I found two houses in condo land — one pink and purple, one light blue.
They sit on what was once the city work yard near False Creek in Vancouver. Houses like these were built all over the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood a century ago, homes for creekside workers. Those that remain are a dying breed.
I wondered what these lonely old survivors were doing here by the water, facing the Expo towers that helped sell Vancouver to the world. To the immediate east is the Olympic Village that evolved the Vancouver brand.
The houses looked like captives, waiting in the middle of a muddied yard, boarded up and fenced off. The whole yard had a fence topped with barbed wire to keep curious passersbys like me from closer inspection.
This is, as it turns out, a holding pen.
The owners of the two 100-year-old houses, two different developers, have big plans for them in their upcoming projects. The houses will be melded with contemporary designs. (The yard is still in the hands of the city, which is holding the heritage properties on their owners’ behalf.)
Once three blocks apart, the two houses will be next-door neighbours until the summer.
The pink-and-purple one, known as “Coulter House,” came from 35 West 6th Ave. Built in 1901, it was then the home of W.H. Coulter, a machinist.
The light blue one, known as the “Lougheed Residence,” came from 2040 Columbia St. Built in 1909, it was named after builder Jas. Lougheed and was then the home of Arthur S. Bennett, boiler inspector.
This area was once home to a thriving Japanese Canadian community. Immigrants who worked at nearby mills on the creek lived here with their families. There were rooming houses for workers, a Japanese-run laundry and two Japanese schools, one attached to a Japanese Methodist church on West Sixth.
The Lougheed Residence was home to salesman G. Kumita and family from 1938 to 1943. In 1942, the Canadian government began seizing the property of all Japanese Canadians living in coastal B.C. and sending them to internment camps. By 1944, a man by the name of J. Hill had taken it over.
Today a different landscape of work has emerged in Mount Pleasant, sometimes called Mount Pixel for the tech companies that have taken up residence. As a part of this new vision, the Coulter House and the Lougheed Residence will have different lives at their former addresses.
Developer Conwest will repaint the pink-and-purple Coulter House white and graft it to its blocky new office building. The house will serve as the main entrance and a restaurant.
Developer Pyrrha will add a wee six-storey industrial tower behind the Lougheed Residence for hand-crafted jewelry manufacturing.
The Bible has some advice about burdening the old with the new: “No one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins — and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins.”
But the city has approved the new wine in old wineskins anyway. The urban design panel called the Pyrrha development a “piece of jewelry itself.” The heritage commission supported the Coulter development but asked what’s up with the paint job.
It’s a lot of surgery for these old bodies. When I returned to the yard to look upon them again, they did look like delicate skins.
By the creekside, where millionaires now walk their dogs, the old houses will have a few months together to ponder their blue-collar birth, before the city marches on, dragging them forward.
Read more: Urban Planning + Architecture
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