Lost bus depot Pegasus panels located after 25 years
Historic art deco items were thought lost forever, but turn up under Cambie Bridge
The architectural showpiece of the old Vancouver bus depot was a pair of sculptures of Pegasus, the winged horse from Greek mythology.
The panels were very art deco, and so cool the City of Vancouver decided to save them when the building at 150 Dunsmuir St. was torn down in 1993. They remained standing at the site for a time, but eventually were taken down and stored by the city.
Then they vanished. And no one seemed to know where they were — until Jeff Veniot sent an email to me after I wrote a story about the old bus depot.
It turns out they’ve been hiding in plain sight in an old city works yard on the southeast side of the Cambie Bridge. But you can’t actually see them because they’re inside a wooden crate.
On Wednesday afternoon photographer Gerry Kahrmann and I went to check them out. They’re tucked into the northeast corner of the works yard, beside a circular staircase and the False Creek bike path.
You have to make your way through blackberry bushes and some rotten parts of their wooden container to get up close. Most of the sculpture is still covered up, but enough of the wood has rotted that you can make out parts of the horse’s posterior and wings.
“I’ve been waiting about 25 years to tell people where they were,” said Veniot, who lives nearby.
“I think they’ve been sitting right there since the bus depot shut down in 1993, when they moved to Pacific Central Station. I knew (they were the panels) right away because of the blue paint — in the last days of the building they had painted the front of the building blue.”
That blue paint is chipping, but when you peel it off the Pegasus sculpture seems to be in fine shape. It’s made of concrete, after all.
It looks like the city saved most of the concrete walls to which the winged horses were affixed. They’re standing upright inside a steel frame, and look to be about 3.5 metres feet tall and six metres wide.
The panels were installed on either side of the Dunsmuir Street entrance and were the logo of B.C. Motor Transportation, the company that built the bus depot.
B.C. Motor Transportation was a subsidiary of B.C. Electric, the private electric company that was nationalized and renamed B.C. Hydro in 1961. B.C. Motor Transportation’s bus company was called Pacific Stage Lines, which also used Pegasus as a logo.
A couple of weeks ago Veniot saw someone “in a visi-vest” looking at the wooden crate with the panels inside. He was told the city plans to clear the site for park and residential use. Alarmed that the Pegasus panels might be destroyed, he contacted me.
“I always thought the city knew where the hell they were, and they were going to try to incorporate them into some new building and make a display,” said Veniot.
“But when I read your article saying they couldn’t find them, I thought what probably happened is the guy that negotiated getting them there and storing them at some point retired, and the information went with him.”
Heritage expert Don Luxton said this happens with public art salvaged from demolished buildings.
“People forgot about them, which so often happens when you salvage pieces of buildings,” said Luxton. “If they aren’t reused immediately, they get put in storage somewhere and don’t get reused.”
There are several examples of this, from the Challenger Relief Map (which is still looking for a home, 21 years after it was taken out of the old B.C. Pavilion at the PNE) to the Seven Seas Seafoods neon sign in North Vancouver, which hasn’t been seen in public since 2002.
The Museum of Vancouver has expressed interest in the Pegasus panels, although their size and weight may prove to be a problem. (The museum owns the old Aristocratic restaurant neon sign, but it’s too big to fit through the museum doors, so it’s in storage.)
Luxton thinks the city initially wanted to display the panels at Larwill Park, which was where the bus depot was located from 1947 to 1993. At this point, though, he thinks they should just put them up as public art.
“Put them up somewhere so people can see them, for God sakes,” said Luxton. “They’re really a fun item. It’s part of our public transportation history. There’s not much left from that era that we’re preserving, and this is one of the more notable survivors.”