Browsing “Illustrated Vancouver Series”

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here at Vancouver Is Awesome, but I thought it was perhaps time for a recap. 2011 was a big year for Illustrated Vancouver, and late in the year, I hit the 500th post milestone.  Since then, I’ve changed my pace somewhat, and while I won’t be posting every single day, I hope to continue my project as I work towards my original goal of 1,000 posts.

Today’s post on Illustrated Vancouver features studiomoh.com’s best of tumblr tool, supposedly generating my best posts from 2011. However, all systems are susceptible to failure, and of the top 12 images selected, almost half of the images are in fact, inflated due to fake tumblr accounts. And so, as a result, I’ve sorted through the riffraff to bring you a collage recap of what I consider to be my top 20 posts of the year.

This first collage above contains seven of the top twelve posts generated by the best of tumblr tool, as well as two more images which proved popular with the masses:

1. Old Hotel Vancouver by Charles Hepburn Scott
2. A cartoon by Len Norris
3. Giant Checkers in Stanley Park by Franklin (Archie) Arbuckle
4. Seymour fauve by Emil Kerie
5. Vancouver poster by Marisa Seguin
6. Poster for DRAWN at Little Mountain Gallery by Sol Sallee
7. Map of Vancouver by Western Canadian Greyhound Lines
8. A 1930 BCER map of Vancouver by Peter Hugh Page
9. A recent painting by Tom Carter

This second collage contains six more popular posts, two of which are by the same artist, the legendary Rand Holmes. His cover of Wreck Beach from the Georgia Straight is amazing, and his advert for Rohan’s Record Store was a hidden gem which I featured here last year. Clearly, the comic and commercial art aesthetic have a firm grasp of the market!

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Seen here is the front cover of The Jubilee Show souvenir program, a musical extravaganza held in July of 1946 for the city’s Diamond Jubilee. The artist responsible for the cover art is H. Edwards. I did try to find out more about H. Edwards, but alas I was unsuccessful. While the cover does look rather amateur or “high school yearbookish”, it was fairly imaginative placing the ghost of George Vancouver in the sky above us. And “Tomorrow’s Vancouver” on the back cover was quite prophetic with all the high density tall skyscrapers echoing the totem poles of the past! He’s even included foreshadowing of an inner-city freeway interchange!

I was able to find a bit of media coverage which mentioned the star of the show Eddie Cantor opening the Jewish old age home, but even more remarkable is the newspaper which ran the article. The masthead of The Jewish Western Bulletin (predecessor to the Jewish Independent) established October 9, 1930, bears an uncanny resemblance to that of my own online publication, Illustrated Vancouver!

The similarity above is purely coincidental, but I was quite obviously channeling newspaper mastheads of yesteryear. Keen viewers might also recognize another inspiration used in my design which I have largely kept secret until now. The distinctive Illustrated Vancouver script is based on that very famous cola company we are all familiar with. I purchased the font American Pop from MyFonts, and after a bit of tweaking, kerning, and customizing the capital letterforms, it was complete!

Finally, anyone looking to own a copy of this program might still find one for sale at Antiquarius books, a bookstore that was previously located in the Dominion Building in downtown Vancouver, now solely selling books on the Internet (from Falkland, British Columbia).

Today on Illustrated Vancouver, a placemat from White Spot, circa 1947. Actually, the date is just a guesstimate; August 22, 1947 was written on the back of the placemat in ink. I came across this placemat amidst the paper ephemera at the annual Burnaby Train Show earlier this month.

I love looking at old maps of the city, and I’ve featured quite a number of them so far. In spite of all the changes we’ve seen over the years, this map is still surprisingly useful, although you will no longer find a White Spot location at the corner of Granville & 67th Avenue. Incidentally, that was the location of the very first White Spot drive-in restaurant, which opened in 1928.

According to their corporate history, the White Spot story all started with a man and his truck. The man was Nat Bailey and his truck was a 1918 Model T which he transformed into a traveling lunch counter to serve sightseers at Vancouver’s Lookout Point.

Is there something about this story that sounds familiar? With a bit of luck, Vancouver might just get to see the food cart to franchise story repeat itself in the years to come.

Illustrations by Bob McIlhargey and Lori Brown, pre-Expo 86.

Concept renderings of the Expo 86 site speculating on redevelopment of the land before Expo had even been built. As I mentioned previously on Illustrated Vancouver, architectural illustrator Bob McIlhargey, along with his wife and associate Lori Brown were largely responsible for much of the concept rendering work commissioned for Expo 86 from 1982-86.

I’m told by Lori this was one of two enormous “8 foot long” isometric drawings all drawn by hand, the other drawing featuring the entire Expo grounds. They were drawn prior to the site being purchased by Li Ka-shing and taken over by Concord Pacific.

Since Bob passed away in 1998, Lori Brown has continued working in architectural illustration, using both traditional and computer assisted tools; she has also taught illustration at Kwantlen University. Bob’s lifetime body of work deserves much more attention than one or two posts could achieve; I hope to show more of this work in the future.

The Capilano Weather Beacon, before the Capilano Brewery was purchased and became property of Molson. This handy card seen below explains how to forecast the weather based on a series of colour codes and illuminated trends. The Canada Life building in Toronto has a similar weather beacon which according to Wikipedia, was the first of its kind to appear in Canada (installed on August 9, 1951) and was built at a cost of CAD$25,000. The Capilano Weather Beacon was a large neon sign which was installed in the spring of 1953 when the Sicks’ Capilano Brewery facility in Vancouver was built. The VPL has a great series of cake cutting photos from April 28, 1953, with a scale model of the building alongside a cake in the shape of the building. These negatives have not yet been scanned and prints are not yet available, so we may see those at a later point in time.

A promotional advertising card from Sicks’ Capilano Brewery, probably circulated until 1958 when the brewery was purchased by Molson.

The “6″ perched atop the weather beacon represented the six Western Canadian breweries once operated by Sicks’ Breweries Ltd. I dug into the Google News archive to retrieve this announcement in the Calgary Herald from August 5, 1944, which outlines who those six breweries were: Sicks’ Breweries (Alberta) Limited, Sicks’ Capilano Brewery Limited, Sicks’ Edmonton Brewery Limited, Sicks’ Lethbridge Brewery Limited, Sicks’ Prince Albert Brewery Limited, and Sicks’ …READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY>>>