Dome of The Night Sky

In a lab on Little Saanich Mountain, engineers are creating the most sensitive radio receivers on Earth.

In one corner they test a feedhorn antenna, stuck into a wall of sound-dampening foam, by radiating it with a series of inaudible, far-infrared frequencies. In another corner, a finished receiver (photo below right) sits in a sealed case that’s filling up with highly-compressed helium, cooling its components down to minus 269 degrees Celsius – making them so quiet, molecularly speaking, that they can detect the tiniest quivers of electromagnetic activity from distant parts of the universe.

These receivers will record the formation of undiscovered molecules, and the birth of galaxies. They are destined for the 66 dish antennas of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, a $1-billion international project to create the world’s biggest radiotelescope on a 5,000-metre plateau in Chile, set to become operational in 2012.

“With this, you’ll be able to look right down the throats of black holes,” says Jim Hesser, director of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, in his office a few floors above the lab. “It’s a really cool project, so to speak.”

Such mindblowing engineering is just the latest chapter in the DAO’s remarkable history. John Stanley Plaskett (1865-1941, photo left), the founder and first director of the observatory, grew up repairing equipment on his family’s Ontario farm, and eventually ran all the machines used in engineering lectures at the University of Toronto. After obtaining degrees in math and physics, he became an astronomer at the Dominion Observatory in Ottawa, and won worldwide recognition for his studies of binary stars. But he got frustrated by the limitations of Ottawa’s puny (0.381-metre) telescope, and after years of lobbying, in 1913 he got a grant to apply his machinist’s skills to building the observatory of his dreams.

A team of astronomers chose southern Vancouver Island as the location because it had the best atmospheric conditions for starwatching in Canada. The federal government bought the peak of Little Saanich Mountain, and Plaskett ordered the observatory’s huge rotating steel dome from Cleveland and the optical parts of its telescope from Pittsburgh. Horse-drawn wagons carried all the pieces up the slope (photo right), including the telescope’s 1.83-metre mirror, the largest in the British Empire.

Plaskett opened the observatory in 1918, and went to work. In 1922, he announced the discovery of what’s now called Plaskett’s Star (left) – a giant binary star with a combined mass 100 times that of the Sun, and until 2008, the biggest stellar object ever known. In 1929, he achieved even greater fame by accurately measuring the rotation of the Milky Way, calculating that it takes the Sun 220 million years to make one trip around the galaxy.

Plaskett retired in 1935, but the DAO acquired more telescopes, and its astronomers continued to rack up achievements. Andrew McKellar made the first measurement of light from the Big Bang in 1941, and in the 1970s DAO staff ground and polished the 3.6-metre mirror (photo below right) for the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope – the biggest working mirror ever made until the Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990. That experience in turn enabled the DAO to develop its Astronomy Technology Research Group, which creates state-of-the-art instruments for observatories worldwide.

In 1995, the National Research Council relocated its Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics to here from Ottawa, and now our mountain with the dome is Canada’s pre-eminent astrophysical research centre, with a staff of over 100 people, managing data from and engineering for at least five international telescope projects. Plaskett’s original telescope is still in use too, making the DAO the oldest active observatory in the country, employed by visiting scientists from around the world.

Indeed, judging by the United Nations of names on the DAO’s directory, it seems astronomy truly is a planet-wide discipline. Hesser, for example, started out in astronomy spending nine years in Chile studying the 14-billion-year development of the Milky Way.

“I’ve realized a dream, learning so much about the world and its different cultures,” says Hesser. Chalk up one more surprising discovery from our observatory on the hill: a shared fascination with the farthest reaches of the universe can help international understanding, right here on Earth.

Fix The Blue Bridge

This morning, Victoria’s city councillors will sit down and try to figure out what to do next, now that it’s clear they won’t be getting millions in federal stimulus cash for a new Johnson Street Bridge. By all indications, they’re going to push ahead with the $63-million project anyway. The City’s website says “a good case” can be made for proceeding because interest rates are low, so we should borrow as much as possible – a similar rationale used by subprime-mortgaged homeowners when trading in their bungalows for luxury mansions.

Instead, I’m hoping the councillors wake up to the fact that Victoria can’t afford a new bridge. As I wrote in a report to them earlier this week, many other cities have crunched the numbers, and decided to refurbish their aging steel bridges instead of replacing them. We should learn from their experience, and repair the Blue Bridge.

In April, the Delcan engineering firm submitted a condition assessment of the bridge to the council, and it said that repair not only is feasible, but relatively inexpensive. The only work that needs doing immediately involves electrical and mechanical repairs, costing about $2 million. Fixing the bridge’s corroded steel and repainting would be another $3 million.

The biggest part of the $23 million Delcan quoted for repair is for seismic upgrading. But they list a menu of options for that, and some of them – such as seismically isolating the span that holds up the bridge’s huge counterweights - could greatly reduce the bridge’s earthquake vulnerability without much cost. In 1999, San Fransicso seismically upgraded its “Lefty O’Doul” drawbridge (right) – like ours, also designed by Joseph Strauss of Golden Gate Bridge fame – for $10 million.

Since the Blue Bridge has never been part of the city’s emergency plans, though, how much seismic upgrading do we really need? Recently I corresponded with Ed Wortman, an engineer who’s overseen the rehabilitation of several of Portland’s movable steel bridges, he said his city has put money into repairs and steelwork instead of quake-proofing because it’s not worth the cost. After reading Delcan’s assessment, he recommended that we thoroughly repair our bridge without a seismic retrofit. “It would still provide a reliable structure for at least the next 40 to 50 years barring a major quake,” he wrote. “If the ‘Big One’ occurs during that period, Victoria will have plenty to deal with other than the possible loss of the Johnson Street Bridge.”

Of course, repainting the old bridge could also inconvenience downtown businesses. But Mr. Wortman told me that Portland has learned how to minimize bridge closures by planning its repair work in sections, and clearly notifying the public about traffic changes. Vancouver recently managed to overhaul the Lions’ Gate Bridge, and still kept it open to commuters. Ottawa is currently doing the same with its 1899-built Alexandra Bridge (left).

Besides, a few months of restricted traffic may not be a bad tradeoff compared to the effects of borrowing $63 million. Victoria’s assistant city manager has said such a debt would “financially strap the city,” leading to tax increases or service cutbacks. (Victoria police have already said they’re withdrawing from the regional crime unit to save money.) Those cutbacks could hurt downtown as much as any inconveniences from repainting the Blue Bridge.

Cyclists may be disappointed, too. Lately they’ve been arguing for a new bridge by pointing out problems with the existing one, including confusing access to the Galloping Goose trail, poor signage, absent sidewalk ramps, and the slipperiness of the metal deck. As a fellow cyclist, I feel their pain. But a lot of these issues could be resolved with a cement mixer and a few cans of paint and non-slip coating, and far more cheaply than by erecting a new crossing that would consume all the city’s funds for cycling facilities for years. If Portlanders can figure out how to integrate bicycles into their heritage bridges, so can we.

Our heritage may also be greater than we realized. Last week I spoke with Eric DeLony, a historian who ran a national engineering archive for the U.S. Department of the Interior, and knows more about America’s 250,000 bridges than anyone else. He noted that we actually have two bridges, side-by-side – and as far as he is aware, ours is the only parallel-spanned Strauss bascule bridge in existence. “You have something there that’s not just unusual, but actually unique,” he said.

Instead of blowing $63 million on a fancy new tourist-attraction bridge, we should appreciate what we’ve got, and fix it.

PS This post originally appeared as an op-ed in today’s Times Colonist; to read the online comments, click here. Many thanks to Bob Horowitz for letting me use his photo of the Lefty O’Doul bridge.

UPDATE (October 10, 2009): Victoria’s council decided to receive the information in my report, and consider the engineering department’s proposal to remove rail from a new bridge, which would shave $15 million from the $63-million price tag. Story here. The Times Colonist followed up with an editorial, telling the City to start the bridge project from scratch.

A New Bridge, A New Problem

Tomorrow at 5:00 pm, Victoria’s city council will vote to pursue one of three designs for a new Johnson Street Bridge. Which criteria will weigh most heavily as councillors make the city’s biggest aesthetic decision in decades is anyone’s guess. Will they support the winner of the online survey? Will they be swayed by letters to editors? Will they use research of their own, or will they – like American Idol judges – be governed by personal taste and gut instinct?

All three designs are supposed to satisfy the same transportation requirements – three car lanes, two bicycle lanes, a pedestrian walkway, a multimodal path, and a railway track. They’re all to meet current earthquake standards, and cost around $63 million to build. But there’s one more characteristic that’s common to all three, and crucially important if the City gets time-limited federal-provincial money to build the bridge: There are no working duplicates of these designs.

Not long ago, I got an interesting email from a fellow who attended one of the City’s open houses promoting a new bridge. “I asked about something that has been bugging me about the cable-stayed option ever since the three designs were unveiled,” he wrote. “The Erasmus Bridge, which is noted as the inspiration, is of course a cable-stayed bridge, but as you might know, it does not lift ... it has a separate leaf-bascule at one end [photo above right]. So, I asked if there were any ‘cable-stayed bascule bridges’ in existence.

“I was surprised at how the answers went from something like ‘there must be at least a few’ to ‘I don’t know if there are any’ to ‘the engineers say it will work’,” he continued. “Anyway, I don't think there are any cable-stayed lift spans in existence, and if that’s true I don’t believe such a novel design could have been legitimately vetted in such a short amount of time. I would have liked to have spoken with the engineers themselves, but they weren’t present.”

Intrigued, I wrote to Sebastien Ricard, the creator of the three designs and a director of the London-based Wilkinson Eyre architecture firm, to ask for more details. Below is my Q&A with him, with links to various bridges he mentions.

Q: One of the designs is for a cable-stayed bascule bridge. It seems the Erasmus bridge in Rotterdam which provided the inspiration has the cable-stayed portion separate from the moving bascule portion. Are there any working examples in the world where the cables actually lift the span, or would this proposed bridge be something new?

A: The Erasmus bridge was highlighted through our presentation as an example of Cable Stayed bridge for people not familiar with the bridge terminology to understand what a “cable stayed bridge” is, not as inspiration as such. Regarding example of “cable supported moving bridges”, bascule system, a few examples would be:

Tyne Bridge [photo left] in Newcastle UK, by Wilkinson Eyre Architects built in 2001. - Binic Port Footbridge 1993 Architect Fauniere Lafon France Britany - La Porta d’Europa Construction 2000 in Catalonia (not a cable stayed structure as such but a bridge which is “working” in a similar structural way).

Q: Are there any working examples of the reverse bascule bridge you proposed? (Aside from the one in the Van Gogh painting, of course!)

A: The “reverse bascule” bridge system or high level counterweight bascule system is a very familiar and well know opening bridge technology. The existing Johnson Street Bridge based on Strauss Design is one example.

Other examples would be: Alcacer Do Sal Bascule Bridge - Bordigue Canal Road Bridge, Sete, France - Brother Edmund Ignatius Waterford Ireland 1982-86 - Diffenebrucke Bridge on the Rhine River 1986-87 - Forton Lake Opening Bridge UK, 2000 - Demmin Bridge Germany 1998-2000

Also regarding Rolling Bascule bridges, see below a few examples: Canary Wharf Rolling Bridge [photo right] Wilkinson Eyre Architects - Bizerte Tunisia 1978-1980 - Borensberg Bascule Bridge Sweden - Dvorcoviy Most Bridge, St Petersburg 1977-78 on the Neva River.

Q: If these designs are new, how long would it take to render them into working engineering plans?

A: Our 3 proposals are based on bridge and movable bridge principle which are not new as such (examples of these typologies of structure exist as noted above) but each of these proposals has been tailored to respond to site specific issues and to create a new landmark, a gateway to Victoria: A unique bridge design rather than a “copy” of another bridge which wouldn’t respond to the specific site constraints.

As for every bespoke [i.e. “custom-made to the buyer's specification”] design (whether these are for Bridges or other Architectural/ Structural designs) there is the need to refine the design, test it, up to detail design stage before we can prepare a set of Tender Information. The timing for this work relates to the type of procurement: as to whether or not the design team prepares all the design information or whether the design team completes a set of “detail design information” which is then given to a Contractor who will complete the remaining part of the design.

This type of procurement allows the contractor to start the construction at an early stage, without having to rely on the full information on the design being completed (this type of procurement is typically used in fast track programmes.)

The decision on the procurement methodology hasn’t yet been finalized but will be shortly in association with the City of Victoria.

To Ricard’s credit, these are not cookie-cutter designs. On September 8, when he revealed the three, he repeatedly referred to wanting to “explore” various ideas with each one. In his cable-stayed bridge, for example, the support span actually bows down as the movable span lifts. In his rolling bascule, pedestrians would actually be able to walk through the wheel [drawing below left], and watch the mechanism of the bridge as it raises.

It’s great that Victoria could have a one-of-a-kind bridge. But this does create a new problem. As Ricard said, “there is the need to refine the design, test it, up to detail design stage” to create working engineering plans and procure materials. According to the timeline presented by the City’s engineering department on May 21, work in the water on a new bridge must begin in November. That’s five weeks from now. I spoke with an American bridge engineer who’s been watching this project with interest, and he told me that the City’s schedule is “extremely aggressive”: hundreds of details will have to line up perfectly if the project is to be finished by March 2011. Getting working engineering plans will be only the first of them.

Consequently, even if the City does get federal-provincial infrastructure stimulus funding, it’s highly unlikely a new bridge will be finished by March 2011 when the stimulus money runs out. That won’t matter much to MMM, the firm overseeing the project, because they’ll get paid anyway. But it makes a huge difference to Victoria taxpayers, who will be covering all the bills after March 2011.

It will be exciting to see which design wins the City’s popularity contest tomorrow. Unfortunately, Victorians still don’t know who’s doling out the prize money – and how much of it will be coming out of their own pockets.

UPDATE (September 24, 2009): An emotional day at City Hall. Victoria was turned down for federal-provincial infrastructure money. The council went ahead and chose a new design anyway: the rolling bascule, mainly because it was unanimously endorsed by the Citizens’ Advisory Committee. The City may have a tough time selling it to the public, though. The cable-stayed actually got more votes (2572 or 49.5%) than the rolling bascule (1885 votes or 36.3%) in the online and onsite surveys.

UPDATE (March 29, 2012): Two-and-a-half years later, problems with the rolling bascule design are beginning to surface. As this story in Focus magazine reveals, engineers will have to reinforce the “open wheels” with cross-braces, thereby eliminating the ability to walk through the hinge point while the bridge is moving — the only feature of the bridge that's architecturally interesting — and have radically changed the mechanism so it bears little resemblance to the bridges at Canary Wharf.

As you'll see below, on February 12 of this year, this post also received three comments in French, advising me to “stop” and “not repeat” my concerns. The third comment goes on at length about the history of the evolution of bridge design, with the commenter’s position summed up in the second-last paragraph: “With advances in knowledge of physical sciences and materials, the bridge becomes a work of art, thanks to the engineers. The architects finally, with the technical constraints pushed to the limits, can now unleash their imaginations to create works of art.”

In Victoria, it appears those limits are reaching the breaking point.

That Old Blue Bridge

This evening, Victoria’s city council will introduce a bylaw to borrow $63-million to replace the Johnson Street Bridge. Then, on September 8, City Hall will unveil three possible designs for the replacement, as part of a huge PR campaign to generate enthusiasm for a new bridge – and make Victorians forget about the one that’s already there.

Up front, I should mention that I’m a director of johnsonstreetbridge.org, a group that’s criticized the hurried, closed-door process that’s so far marked our city’s most expensive public-works project. But as someone who also writes a local history blog, and values what’s unique about Victoria, I think it’s also necessary to explain the background of the existing bridge before it's sentenced to death.

Politicians argued over the Johnson Street Bridge for nearly 25 years before it was built. In 1888, a steel swing bridge was constructed across the Inner Harbour, bringing the E&N railway into downtown to satisfy Victoria’s demands for a national-rail connection promised by Confederation. But within a decade, Victorians began calling for a new bridge to carry a wider variety of vehicles, including newfangled automobiles, enabling a direct traffic route from Oak Bay to Esquimalt.

In 1911, the British Columbia government bought the Songhees native reserve on west side of the harbour, and then plunged into negotiations over a new bridge, and who should pay for it, with the City of Victoria, the E&N, and the B.C. Electric streetcar company. The parties didn’t reach an agreement until 1919. In a referendum the following year, fed-up Victorians voted six-to-one in favour of a municipal bylaw to borrow money to construct a new bridge.

For designs, the City turned to Joseph Baermann Strauss (photo right). Born in Cincinnati, Strauss was a poet and self-promoting romantic who never obtained an engineering degree, but learned everything about bridge-building while working for construction firms. In Chicago, around 1902, he patented an improved steel bascule (the French word for “see-saw”) drawbridge, using a huge concrete counterweight to balance the span upon a fixed-heel trunnion, or set of axles, ingeniously enabling the overhead truss to fold up as the span lifted. Thanks to the growing demands of automobile traffic, and availability of electric power for lifting motors, Strauss created some 400 bascule drawbridges around the world. His reputation as the “king of drawbridges” in turn got him the job as chief engineer of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. (Strauss is sometimes erroneously called the “designer” of the Golden Gate, but historians have shown that the real credit should have gone to his employees.)

The City of Victoria’s engineering office, led by F.M. Preston, built the Johnson Street Bridge’s substructure and approaches. Another team, using steel shipped from Ontario, assembled the Strauss bascules with the spans pointing upright to attach the counterweights. There were a few hangups – unions threatened to strike because day-labourers worked on the site, and lawsuits plagued the city’s expropriation of land around the bridge – and it did not officially open until January 11, 1924. British Columbia premier John Oliver told the thousands attending the ceremony, “I wish to congratulate the people upon the completion of a protracted and somewhat expensive undertaking.” The final cost was $918,000, some 27 percent higher than first estimated – a cautionary tale for Victoria’s councillors, who maintain that the City can build a new bridge within budget by March 2011.

Such history has value. The top photo, for example, is taken from the August issue of United Airlines’ in-flight magazine, proving that the old bridge is one of the elements that gives Victoria’s Inner Harbour its unique charm. Below is a scene from the 1999 movie Excess Baggage, which the producers shot in Victoria specifically to use the bridge:



This past April, Vancouver heritage expert Harold Kalman delivered a report – which the City has not publicly released, but you can download here – identifying the bridge as a “very significant heritage landmark” of Victoria’s industrial and transportation history. It’s unknown exactly how many of Strauss’s bascule bridges survive today – perhaps a few dozen – but several are identified as historic sites, such as Toronto’s 1931-built Cherry Street Bridge. Nathan Holth, a Michigan researcher who runs historicbridges.org, told me that all movable bridges are rare, mainly because they're built only to cross navigable rivers or canals where the long approaches for a high-reaching fixed bridge would be impossible. He considers ours an “important heritage bridge,” especially unique because it is actually two differently-sized parallel bridges that can be lifted independently.

Admittedly, preserving history also has a price. The City is pushing for a new bridge mainly because an engineering assessment said it would cost $25 million to rehabilitate the old one, although most of that is for seismic upgrading. Steel bridges, especially ones with intricate latticework like ours, contain thousands of difficult-to-reach joints, often hiding corrosion that’s accelerated by salty air. Repairing and repainting such bridges is an ongoing headache, especially compared to ones made of concrete. Nevertheless, some places re-invest in their old steel bridges. Toronto refurbished its Cherry Street Bridge for $2.6 million in 2007, and recently Boston and San Francisco spent tens of millions renovating their Strauss drawbridges as well.

Some say that paying anything to renew our bridge is a waste because it’s “ugly”, but that’s a superficial judgement. The truth, most apparent and impressive when you see it working, is that the Johnson Street Bridge is a giant machine from a vanished age. It’s like a rare and unusual grandfather clock – one which the owner has decided is too much trouble to repair, and now wants to replace with a shiny new timepiece under warranty.

This would be repeating a mistake the City has made before. We once had streetcars, a public market building, and the grand Victoria Brewery, and we demolished them all in the name of “progress”. Now, too late, we wish we had kept them. You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.

PS Thanks to Deddeda Stemler for the opening photo, and Lotus Johnson for the one of the latticework. The Johnson Street Bridge not only inspires photographers, but musicians too: check out these videos by The Bills and an ‘80s punk band, The Wardells.

Oh, Tallulah!

Once in a while, I dream about opening a bar. Nothing big – something the size of Smoking Lily’s 4 x 11 boutique on Johnson Street, actually – decorated in velvet and faux fur. A kind of Big Bad John’s for drag queens, serving expensive martinis, and adorned with a shrine to Tallulah Bankhead, the most flamboyant tourist to have passed through this city in the last 50 years.

In sober moments, though, I realize that my Tallulah’s would have a hard time keeping up with the notorious reputation of its namesake. Tallulah Brockman Bankhead was born in Alabama in 1902, into a prominent political family – her grandfather and uncle were U.S. senators, and her father was Speaker of the House of Representatives – but she became an actress, famous for her outrageous performances both on and off stage as she blazed through Broadway, London’s West End, and Hollywood.



In her cigarette-scorched, baritonal voice, Tallulah provided gossip columnists with hundreds of shocking bon mots. She openly admitted to drinking heavily and dabbling with drugs: “Cocaine isn’t habit-forming, darling. I should know, I’ve been taking it for years.” She claimed to have enjoyed more than 500 sexual partners, including actors John Barrymore and Johnny (Tarzan) Weissmuller – and Joan Crawford, and Marlene Dietrich too, who called her “the most immoral woman alive.”

“I’m a lesbian,” Tallulah once announced to a stranger at a party. “What do you do?”

Tallulah’s connection to Victoria came through Dola Cavendish, the youngest daughter of James Dunsmuir, the coal baron and British Columbia premier who built Hatley Castle (now Royal Roads University) in 1908. After her brief marriage to Cmdr. Henry Cavendish (wedding photo at right), Dola moved to London, worked in the fashion business, and spent every free minute at West End theatres. She became captivated by Tallulah, who developed such a rabid following during the 1920s that hordes of screaming “gallery girls” threw flowers to her from the balconies after every performance. Dola insinuated herself into Tallulah’s circle, and became the star’s secretary and trusted friend, travelling with her everywhere.

But in 1941, Dola’s sister Kathleen died in an air raid on London, and Dola moved back to Victoria to take care of Kathleen’s daughters. She built a mansion named Dolaura (photo below left), on property her father had willed to her, at 501 Belmont Road in Colwood. From then on Tallulah visited Victoria regularly – with Dola shouting at the airport, “Make way for Miss Bankhead!” – and they stayed at Dolaura for weeks at a time.

Tallulah’s house parties were epic. Freda Bemister, who worked as a housekeeper at Dolaura in the 1960s, recalls that one time a drunken judge got his car stuck in the mud outside the house, and the tow-truck driver was rewarded by drinking champagne from Tallulah’s shoe. “I never made a pot of coffee the entire time I was there,” says Mrs. Bemister, whose husband was often recruited to go buy more cases of Dola’s favourite gin. “Miss Bankhead never ate breakfast. Instead, she asked for mint juleps.”

Tallulah, a born exhibitionist, also spent much of her time parading around the house in the nude, enjoying the feeling of the ocean air on her naked body. “The cook wouldn’t serve Miss Bankhead dinner unless she had her clothes on, which wasn’t very often,” says Mrs. Bemister. (Tallulah often acted without panties, too: during filming of her best-known movie, 1944’s Lifeboat, director Alfred Hitchcock heard so many complaints from other actors that he famously said he wasn’t sure whether the problem should be referred to the makeup department, or hairdressing.)

Although Dola rarely left the mansion, Tallulah did get out to enjoy Victoria’s arts scene. Through the painter Flemming Jorgensen, married to one of Dola’s relatives, Tallulah got to know members of The Limners collective. (That’s Jorgensen and Tallulah at right, in 1959.) In 1963 she performed at the Royal Theatre in a touring comedy, and in 1964 she endowed several seats at the McPherson Playhouse to help pay for its renovations.

Tallulah even enlisted Freda Bemister to read a script for a trashy 1965 psychodrama, entitled Die! Die! My Darling. “‘Tell me if you think this suits me,’ she said,” Mrs. Bemister recalls. “It did.” (You can see a trailer for it here, although better is Tallulah’s “Celebrity Next Door” episode on the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Comedy Hour, watchable here.)

Dola died in 1966, leaving Tallulah $30,000 in her will. Tallulah provided a bed of roses for the funeral, and a pillow of gardenias for Dola’s head. Tallulah died two years later, of double pneumonia; reportedly her final words were “Codeine – bourbon.” The federal government took over Dolaura but let the mansion fall into ruin, and tore it down in 1996.

Tallulah’s legend has endured, however. She inspired female impersonator Craig Russell, and the Cruella De Vil character (left) in Disney’s 101 Dalmations. Her autobiography, the #5 bestseller of 1952, remains in print and available for Amazon’s Kindle. And Looped, a comedy based on an incident when Tallulah took eight hours to re-record a single line for her last movie, recently played on Broadway.

Reportedly during one of Tallulah’s last visits to Canada, a customs officer checking passports asked her if she was the Tallulah Bankhead. She replied, “I’m what’s left of her, darling.” Even four decades after her death, what’s left of Tallulah is hard to ignore.

PS Thanks to Royal Roads University Archives for providing many of the above photos.

UPDATE (August 26, 2009): A letter appeared in this week’s Monday Magazine, regarding the above post:

In the very early 1960s, I worked for a veterinarian. I was 17 or 18 and very naïve, especially about women – especially older women. Mrs. Dola Cavendish (Dola Dunsmuir in your article) had one of her dogs in the clinic and it was due to go home, but no one was available to pick it up. The vet asked if I could take it home for Mrs. Cavendish; I agreed. I understood Tallulah Banhkead was in town and staying with her.
I knew about Tallulah, but didn’t think I had seen her in the movies. Reputation said she might be a cross between a vamp and a tramp – on and off the stage. Upon arrival, I was shown in with the dog. Tallulah rushed over and held my chin, saying, “Oh, dahling, isn’t he so sweet!” Uh oh, I could feel my face go a very deep vermilion. “Do come and sit down,” she said. I could see they were drinking, so I stammered that I was told to return to the clinic immediately.
A short meeting with Tallulah was much too big for this teenager!
Gerry Harris, Victoria

Paving Paradise

There are two seasons in Canada, some say: winter, and roadwork. Since we’re enjoying the latter, it’s time to consider the history of roads – without which summer vacations, countless pop songs, and much of our contemporary economy would not exist.


Several of Victoria’s earliest roads originated as trails, cut by the Songhees natives to reach their seasonal hunting grounds. When canoeing back from the north, the Songhees sometimes landed at Cordova Bay to avoid the rough water at Ten Mile Point, and hiked past Cedar Hill (today’s Mount Douglas) along a trail to the Inner Harbour. That trail later became Cedar Hill Road. Another trail split off and ran to their village at Cadboro Bay, where they launched canoes for salmon fishing. Today, that trail is Cedar Hill X Road.

Colonial officials commissioned other early roads. Governor James Douglas requested a trail to Sooke in 1851, which became a rough version of today’s Sooke Road in the 1870s. After three sailors drowned trying to row from the Esquimalt naval base to Fort Victoria, an admiral ordered his men to cut and pave a gravel road to the fort in 1852 – thus building the first true roadway in British Columbia, now known as Old Esquimalt Road. (That’s part of it in the photo above, behind the Songhees settlement on the Inner Harbour.) In 1854, the colony commissioned a road to Craigflower farm, which provided much of Fort Victoria’s food, and that route today is Craigflower Road.

It became a challenge to finance a rapidly-expanding road system, however. In 1860, Douglas passed a law requiring landowners to donate six days of labour per year to road construction; when they howled with outrage, he imposed a property tax instead. Many Vancouver Islanders also opposed merging their colony with British Columbia in 1866 because they didn’t want to be saddled with the mainland’s huge road-building expenses – a problem Douglas solved by charging tolls on the mainland’s busiest routes.

Further pressure came from owners of the new vehicles that started appearing in town. Victorians got caught up in the cycling mania that swept North America in the 1890s, and city cycling clubs fed up with muddy streets joined a continent-wide “Good Roads” lobbying movement, which intensified after the arrival of the first automobiles in Victoria in 1899. Businessmen, doctors, and church ministers bought many of the city’s first cars – at left is a photo of a few members of the city elite, motoring in Beacon Hill Park in 1906 – and they insisted that better roads would expand the local economy.

Indeed, some sectors of the economy quickly made use of cars and improved roads. As G.W. Taylor noted in his book, The Automobile Saga of British Columbia, 1864-1914, “The real estate industry was the leading business in Victoria at this time; practically the whole male population being preoccupied in the buying and selling of land. The firms engaged in this business in Victoria totalled over two hundred and fifty, and many were possessors of automobiles.”

Sometimes the political pressure was personal, and direct. Major J.F.L. MacFarlane, fed up with the 1864-built wagon trail he had to take over the Malahat to get to his farm in Mill Bay, decided in 1903 to survey his own route through Goldstream (photo right), and then gathered Victorians’ signatures on a petition – the sheet grew over nine feet long – demanding a proper road. The provincial government, anticipating an election, agreed to build the Malahat Drive along MacFarlane’s route. When the road officially opened in 1911, he was the first to drive upon it.

By this time, the principles of road engineering had been well-established, mainly based upon the work of J.L. McAdam, a Scot who demonstrated early in the 19th century a method for building durable roads, using bits of stone jigsawed together and filled in with gravel. Such “macadamised” roads couldn’t stand up to heavy downtown traffic, however, and the city began experimenting with other surfaces. It paved Wharf Street with vitrified brick, but many complained that the noise of iron cart wheels upon the surface was unbearable. So in 1899, the city began paving with blocks of wood.

The early trials were a disaster. Even though many cities like Toronto and Vancouver already had wood-block pavements, Victoria didn’t study their work and used blocks of untreated fir that rotted away after a few years. In 1907 the city built a huge creosote plant to preserve the wood, and began paving on a massive scale. In January of 1908, labourers paved Government Street with 330,000 pieces of fir, and in April the city ordered a million more. By the end of that year, nearly all downtown streets west of Douglas and south of Herald were paved with wood blocks – including Waddington Alley (photo left), the only place in the city where you can still see them today.

What replaced them, of course, was asphalt. This sandy petroleum goo, which naturally occurs in rare asphalt lakes, was first used for paving roads in the ancient city of Babylon. At the end of the 19th century, however, inventors came up with ways to produce asphalt from oil, and it quickly became the pavement of choice – smooth, durable, and easily applied with a few men and a steamroller. In 1909, property owners voted to have Douglas Street covered with asphalt instead of wood. By 1917, the city had 89 kilometres of asphalt streets.

After World War II, asphalt conquered the planet – in the United States some 61,000 square miles of land are now under pavement, an area the size of Wisconsin. But perhaps we are beginning to recognize limits to such growth. Following the oil price shocks of the 1970s, some cities started recycling their road surfaces – in 1984, Victoria became the first town in Canada to have its own asphalt recycling plant – and since then, community groups like Portland’s Depave have sprung up, dedicated to “the removal of unnecessary concrete and asphalt.” Sometimes, all people really want is a footpath through the bush.

PS Many thanks to Janis Ringuette for providing research materials for this article, and City of Victoria streets manager Hector Furtado for answering my questions.

The Legend of Knockan Hill

“Victoria is a strange place,” wrote Franz Boas in his 1886 diary. “I have never seen such a mixture of people among such a small number of inhabitants.” Just 28 years old and freshly arrived from Germany, he was impressed by the city’s Chinese residents, black settlers, and “endless Indians of various tribes” – the perfect place for an ethnographer starting a career.

Over the next eight years, Boas (right) passed through Victoria many times on journeys up the coast, collecting native folktales and other artifacts, rightly fearing they would disappear as colonialism encroached upon First Nations communities. In 1895, he published (in German) Indian Myths and Legends from the North Pacific Coast of America – the best record of British Columbia’s early lore, and the book that launched Boas’ reputation as “the father of American anthropology.” The book was finally printed in English in 2002, thanks to Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy, directors of the Victoria-based B.C. Indian Language Project.

Unfortunately, Boas did not record many stories from the capital region. He visited the Songhees settlement on the west side of the Inner Harbour in 1886, but had difficulty finding anyone to speak with him. Many villagers mourned the recent death of a chief’s child, and feared that Boas worked for the E&N railway, which threatened to run tracks through their settlement – and ultimately did, in 1888. As he later wrote, “The close vicinity of the city has had a very detrimental influence for the Songhees.”

But Boas did hear one Songhees legend: “The Wives of the Stars,” about Knockan Hill, which rises just north of Portage Inlet.

According to the story, there once were two sisters who gazed up at the night sky and wished that two of the stars would be their husbands. When they awoke, they discovered that the stars were men, and had taken them up to the heavens. Soon they missed life on Earth, so they dug a hole in the sky, lowered a rope, and climbed down, landing on Ñga’kun – a name derived from a Salish word for “rocks on top”, Bouchard and Kennedy note, and anglicized as “Knockan”.

“A young man who obeys the laws scrupulously, bathes frequently and has never touched a woman, is able to see the rope on Mount Ñga’kun,” the tale concludes. “It is invisible for other people.”

Boas wasn’t the first white man to hear this story. Robert Brown, a Scottish botanist, had also recorded a version of the Knockan Hill legend and published it in his 1873 book, The Races of Mankind. Brown superficially labelled it a variation of the fairytale of Jack and The Beanstalk – “a strange myth found among nearly all nations, savage and civilised” – but his rendering also contains some interesting differences.

Instead of landing on a hill, the sisters “found themselves near the valley of the Colquitz not far from their own home with the rope lying beside them. So they coiled it up, and Hselse [a spirit] made it into a hill [Knockan] as a monument, to remind mortals not to weary for what is not their lot. And after this the girls went back to Quonsong [the Gorge], and became great medicine-women, but remained single, all for love of the ‘little people’ above.”

(You can read Boas’ version of the legend here, and download a Word document of Brown’s complete version here.)

Today, Knockan Hill is a charming 11-hectare park straddling the Saanich-View Royal border. At its south end sits Stranton Lodge (1248 Burnside Road West), an arts-and-crafts-style cottage (left) built in 1934 by Tom and Maude Hall, two teachers originally from England. Their former back yard, purchased by Saanich in 1973, contains a trail that winds through a forest of Douglas and grand fir (with an active eagle’s nest), up to a Garry oak meadow with panoramic views of Mount Baker and downtown. The Friends of Knockan Hill clear invasive Scotch broom from this grassy peak, to preserve camas and other native food plants – good work that tries to correct both the environmental and cultural wrongs of our past.

It’s a fine spot to watch the stars, look for the rope from the heavens, and meditate upon Franz Boas’ first impressions of Victoria – a strange place, and wondrous too.

Gorilla Radio Interview

Chris Cook's Gorilla Radio on CFUV is the best activist radio program in town. This past Victoria Day, Chris had me on to talk about local economic elites and First Nations history. You can listen to a podcast of the show here.

King of The Boondoggles, Part II (with video)

Quite a spike in traffic to this blog recently, mainly because of an earlier post about Frank Hertel, the oily businessman who used research-and-development tax credits to buy up Victoria real estate in the 1980s, and then fled the country, charged with tax evasion. On May 9, Hertel was arrested in London, England, after 23 years on the lam. The federal government is applying to have Hertel extradited back to Canada.

As I said previously, and the Times Colonist elaborated today, Hertel did rather well hiding out in Venezuela. But the T-C neglected to mention what Hertel has been up to lately, and exactly why the RCMP nabbed him last week.

Early in 2007, I started corresponding with a man in Germany who saw my blog and wanted more information about Hertel’s time in Victoria. As he told me, he knows people who invested heavily with Hertel in the 1990s, and have been tied up in litigation ever since. In response, he has continued to provide me with details about Hertel’s recent activities in Europe.

Hertel has been returning to Germany regularly since 1994 to raise money for various schemes, especially a “hybrid” method of drilling for oil that simultaneously taps geothermal energy to power the wells. In 2004, Hertel registered a UK company, IEC Europetrol, with a head office in London – a city he apparently visited regularly.

Currently, Hertel is principally operating as IEC International Energy Corporation, with offices in Phoenix and the British Virgin Islands. (His company names may change, but Hertel keeps using the old Data 70 IEC logo he slapped 25 years ago on his Carey Road office building, photo above right.) Last December, IEC signed a deal with the government of Albania, using Hertel’s hybrid technology on that country’s Visoka oil field. Here’s a video of Hertel making the announcement, and promising to bring Albania a green energy “revolution”:



Will his investors be satisfied? The Visoka field has been online for 36 years, and produces just 240 barrels a day. But that may have been enough for rivals to notify the RCMP about exactly when Hertel was flying into London: according to a comment by “mmeier” from Hamburg to CBC’s online version of the story, the Mounties acted this month only because they “got a tip off by people who wants to stop the IEC making business with Russia and Albania”. Stay tuned for more details.

UPDATE (May 20, 2009): Hertel remains in custody in the UK because he can’t come up with £500,000 for bail, the T-C reports today. His next court appearance is Friday, May 22.

UPDATE (September 21, 2010): Hertel is out of jail. According to this item in today’s T-C, a London court ruled that Hertel could not be extradited to Canada, because prosecutors failed to prove that his alleged actions would have been an offence in the UK. His lawyer says Hertel will remain in the UK until it’s clear whether or not Canada will appeal the verdict.

Ugly Victorians

I’m taking this month off to finish a book proposal, so here’s an oldie but a goodie from the original Secrets book, updated in time for the Imperial festivities of Victoria Day.

As anyone who visits quickly notices, Victoria is whiter than a Klan rally in a snowstorm. The 2006 census showed that visible minorities make up only 10 percent of greater Victoria’s population, while the provincial average is 25 percent. Could it be that ugly aspects of Victoria’s history have deterred some people from moving here?

The Last Stand of Mifflin Gibbs: Philadelphia-born Mifflin Wistar Gibbs arrived here in 1858 with 250 American blacks who’d been persecuted in California and sought refuge under a British flag. Gibbs opened a grocery business, and later became a popular city councillor, but he was also barred from sitting in the best seats of Victoria’s concert halls. So one night in 1861, Gibbs and several black friends tested the rule by sitting in the dress circle of the Victoria Theatre. One performer refused to take the stage, and a storeowner handed out onions to throw at Gibbs’ party. When a bag of flour was tossed on the black pioneers, Gibbs and a friend threw punches at their attackers. All involved were arrested, but the result of the “riot” was the posting of notices that blacks were welcome only in the theatre’s gallery. After it abolished slavery in 1863, Gibbs went back to the United States.

Then We Take Berlin: On May 7, 1915, a German U-boat torpedoed the liner Lusitania off the coast of Ireland. Nearly 1,200 passengers died, including 21-year-old lieutenant James “Boy” Dunsmuir, the beloved son of Victoria coal baron James Dunsmuir. Members of James’ Victoria-based regiment were enraged, and the following night they took revenge upon the bar in the German-owned Kaiserhof Hotel (now the Demitasse café), where they threw spitoons and smashed mirrors. The mob then vandalized a German social club on Government Street, and Simon Leiser’s warehouse on Yates. (Leiser’s bust was removed from the Royal Theatre for safekeeping, but it was never returned and its location remains a mystery.) The mayor had to read the riot act and call in the cavalry to quell the disturbance.

Yellow Peril: Victoria’s often been afraid that it’s about to be overwhelmed by immigrants from Asia. In 1878, the B.C. government passed its first law against Chinese immigration, and over the next 30 years created dozens more – requiring English-language fluency, for example, or forbidding long men’s hair – even though such laws were repeatedly struck down by the federal government or the courts. Undaunted, in 1909, premier Richard McBride told a convention of his Conservative party, “We stand for a white British Columbia, a white land, and a white Empire.” Chinese residents didn’t get the vote in B.C. until 1947, Japanese residents not until 1949. Some might wonder if local attitudes have improved that much: when four shiploads of Chinese refugee claimants arrived off Vancouver Island in August of 1999, the Times Colonist published the headline “Go Home” on its front page, with results of a phone-in “poll” showing that more than 3,000 readers wanted the boat people deported immediately.

Mr. Christie, You Defend Bad Cookies: Known nationally as the defence lawyer for anti-Holocaust teacher Jim Keegstra and hate-literature peddler Ernst Zundel, Doug Christie has been the centre of controversy almost since the day he moved to Victoria in 1970. A strict vegetarian who neither smokes nor drinks, Christie works out of a windowless parking lot attendant’s booth across the street from the downtown courthouse, and continues to crop up in the news as a fringe political candidate and advocate for the indefensible. In 2007, Christie represented Nazi prison guard Michael Seifert, who was eventually extradited from Canada to Italy to serve a life sentence for war crimes.

Want to know more about the influence the conquering British had – and still have – in Victoria? UVic students have created an “anti-imperialist walking tour” that reveals the unpleasant histories behind several city landmarks. Check out the online tour here.

A Drop to Drink

Victorians endured a couple of rainy weeks at the beginning of April – but the rest of the world hasn’t been so lucky. Bush fires ravaged Australia, activists at the World Water Forum demanded that water be recognized as a fundamental human right, and California has faced water rationing. So it’s a good time to celebrate a blessed component of our local infrastructure: Victoria’s water supply, the product of a century of engineering, foresight, and legal wrangling.

As noted on this blog previously, Victoria originally piped in its water from Spring Ridge (today’s Fernwood), and then, starting in 1874, from Elk Lake. By 1904, though, it was clear that even vast Elk Lake wasn’t sufficient. Many of Victoria’s 30,000 residents were connected to the water system, often preventing enough pressure for fire hoses – a dangerous predicament in a wood-built town. So the city’s leaders looked westward, to the rain-drenched Sooke Hills.

They were not the first. In 1892, Theodore Lubbe, a successful fur merchant, had started building a series of dams in the headwaters of the Goldstream River, and then piping the water – which gained tremendous pressure as it fell from his hilltop reservoirs – to the Esquimalt naval base. He also earned good money selling the water to a hydroelectric station downstream (left) that generated power for Victoria’s streetlights and streetcars. The city took a dim view of Lubbe, however. It argued that the province had originally given Victoria exclusive rights to all water within 20 miles (32 km) of the city, and it sued. In 1906 the case went all the way to the Privy Council in England, and Victoria lost.

What to do? The following year, the city recruited Arthur L. Adams, a San Francisco water expert, to assess Victoria’s options. After surveying the region, Adams reported that Sooke Lake “would prove an almost ideal source of supply,” providing up to 23 million gallons daily, “sufficient for several hundred thousand people.” In a 1908 referendum, Victorians approved Adams’ plan, and the city went to work, buying up summer cottages on the lakefront, and building a 43-kilometre concrete flowline (right) all the way around the hills – thus avoiding Lubbe’s property – to the Humpback reservoir and a new water main to the city. Mayor Alexander Stewart turned on the taps at the Sooke dam on May 28, 1915. “Few cities in western Canada,” the Victoria Daily Times announced, “will be able to boast of such a satisfactory supply as will be afforded by the system which is opened to-day.”

Such a strategic asset created its own concerns. World War I raged at the time, and the city declared the watershed a restricted area, guarded by soldiers on the lookout for German espionage. (Caretakers still patrol the watershed today, mainly to shoo away hikers and would-be marijuana farmers.) During WWII, the federal government also ordered Victoria to start disinfecting its water with chlorine as a security measure. The city continued the practice after the war, despite public protests, because the Greater Victoria Water District started logging the watershed in 1949 to finance improvements to the water system. (Victoria has never added fluoride to its water, thanks to region-wide referendums against fluoridation in 1959.)

Duly protected, the abundant water enabled Victoria to enjoy an industrial boom. During the 1950s, for example, the Sidney Roofing and Paper Company, which stood on the site of today’s Ocean Pointe resort, used as much as a quarter of the city’s total daily supply, consuming 200 tons of water to make every ton of its paper. The water district had already acquired Lubbe’s facilities at Goldstream – his biggest customer dried up when the huge Jordan River power station came on line in 1911 – but by the 1960s, the city’s water system needed to expand again. At a cost of $5.6 million, it dug a nine-kilometre tunnel through the rock (click on photo left), connecting Sooke Lake directly to a treatment facility and the Humpback reservoir, and built a larger dam, opened in 1970, that tripled the system’s daily capacity.

The 1990s, however, proved the most challenging decade for Victoria's water system.

1992: The water district board decides the system still doesn’t have enough capacity for extended dry periods, and begins work to raise the Sooke dam, triggering protests that the water will be contaminated by decades of logging, and that the focus should be on conservation instead of greater capacity.

1994: The B.C. Supreme Court rules that the water district has never had legal authority to commercially log the watershed, but can log to build new water facilities.

1995: More than 100 Victorians fall sick with toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection – the first time the disease is linked to municipal water. Investigators determine the outbreak was caused by the feces of wild cats at the Humpback reservoir. The water department closes the reservoir and, on the orders of the region’s chief medical officer, begins construction of a $12.5-million disinfection plant that uses ultraviolet light to neutralize micro-organisms that aren’t killed by chlorine. When the UV plant (pictured below right) opens in 2004, it's the biggest on the continent.

1996: As the water district clears timber to prepare for the expansion of Sooke Lake, the province appoints special commissioner David Perry to assess the governance of the water supply. Perry recommends creation of a new, accountable regional water commission. A year later, the commission approves raising the dam.

1999: The Capital Regional District secures the Sooke watershed by negotiating a 1,300-hectare land swap with Kapoor Lumber, a company that has been logging in and around Sooke Lake since the 1920s. The company is owned by the two daughters of Kapoor Singh, both doctors, who use the profits to run a clinic in the Punjab.

The Sooke Lake dam was finally raised in 2002, and the city’s water wars have been pretty quiet ever since. Victoria’s system now boasts a capacity of some 25 billion gallons, enough to supply the city for two years without any rainfall. In 2007, it recieved an “A” for reliability and public health in a national comparison of municipal water; that year, the CRD also bought the 8,761-hectare Leech River watershed for $59 million, anticipating that the city will need its water in 25 years as well. Unlike many parched places, it seems Victoria has enough water to keep on growing.

CRD Water is giving free tours of its Sooke Lake facilities from May 4 to 9, to mark National Drinking Water Week. For reservations, call 250-413-4207.

PS As you can tell from the story above, our water system heavily relies upon old-fashioned gravity. The system also has to fight against Newton’s discovery, however, because many Victorians live on hills, and water has to be pumped up to numerous reservoirs to serve them. The city’s oldest reservoir is on Smith’s Hill, now Summit Park, but the most distinctive of them sits on Mount Tolmie. One is a huge concrete block, built in 1967, that you can stand upon at the very peak. (I previously said it was the platform for a WWII radio station, but that was a different structure, as commenters below have noted.) An even larger reservoir sits underground, just down the slope and at the end of Cromwell Road. Built in 1960, it contains six million gallons of water (photo left) and is covered by nearly two acres of concrete. A few years ago that reservoir had to be seismically upgraded, for fear that it would unleash a deadly wave on homes below if it cracked open. But why does it have a roof, when other reservoirs are open to the sky? Answer: because planners designed it at the height of the Cold War, and wanted to keep the water safe from nuclear fallout.

PPS Dustin Creviston has created an excellent Wikipedia page on the history of the Sooke flowline, and where to see it. Check it out here.