Art deco tower new home to stock exchange
Vancouver Province fills 26 pages of 58-page paper with special section
On Thursday, June 27, 1929, the Vancouver Province had a special section on the opening of a “palatial Stock Exchange Building in Vancouver.”
The Vancouver Stock Exchange didn’t actually move into the building at 475 Howe until July 22. But by jumping the gun a month early, the Province was able to beat the rival Vancouver Sun, the paper where these kinds of special sections normally ran.
The Province was also able to snag a ton of advertising: The special was 26 pages out of a 58-page paper. The previous Thursday, the Province was 28 pages.
Most of the special was devoted to stories and ads about the VSE’S bread and butter: mining and resource companies.
“Out of Gross Production of $65,472,583 From Mines in British Columbia in 1928, Dividends of $11,556,688 Were Paid,” was the headline on one story.
“Period of Unprecedented Activity Underway in the Development of Properties in Kootenay and Slocan,” read another.
It doesn’t make for exciting reading, 91 years later. The Stock Exchange Building, though, hasn’t lost any of its allure. It was designed by architects Fred Townley and Robert T. Matheson, whose most famous structure is Vancouver’s art deco City Hall. Today, we’d call the Stock Exchange art deco as well, but at the time they called the architecture “gothic.”
“The street facades, dignified and practical, reflect as they should the mercantile character of its interior,” said a Province story.
“An effective combination of massive strength and graceful line is achieved by the lofty piers of sepia-toned brick which terminate in the crowning feature with its coloured panels of delicate green polychrome.”
Heritage expert Don Luxton said the Stock Exchange is Townley and Matheson’s “run-up to city hall,” which was built in 1935-6.
The exchange is “not a pure deco building, but it has many of those aspects,” Luxton said. “Now that it’s restored with the original green windows and spandrel colour and all that, if you compare it to city hall, you can see the similarities: the vertical slits, the recessed windows.”
The facade was restored a couple of years ago when a $240-million glass tower was built behind and over top of the original 11-storey building, turning it into a 31-storey structure. Part of the old stock exchange is now a boutique hotel, part is offices.
Back in 1929, the double-height trading floor was on the first floor, and offices were up above. The Province said the cost was $750,000. It was the fifth home for the Vancouver Stock Exchange, which opened for business on Aug. 1, 1907, in a “small wooden structure” at 849 West Pender.
A joint stock company was already called the Vancouver Stock Exchange, so when the bill to incorporate the Stock Exchange came before the provincial legislature on April 5, 1907, several MLAS suggested alternative names.
Some were serious (the British Columbia Stock Exchange, Terminal City Stock Exchange), some were not (the Rainy Hollow Stock Exchange). In any case, it became the Vancouver Stock Exchange. Fourteen companies were listed the first day, but there were only three sales.
The timing for opening a new Stock Exchange building in 1929 was bad — the worldwide market crashed that October, ushering in the Great Depression. But the VSE would recover to become the third-biggest stock exchange in Canada, and moved to bigger digs at 540 Howe in 1947, and 609 Granville in 1981.
It also became internationally infamous for its listings of dubious companies.
“Glass and steel skyscrapers have replaced the saloons and dance halls spawned by mining booms of the 19th century,” said the New York Times in 1977.
“But (Vancouver) remains a stronghold for the last of the Wild West stock exchanges, where penny stocks glitter brighter than Miss Kitty’s rhinestones and flimflam artists have long found a home.”
In 1989, a Forbes magazine story said the VSE was “rumoured to be a laundering vehicle for mobsters and undesirables such as Ferdinand Marcos,” and dubbed the exchange “the scam capital of the world.”
“Each year it sucks billions of dollars out of legitimate markets by inducing dupes in North America and Europe to invest in mysterious outfits making hydrodouches, computerized golf courses and airborne farm equipment,” said Forbes.
The VSE’S bad reputation followed it until it was merged into the Canadian Venture Exchange in 1999.