An iconic landmark that towered
The Vancouver Sun has been based out of several diff erent locations, but The Sun Tower —
At 2 a. m. on March 22, 1937, a fire broke out at The Vancouver Sun’s office at 125 West Pender. The newsroom was destroyed, but the paper still managed to print its usual three editions, including a story on the fire.
The staff’s resiliency in the face of adversity has long been one of the hallmarks of the paper — that’s why newsroom wags call it The Daily Miracle.
In any event, the fire had a beneficial side- effect, because it set in motion one of the important moments in the paper’s history: the move to the Sun Tower.
The historic landmark at 500 Beatty was The Sun’s home from 1937 to 1965. Not only was it one of Vancouver’s most distinctive buildings, it had one of its best neon signs, a gloriously garish work that spelled out The Sun in red neon and was flanked by golden neon lightning bolts.
It was originally called the World Tower, because it was built in 1911- 12 for another newspaper, the Vancouver World.
The World was owned by the flamboyant Louis D. Taylor, who ran for Vancouver mayor 20 times between 1910 and 1934, and won eight elections.
Taylor spared no expense for his showpiece, hiring the noted architect W. T. Whiteway to design the tallest structure in the British Empire.
Whiteway’s Beaux- Arts design soared 17 storeys high, with a three- storey “cupola” dome on top that makes it 284 feet off the ground.
The cost was $ 625,000, a fortune at the time. There was a marble floor in the entrance, hexagonal tiles in the offices, and operators for the elevators. One thousand, two hundred tons of steel went into its frame, which was clad in terra cotta, granite and brick.
One of the building’s defining features was nine nude female caryatids in the terra cotta on the 8th floor. The “nine maidens” were designed by sculptor Charles Marega, who also created the lions on the Lions Gate Bridge.
Unfortunately, the building opened just as a recession hit. A big globe held up by a strongman, which appears in early drawings of the building, was never installed.
In 1915, the World moved out of the building, which was home to Bekins Moving & Storage when The Sun purchased it. It was an appropriate home for the paper, given The Sun had purchased the World in 1924.
Whistle blowers
The bottom eight floors have about 7,500 square feet per floor, while the floors in the nine- storey tower have 2,200 sq. ft. The offices in the tower floors are arranged in a circle around the elevator. When The Sun was based there, the newsroom was on the fourth floor, the cafeteria was on the ninth, and the photo studio on the 16th.
“There was a chandelier in what we used for the studio, and the chandelier used to sway back and forth in a high wind,” recalls retired Sun photographer George Diack. “They found the tower actually swayed, and the chandelier would sway.”
The building still had elevator operators in Diack’s time.
“If you had to get out in a hurry, you pushed the elevator button and hammered on the door,” he explains. “If you hammered on the door the elevator operator was supposed to drop everything and rush straight up to pick you up. Then they’d rush you down to the main floor.
“When you returned you had to get up to the darkroom and develop your film in a hurry. So when you came in you’d push the alarm button and the elevator would come down with all these surprised people on it. You’d jump in and they’d rush upstairs.”
Crime was big in the 1940s and ’ 50s, and editors would listen to the police scanner for news of any bank holdups or big accidents. When something happened, a reporter and a photographer would dash off to get the scoop.
“If they found out it was a false alarm, the city editor would yell for a copy boy to ‘ blow the whistle out the window,’” Diack says.
“They had a police whistle, so they’d roar over to the window and blow this police whistle, and all the traffic would stop. The reporter and photographer would hear the whistle and return to the office.”
This worked fine until one day a new copyboy thought the editor said, “Throw the whistle out the window.” He followed what he thought were the instructions.
Secret stashes of bottles
There was a lot of drinking in the Sun Tower days, when reporters and editors would hide their bottles in the washroom.