With apologies to Robert Browning, Oh, to be in Victoria (especially if from Toronto) now that early spring is here.
There are crocuses …
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… and snowdrops …
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… plum tree blossom …
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… and holly. Well, holly’s year round, but lets me use the picture …
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… and, more to the point, insert my mother in our 1950s Vancouver front garden. The holly tree was especially useful at Christmas.
Let me take you on a (very) truncated tour of Victoria architecture.
The Rithet Building on Wharf Street, built in stages between 1861 and 1889, with splendid cast iron columns.
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Jaunty, even exuberant details in the James Bay and Fairfield neighbourhoods.
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And, inevitably, frequent sightings of colonial Tudor.
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I did enjoy some highly personal embellishments.
In front of a house with a two tone Beetle …
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... this bust.
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I just liked the composition.
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And here, well, what can one usefully say about a giant skeleton with a heart tipped arrow?
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Very Forties, Fifties, false shutters with hearts.
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Sophisticated and elegant is this art deco tower, which soars above Victoria’s visitors bureau and once was part of an Imperial Oil service station. With 1930s expectations of more and more seaplanes landing in the harbour, the tower was topped by a ten million candlepower beacon.
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Happily the city decorates many of its electrical utility boxes with pictures from the past.
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Attached to Gothic and Tudor the locals may have been, but the tower was a New York-ish, Chicago-ish addition, especially noticeable in a modest town then without skyscrapers. Even now, there are few noticeably high buildings.
Post war, other fresh structures appeared. The 1948 streamline moderne Odeon.
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Late art deco BC Power Commission Building from 1949.
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The stripped classicism of the Douglas Building, which provincial government employees first occupied in 1951.
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All much different from the across the street 1898 BC legislature topped by a golden Captain Vancouver ...
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... and at dawn with a decidedly youthful, pre-widow of Windsor, Queen Victoria.
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Oh, and the legislature architect was that chap who met his end from a croquet mallet.
