Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Saving house wins people's choice heritage award

Jeffs Residence and Heritage Vancouver work on building permits database win honours

An effort to save an historic West Side home garnered one of two inaugural people’s choice awards at the 2015 Vancouver Heritage Awards held Monday night.

The 1912 W.A. Doctor house was moved from 5903 Larch St. to storage in order protect it from demolition. Owner Susan Walker, who bought it from a developer who was going to knock it down, is now searching for a lot.

The second people’s choice honour was awarded for the rehabilitation of the Jeffs Residence at 1298 Salsbury Dr. in Grandview-Woodland.

This year marks the 36th time heritage awards have been handed out. They used to be annual but are now bi-annual.

There were 14 People’s Choice entries to rate between one and five stars with 1,178 ratings submitted for those entries.

Patrick Gunn, who’s on Heritage Vancouver Society’s board of directors, called the Larch Street home “spectacular.”

“They’re still looking for a lot and then it will be fully restored back to its 1912 appearance inside and out,” he said. “The insides are spectacular. It’s like nothing else Vancouver has — it’s really high Arts and Crafts. It’s just off the scale.”

Heritage Vancouver, meanwhile, captured an award of honour for helping create an early building permits database. Gunn, the project lead, and City of Vancouver archivist Heather Gordon accepted the award on stage. Leah Holman, who was involved in the project for Heritage Vancouver when it was initiated, was also a recipient.

“We’ve taken all of the handwritten building permit ledgers from the archives and transcribed them, line by line, because it’s all handwritten,” Gunn said. “So from 1901 to, right now, the early 1920s, all the building permit information is in a searchable database online and there’s 33,000 building permits now.”

For instance, if you have a 1912 house, he explained, you can find out information such as who owned it, the architect if there was one, the builder and the cost.

The project, which started in 1998, has taken thousands of hours of volunteer time. Gunn took it over in 2010. He said public service is the reason he got involved.

“Because the most common question is, when was my house built?” he said. “It’s a simple question but it’s not a simple answer and there’s no way of easily going through these permits, these historic ledgers. So once the data is transcribed, it’s easy to search.”

The project is ongoing, but Gunn said there are a lot of volunteers. They just had the archives scan 1937 to 1947 building permits, which is 1,900 ledger pages.

“We’re looking at about 45 minutes a page, so you’re looking at 2,000 hours to get them up in volunteer time,” he said. “It’s not as sexy as having a restored building, but basically all the buildings that were showcased [Monday night] can be found in the data base.”

Other awards of honour went to the Japanese Canadian War Memorial in Stanley Park, Kits Neighbourhood House and Hay House at 2305-2325 West Seventh Ave., St. George’s School at 3851 West 29th Ave., Vancouver Japanese Language School and Japanese Hall at 475 Alexander St., and the Yale Hotel at 1300 Granville St.

Janet Bingham was handed a Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of her heritage advocacy, including her efforts to preserve Gastown, Barclay Heritage Square and Roedde House and research and publications on Samuel Maclure and the Roedde family.

Awards of merit and awards of recognition were also given out Monday night. See the City of Vancouver website for the full list.

twitter.com/naoibh

Note: This story has been corrected since first posted.