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| The Leslie
House 1380 Hornby The West End |
The Clark
House 243 East 5th Mount Pleasant |
732 Princess Strathcona |
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Everyone in Vancouver knows Umberto's. Umberto
Menghi's flagship restaurant, situated in a striking canary yellow with
white trim Victorian Yaletown home, has been a Vancouver gastronomic landmark
for decades. What most Vancouverites do not know is that until recently there existed a lane house hidden behind the yellow house. Nova Scotia-born plasterer George Washington Leslie built Leslie House in 1888-1889. He, and members of his extended family, lived here from 1889 until 1947. Leslie built the two-storey lane house for his daughter Agnes and her husband Stirling Grieves above a previously existing barn. From 1948 to the late 1960s Leslie House was home to an interior design shop while the lane house at the back was often rented out to upholsterers working for the company. Later on the house was home to Mano Designs, a dress design company, owned by Mano and Olive Herendy who lived in the lane house behind the shop. The Lane House has recently been moved to Mole Hill with the help of The Vancouver Heritage Foundation to allow a new development behind Umberto's. |
The Clark House has been
my most challenging, and at the same time, most rewarding research project.
After researching the history of the lane house behind Umberto's for the Vancouver Heritage Foundation, it was recommended that I contact Johnathan Brownlee, who, I was told, was working to save The Clark House - reputedly Vancouver's oldest existing house - from demolition. I was told that Johnathan was making a documentary on the Clark House and might be looking for someone to help with research. I showed Johnathan samples of my past projects and some data I had gleaned about the Clark House at the archives. Not only was I hired to do the research, Johnathan asked me to be involved in the TV show. Scottish-born fruit wholesaler, Thomas Whighton Clark, built this house in 1888-1889. To save the Clark House Johnathan moved it from its East 5th location to a new site behind 130 West 10th. I researched the entire 200-block of East 5th, as well as a large section of the 100 block of West 10th which, incidentally, won Vancouver's most beautiful block competition in 1999. |
732 Princess and its neighbour to the south, 750 Princess, were recently
rehabilitated by their new owners and their exteriors restored to a period
colour scheme through the help of a grant from the True
Colours Programme offered though the Vancouver Heritage Foundation.
The first residents of this block were a mix of middle and working-class people from Britain, Atlantic Canada, Ontario, and from Newfoundland - then a separate Dominion. The Spracklins and the Russells who pioneered the east side of the block, were from Newfoundland. The Spracklins, and the Bartletts, (the Bartletts were later residents of 732) all hailed from the town of Brigus in Newfoundland where their family roots can be traced back to the 1600s. There was a sort of Newfoundlander colony of sorts in the 600 and 700 blocks of Princess. I haven't yet been able to determine exactly why or how they all came to live in the same block but I would sure love to find out. The stories of at least three families that lived on the 700-block of Princess can be read in Daphne Marlatt and Carole Itter's fascinating Opening Doors: Vancouver's East End. |
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