one of the first of its kind in North America when it opened in the early '70s.

Today Market Square still anchors the Lower Johnson Street shopping area recently coined as LoJo. It has become a magnet for shoppers wanting the funky, cutting-edge merchandise that independent retailing offers.


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Nick, left, and Sam Bawlf transformed an area of worn out warehouses into Market Square.
Ray Smith, Times Colonist

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Font: ****Nick was the architect on the Market Square project; Sam the developer with the vision that there was a future in saving the past.

On Friday the detail guy and his big-picture younger brother will be awarded the 2007 British Columbia Heritage Award from the province.

"They were really trailblazers," said Rick Goodacre, executive director of the Heritage Society of B.C., which recommends names for the award. "They did pioneering work in different and individual ways. Nick was the designer and Sam was the entrepreneur, politician and planner."

Market Square is held out as the brothers' signature development although it's a small piece of their contributions to heritage in the city and elsewhere.

Nick, 68, estimates his fingerprints -- either as an architect or heritage consultant -- are on more than 80 projects throughout B.C. Prior to Market Square, the duo worked on the Belmont Building at Humboldt and Government streets. Their partnership began with the redevelopment of the Law Courts building in Bastion Square. Nick had already envisioned the square as a heritage hub in a scholarship-winning architectural graduate thesis when he was at the University of British Columbia. Sam, six years younger, said the thesis inspired him to form a company that restored 16 buildings.

While academia fired Nick's interest in heritage, Sam got his start more pragmatically, rolling up his sleeves as a 24-year-old to organize the James Bay community association to protect the single family neighbourhood from highrise development pressures.

That work drew him into politics, first in 1973 as a Victoria city councillor during which time he developed the city's heritage policies and guided the first inventory of commercial heritage buildings. He lobbied the provincial government to make the first urban heritage conservation amendments to the Municipal Act.

Two years later, in a short term as an MLA, he broadened his impact on heritage conservation by overseeing the creation of the province's first Heritage Conservation Act of 1977 and the creation of the B.C. Heritage Trust and the Heritage conservation branch.

The duo's professional heritage focus spilled into volunteer passions. In the late 1980s, they were on the frontlines with a group called Save Our City Coalition which fought in vain to save heritage buildings torn down to make way for what is now the Bay Centre on Douglas Street.

[VicHockeyFan]

Almost 20 years later the project still opens old wounds for Sam, who now lives on Saltspring Island. "The Eaton Centre was a boondoggle," says Sam, adding the project damaged the vitality of Old Town "because there's only so much economic power."

While Sam worked the backroom, Nick stayed closer to the drafting table.

A project Nick is particularly proud of is the Victoria Conference Centre he designed with an eye on contemporary architectural movements but with sympathies toward the iconic and adjoining Fairmont Empress Hotel.


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Font: ****Len Volpnfjord, a retired director of planning who worked for the city when the project was done, said "that was an amazing challenge to have something that was new, complementary and in fact attached to The Empress." The project earned Bawlf a Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia Medal for Excellence.

Volpnfjord called Sam "a big-picture guy." While some projects, such a plans for the Inner Harbour around the foot of Wharf Street never flew, "he had some great ideas and it was always fun to bounce ideas around with Sam Bawlf."

Today Sam talks about the link between conservation and the economic health of Victoria.

Without early conservation efforts and the subsequent international attention Victoria's heritage has garnered, the city might not be as economically healthy as it is now, says Sam.

But back in 1969 when Sam moved to Victoria, no one saw that.

"When I came to Victoria ... the whole of Old Town was essentially fossilized. There was a question whether any of it would be preserved. There was talk of demolishing buildings along Wharf Street to make a more grandiose highway."

The two brothers, as time has shown, had their ideas that with the benefit of reflection proved to be equally grandiose but little to do with bigger roads and newer buildings.

Sam says they were the first to use the phrase Old Town now officially used on city documents and public banners. Most recently the city has developed "Old Town" design guidelines to pilot new construction in the area.

Nick, who uses a walker after breaking a hip in a fall, says he's not actively working on projects these days because he's not nimble enough to be climbing around in old buildings.

Is there a project he's still keen to do.

"Yes." An addition to his cottage perched on a cliffside on Texada Island to give him easier access to it. It's there Nick fosters another interest, collecting modern Danish designed furniture.

Sam, meanwhile continues to work as a consultant and on projects he's not prepared to discuss. "I expect I'll die with my boots on."

On the side of his desk he continues to drum up support for a theory he's outlined in a detailed book suggesting that Sir Francis Drake was the first European to chart B.C.'s coast.

If true, it overturns much of what everyone believes about who first explored the coast. But that's hardly the first time the brothers have made people see things differently.

Volpnfjord said the Bawlf brothers set the stage for other developers, including Michael Williams, who is also credited with saving many of the buildings in Victoria's downtown, to follow.

"It must have opened a lot of eyes in the '70s that you could do something on that kind of scale."

[Holden West]

I don't mean to throw cold water on Heiman's hagiography but any examination of the career of the brothers Bawlf must include Nic's own "boondoggle", The Wing project in Vic West. I don't hear much acclaim for the Regent Hotel on Wharf St., either. Still, their contribution to heritage revitalization has been incomparable, so congrats to them.

[Caramia]

This is awesome! And well deserved imo.