What you are seeing here is the old Capitol 6 cinema from the Seymour Street side. The building across the alley with the gaping holes is the Granville Street entrance and the excavation in the foreground is where the six cinemas were. The Capitol Six was built in 1975 as part of the ultimately failed attempt to turn Granville Street into a walking mall. Prior to closing it off to all but trolleys, buses, and taxis Granville Street used to be the main drag and boasted the highest density of neon signs in the world, surpassing even Las Vegas at the time. Some well-intentioned but misguided urban planner decided that by removing the cars from the equation people would promenade rather than cruise.

The approach standard to indoor shopping malls was taken, anchor store at one end and food court at the other and that's where it failed. On the 600 block of Granville was the Bay, Eatons was on the 700 block, the 800 block had the brand new Capitol Six, the Granville 7 Cineplex/Odeon with a McDonalds at the end of the block at Nelson and the food court kitty-corner from the McDonalds across Nelson.

At the time of the Granville Mall's creation Davie Street was the red light district (the Ultra Love sex shop and the bank of pay-phones in front of the Shoppers Drug mart are remnant of this time) and Yaletown was an industrial skid full of sawmills, warehouses, and welfare hotels. Granville Street between Nelson and the Granville Bridge had deteriorated into a string of seed sex-shops, 25¢ movie booths, and by-the-hour hotels. A further attempt to anchor the south end of the Granville Mall in the form of the Chateau Granville luxury hotel on the 1000 block of Granville at the corner of Granville and Helmeken, also built in 1975. It was hoped wealthy tourists walking from the hotel to the Granville Mall would attract "respectable" business to the 900 block of Granville.

In reality, during the day, Eatons became the south anchor since it was much more pleasant and palatable for the average person to turn off on Robson Street, walk past the gleaming new provincial courthouse and the old courthouse now converted to the Vancouver Art Gallery and the ultra-modern Vancouver Public Library go to a restaurant on "Robson Strasse" the former heart of the German immigrant community and home to many fine restaurants. It was only in the evening would people walk the the 800 and 900 blocks of Granville to go to the cinemas - the new Capitol Six, the Odeon/Granville 7 Cinemas, the Plaza, the Paradise, the Caprice, and the Vogue - or to attend performances at the Orpheum and Commodore.

Only the very well established niche businesses, like Leo's Cameras, Granville Optical, Tandy Leather, and Granville Books or places that served the cinema-goers, like Taf's Café thrived. But with the 800 block of Granville being the main stop for the trolleys a different daytime crowd emerged - suburban punks and death-rockers. During the day the 800 block of Granville was populated by the alternative crowd and businesses like Fox and Fluevog, the Underground, and Golden Age Collectibles catered to them. Taf's was the place to hang out (along with the back stairs of the art gallery around the corner).

In the late 70's and early 80's I used to go the cinemas with my dad when he needed to come into the city for business. We'd often go to a matinée before heading back to the ferry. In the late 80's I'd regularly come over from the island to go clubbing at Graceland, Luv-a-fair, the Eclipse, and the Twilight Zone. I was one of those death-rockers (called "Gothics" at this point, the term had not yet shortened to just "goth") on the 800 block and the art gallery stairs. In 1990 I moved to Vancouver permanently to attend SFU. I became a regular at Taf's. In the early 90's my girlfriend at the time worked as a jewelry vendor on the 800-block of Granville and I occasionally did as well (I was frequently sought out by people who could not get their puzzle rings reassembled). A little later I got a part-time job at the Capitol Six as a doorman and usher since the hours worked well with my class schedule. It was a terrible, low paying job, but better than nothing.

The job had it's moments though. I let my friends "sneak" in for free on Wednesdays when I would be the only person checking tickets. "Nightmare Before Christmas" came out while I worked there, which is where I got the 6' x 4' Jack and Sally posters that hang in my hallway. There was the utterly surreal moment of finding a live turtle on the stairs leading to the alley overpass from the Granville entrance. It was before Yaletown was built up with towers and it was stunning to watch fogs fill False Creek and spill into the city from the windows on the top floor. I'll also never forget the annoying brat wiping out in the sludge lake in Cinema 1.

Like any multiplex theatre our primary function as doormen were to keep people (usually boys between the ages of 12 and 15) from buying one ticket and then skipping from one cinema to another to see two or three movies. One day there was a couple of particularly obnoxious 12-year olds that were trying to skip from a 7:00 show to the 9:00 show in Cinema 1. Cinema 1 one was the big screen on the first floor that seated about 1,000 people. On a Saturday with a popular movie with shows at 1:00, 3:00, 5:00 and 7:00, three to four thousand people have already been through the cinema by the 9:00 show. A lot of those people spill pop. The floor is sloped and all the spilled pop would collect in a foetid puddle in the space between the first row and the screen. While another doorman and I had the exits back to lobby blocked a third doorman was chasing this kid down the isle to boot him out. The kid tore down the isle, slipped in front of the first row and skidded into the pop-lake. He was covered from head to toe in rancid pop. It wasn't hard to get him to leave after that.

Now the Capitol Six is gone. It was replaced by the Paramount (now "Scotia Bank Cinemas") at Smithe and Burrard. Fluevog (now sans Fox) and Taf's remain, but the "alterno-mall" portion of the Granville Mall is gone with it. The Underground didn't survive the four-month bus-strike of 2001. Other business were driven away (Leo's) or driven out of business (Cheap Thrills, Granville Books) by raised rents resulting from the Canada Line LRT station going in at Granville and Robson and 2010 Olympics profiteering. The Vogue is now a performing theatre, while the other single-screen cinemas have all been turned into cavernous night-clubs in another city hall (mis)guided initiative to return Granville Street to its glory days of 40-50 years ago.

I've been reading "Historical Atlas of Vancouver and the Lower Fraser Valley" by Derek Hayes and have had a few old mysteries about certain streets cleared up. Ever wonder why the block between Alberni and Georgia streets is so narrow and why Alberni abruptly ends at Burrard? Or why, excluding Georgia, Davie, Pacific and Nelson, none of the streets west of Burrard match up with the streets east of Burrard? And why does Burrard, the busiest north-south street through downtown, just end at 16th? Or why there is a bizarre dog-leg in Oak Street at 16th? Or why on Granville there are shops north of 16th abruptly giving way to giant lots with mansions on the south side of 16th? What's up with that great big square of nothing in Richmond between Alderbridge, Westminster Highway. Garden City and Shell Road?

Well the mismatching of streets downtown on either side of Burrard is because, prior to incorporating together in 1886, there were two separate town sites on the downtown peninsula. East of Burrard was "Granville" and west of Burrard to Stanley Park was "Liverpool". Granville was laid out with the long side of the block parallel to Burrard, whereas Liverpool had the short side parallel to Burrard. Pacific, Davie, Nelson and Robson more or less line up by accident. Granville was a CPR townsite and Georgia was already established as main street so the planners of Liverpool carried it through despite that it interrupts their grid, thus the narrowness of the block between Alberni and Georgia, the after-the-fact dog-legs at Smithe-Haro and Dunsmuir-Melville, the weird left-over street-to-nowhere that is Eveliegh, and all the other "what were they thinking?" weirdness that happens at Burrard.

And why does Burrard itself just suddenly end at 16th? Because, in 1886, that's where Vancouver ended. The original city limit was at 16th and all the space beyond was unincorporated nothing. When the Interurban electric railway was built between New Westminster and Vancouver the people that had land in the intervening unincorporated space got together to incorporate everything from Point Grey to North Road as a new municipality. There was a disagreement over the name. The farmers in the eastern part wanted it named "Burnaby" after Colonel Moody's secretary Robert Burnaby, who was the first to survey and map Burnaby Lake. Real estate speculators who wanted to make money selling lots near the Interurban line wanted to call the new municipality "South Vancouver" since they thought that was a more marketable name. They split the territory at what became Boundary Road. To the east was Burnaby, to the west was South Vancouver. South Vancouver incorporated in 1891. Burnaby in 1892. Like the Liverpool/Granville join, the grid for South Vancouver was laid out separately from the grid in Vancouver, thus the mis-match of Oak at 16th.

Because land was cheaper in South Vancouver than in Vancouver lots in the east were marketed to blue-collar sorts. The municipal government of South Vancouver refused to go into debt and roads and other services weren't getting built fast enough to suit the richer land-owners in the western part, so they split off (at Cambie Street, then called Bridge Street) in 1908 and formed the municipality of Point Grey. The abrupt change in zones on Granville at 16th is because at the time houses like Hycroft Mansion were being built, they weren't in Vancouver. Point Grey and South Vancouver were separate municipalities up until 1929, and it is no accident that the new (and current) Vancouver city hall, built shortly after amalgamation, is at 12th and Cambie, more or less where the three municipalities met.

So what's the connection to all this and that weird patch of nothing in the middle of Richmond? It goes back to the Interurban - and this is funny in a painfully stupid kind of way. The original line of the Interurban, built in 1891, connected New Westminster and Vancouver, spurring the creation of Burnaby and South Vancouver. In 1902 a second line was opened to Steveston. That's what the railway tracks beside Arbutus Street in Vancouver and along Shell Road in Richmond are. In the 1920's someone had the brilliant idea of putting an airport along the Interurban line in Richmond and that blot of nothing is it. When planes got bigger and longer runways were needed the airport was moved to Sea Island, but think about it for a second. In 1986, in order not to look like dufuses with the rest of the planet looking millions were spent to build the original line of SkyTrain between Vancouver and New Westminster. Guess what path it follows? The path of the electric railway that was there in 1891. And right now, again simply to not look like dufuses with the rest of the planet looking because of the 2010 Winter Olympics, hundreds of millions more are being spent to build rail transit to Richmond that we had in 1902 and a connection to the airport that we effectively had before there was an airport. It seems that in the area of transit all we've managed to accomplish in the last twenty-one years is flail around trying to rebuild what was in place over a century ago.

If 95% of the people on earth right now were to suddenly die, the total population of the earth would still be higher than it was in the at any point prior to a thousand years ago.

Put another way, in the last thousand years the total number of humans living on earth has increased twenty-fold.

From the south-west corner, looking north-east.

From the rose gardens on the south lawn, facing north-north-west.

The Empress Hotel was built in 1908 as part of the Canadian Pacific Railway's chain of luxury hotels. The land it is sitting on is fill. The street in front, Government Street, was a bridge across James Bay when construction started. The city of Victoria originally granted the land that the natural history museum is now on to CP on the condition that they build and operate a hotel in the city for a minimum of fifty years. The architect, Francis Rattenbury (who also designed the provincial legislature buildings in Victoria and the fantastic power plants half way up Indian Arm), decided that filling the bay and parking the hotel centred in Victoria's inner harbour would make for a much more impressive presence. The original hotel (the part in these pictures) and the extension built in 1912 rest on Australian iron-wood pilings that are actually insufficient for the weight of the building - the hotel has settled about half a metre since it was constructed. I pointed out the repairs in the masonry to Elaine while we were there, but didn't think to take a picture. When the conference centre was added behind the hotel in the late 1980's stainless-steel pilings were driven nearly twice as deep as the pilings bearing the hotel and they only carry a fraction of the weight.

My mother sent me an e-mail of stories and pictures from a website detailing the V-bomb attacks on Antwerp late in World War II.

Imagine this: you are a fourteen year-old girl. It's a couple weeks before Christmas and all your friends want to go to town to see the new movie. They want you to come too. You say you can't afford it and want to save the money for Christmas. They plead with you and try to get you to come along and won't take "no" for an answer. You have a hard time convincing them (and yourself) that you don't want to come, but eventually they give up trying to drag you along and go without you.

The cinema gets hit by a bomb and all your friends die.


That's one of my mother's stories. This is the cinema:

The Rex Cinema, Antwerp, Belgium. December 1944.

This was the cover of today's National Post.

Now bear in mind that the Mongols are to Islam as Nazis are to Judaism. The Mongols wiped-out whole cities in Persia and Iraq, killing millions. In 1298 the invading Mongols slaughtered an estimated 800,000 people in Baghdad and killed the Caliph (more or less Islam's equivalent to the Pope) and all his family and heirs. The event is at the hub of much of the last 700 years of history in the area and the ramifications of it continue today. Saddam Hussein frequently made referrence to the Mongol invasions in his speeches against the United States. As an occupying force in Baghdad right now Bush is not making it easier for his troops by posing for a picture like this. Even the Crusaders are less reviled in the Muslim world than the Mongols. I can't even think of a more historically myopic and just plain blatantly stupid photo opportunity for the man. He wouldn't be any more in-your-face if he were to paste horns on his head, paint himself red and parade around Baghdad holding a sign saying "Great Satan"... Only in this case he's not the one that is going to have rocket-propelled grenades launched at him. Way to go Peace Duke.

( larger scan under the cut )

I saw this picture on the cover of the Globe and Mail today:



and immediately thought of this one:



...noting that Bush is in the position of Stalin. Probably not the association he was going for.

As usual we are, despite all the flack for "doing nothing" quietly doing more than expected, more than we said we would, and doing it right. The headlines on all the papers today are about how "disappointed" the American government is with us, yet the American embassador to Canada, Paul Celucci, also had these words about our naval presence in the Persian Gulf which is still there because we are still in Afghanistan:

Ironically, because of the presence in the Persian Gulf, they will provide more support for this war in Iraq indirectly than most of those 46 countries that are fully supporting us. It's kind of an odd situation.

So, to those that are "ashamed" of our "lack of involvement" - shut the fuck up. Our government did the ethically right thing by staying in line with our prinicples regarding the UN, international law, and peacekeeping. Never forget that Canada invented peacekeeping and ever since we first distinguished ourselves in the Boer War, Canadian soldiers have continued to earn and maintain the respect of friends and enemies alike. General Rommel, the German commander of the North African theatre in WWII, said that if he had Canadian soldiers with American equipment he could win the war. In the first gas attacks of WWI at Yprès, it was the Canadians alone that held the line while everyone else ran and died. Canada was in WWII two years ahead of America and it was the Canadians (including my father) who spearheaded the invasion of Italy in WWII and cleared the way for the Brits and Americans. It was Canadians (again including my father) that landed at Dieppe and prooved that the invasion of Normandy, while difficult, was not impossible. Our peacekeepers were in Korea and, despite the reputation garnered from American draft-dodging, our volunteer millitary was in Vietnam. And in the first Gulf War it was Canadian fighter jets that were sent in first, specifically to be shot at, so the Americans could come in with relative safety to take out the anti-aircraft guns.

Be proud of Canada. Be proud that we have the guts and moral fortitude to finish wars and ethics enough not to start them.

Nor will we forget the citizens of 80 other nations who died with our own. Dozens of Pakistanis, more than 130 Israelis, more than 250 citizens of India, men and women from El Salvador, Iran, Mexico and Japan, and hundreds of British citizens.

What about us, George? What about that country that shares about 5,000 miles of border with you and represents nearly 50% of your foreign trade? What about the as yet undetermined 35-60 Canadians that were there? What about the estimated 200,000 Canadians in NYC right now? Way to go. Way to forget about your neighbours.

America has no truer friend than Great Britain.
Once again, we are joined together in a great cause.
I'm so honored the British prime minister has crossed an ocean to show his unity with America.
Thank you for coming, friend.
On Sept. 11, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country. Americans have known wars, but for the past 136 years they have been wars on foreign soil, except for one Sunday in 1941. Americans have known the casualties of war, but not at the center of a great city on a peaceful morning.

And way to show your ignorance of your own history, George. Nice how you praised the British and strategically failed to mention that it was them (and us) doing the attacking 136 years ago. Also way to forget about the Japanese landing on the Aleutian Islands. Did you forget about Alaska, George? That's part of the states too you know. Seems like you have a pretty major blind spot that starts at the 49th parallel. Idiot.

They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed.

And in case anyone's forgotten what happened in the last election, ain't this a fine example of the pot calling the kettle black? Here's a little reminder:


I'm all for going after the Taliban, it should have been done well before this. I'm just glad the Brits are involved to keep this idiot in line. Before the war really gets going, how about Giuliani for president? Or even Hilary Clinton? Or anybody with a brain.