Vancouver Waterfront, 1982

I was on my way to the Powell Street Festival of Japanese culture in 1982, when I stopped to make the photo above.

I wouldn’t have remembered that if not for a contact sheet from a 24-frame roll of Ilford FP4 exposed that day. The first exposure records the urban landscape above. And I’d quite forgotten the location of that viewpoint.

So I Googled it.

Using Google Earth and Street View, I pinpointed the location. No surprise, given how many of my Eighties Vancouver images were made from similar structures, that it should be from an elevated parking lot (at street level) between Seymour and Richards Streets, on W. Cordova, at Waterfront Station (itself a historic landmark, opened in 1914).

The image looks northeast, over the waterfront Railyards along the back of the 300 block Water Street. The corner building, at 375 Water Street, long the home of Kelly, Douglas & Co., supplied everything a Klondike Gold Rush miner could have desired in 1898. Founders Robert Kelly and Frank Douglas apprenticed at Oppenheimer Brothers, German immigrants who made their fortune in the Cariboo Gold Rush of the early 1860s.

A complete renovation in 1987 turned the giant warehouse into the office building known today as The Landing. The “prestigious heritage office building” was recently acquired from the Vancouver Whitecaps (who I thought were a football team) by a Toronto development company. The ancient advertisements in my photo have been painted over.

375 Water Street, 1900s (Carrera Management Corp.)

Unfortunately, my photo doesn’t include the great arched window just above ground level, with a view of the harbour — probably because I was concerned with keeping the camera, and so buildings, vertical. Perhaps, had I owned a wider lens (or a view camera with tilts and swings, which was probably used to make the historic image above), I might have caught the spectre of a white-robed (they’re always white-robed) poltergeist who is reported by security guards to drift through the building to gaze out of the window … waiting, perhaps, for a ship that never docked.

Further down Water St., 353 housed Dairy Queen, and next door Neto Inuit Gallery (now simply the Inuit Gallery) represented some of the greatest  sculptors from Canada’s arctic communities. I wouldn’t have known when I made the photo that 8-years-later, I’d accompany my future wife, Amanda, as she paid instalments on a delightful whalebone carving of a kayaker, by Nelson Takkiuq (1930-1999) of Uqsuqtuuq (Gjoa Haven).

As I said, in 1982 I was on my way (by bicycle) to the Powell Street Festival, then just five years old, in Japantown. This year’s festival would have celebrated 44-years. Due to Covid-19, and possibly the homeless crisis at Oppenheimer Park, it was held as a telethon on August 1.

Powell Street Festival, Oppenheimer Park, 1982

Like the feature image, the photo above makes its debut here and in the Eighties Vancouver 35mm gallery.