While taking the pictures of the trees below, I took a couple of this little Gallery across on the other side of the railway tracks, in a waterfront park. Back in the 'good old days' before the Lions Gate Bridge was opened in 1937 or 1938, this was the Ferry Building, where you got tickets for the ferry which took you across to the far side of Stanley Park, in what's now called 'the West End' of downtown Vancouver. This is now owned by the city, and used as a Gallery for local artists to show their stuff. Everything old is new again.Wednesday, August 12, 2009
The once-upon-a-time Ferry Building....
While taking the pictures of the trees below, I took a couple of this little Gallery across on the other side of the railway tracks, in a waterfront park. Back in the 'good old days' before the Lions Gate Bridge was opened in 1937 or 1938, this was the Ferry Building, where you got tickets for the ferry which took you across to the far side of Stanley Park, in what's now called 'the West End' of downtown Vancouver. This is now owned by the city, and used as a Gallery for local artists to show their stuff. Everything old is new again.
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I love such buildings, thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteAre there also any ancient Hudson Bay Posts around in your area?
What's a 'Hudson's Bay Post'?
ReplyDelete(Just kidding!) Actually, and rather sadly, the Hudson's Bay Company was bought out by some billionaire in the USA named Zucker and with a name like that, you've got to be good.
But I digress - sorry about that.
No, Monsieur, there aren't any of those famous old Hudson's Bay Posts around here. But I did actually visit a working one up in the arctic in 1968, and it was a far cry from the walled-in compounds we saw in school books.
It was hundreds of miles above the tree line, at the top of Hudson's Bay, coincidentally, and looked much like a rather nondescript one-room store operation, with the
living quarters for the fellow who ran it attached to the back of the store. The summer I was up there, his stock was almost exhausted, because the once-a-year resupply ship had been delayed for repairs en route. So those of us who could were having supplies flown in from a base at Churchill, Manitoba.
Those came on an old single-engined Norseman floatplane, and it cost $1.00 per pound for a bag
of potatoes to be flown in that way. I know, because my gang got tired of the dehydrated kind, and we decided to order the real ones.
Our bosses on that government job
had a fit when they got the bill in Ottawa for our change of diet.
I got a very stern message by radio-phone saying I'd better not do that again. That annoyed the hell out of me, because I hadn't seen a pay-cheque for me or my faithful local helpers all summer,
and my snivel-servant bosses in the head office weren't at all concerned about that. So my remedy was to requisition another tech from head office to come up and lend a hand. The day the plane brought him in, I was packed and ready for departure when it left.
I shook his hand, congratulated him on being promoted to acting superintendent, and waved everyone a fond farewell as that old plane lifted off for civilization.
My bosses in Ottawa head office weren't too pleased about that one either, and even less so when I demanded overtime pay for all the extra hours I'd put in, working six days a week up there, trying to finish things up before winter came back. After I collected all that, I headed out here to B.C.,
and hired on at B.C. Hydro. So much for being a federal civil servant. My main problem, it seemed, was that I wasn't related to anyone else in the civil service of those times, so I had no clout to use when someone goofed up further along the line.
But it was an interesting couple of years while it lasted.
An my four Eskimo ( now called Inuit) companions on that job were really good guys to work with, and they picked up new ideas quite fast. We had a bit of a language problem at first, but we got around that with a lot of gesturing and drawing pictures, and by one of them acting as the translator. I enjoyed working with them more than I thought I might, and they seemed surprised that a
"crazy kabloona" would work right along with them. (kabloona in their language meant "face that never smiles" which is how they saw most of the whites they met up there, probably because most whites didn't really want to be there, and had very little to smile about. The natives, on the other hand, always seemed to have something amusing to cheer themselves up, and considering the conditions around there, I thought that was really an accomplishment.
It was an interesting place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. In mid-summer, the highest the temperature got at the local government weather station was 45 Fahrenheit. I didn't want to be there in mid-winter, when they said it was dark 24/7 for weeks, and colder than a mother-in-law's heart.