Michael R. Barrick

Vancouver is not transmitting. I have the Victoria transmitter tuned in, but it doesn't come in well. This is very odd.

From the south-west corner, looking north-east.

From the rose gardens on the south lawn, facing north-north-west.

The Empress Hotel was built in 1908 as part of the Canadian Pacific Railway's chain of luxury hotels. The land it is sitting on is fill. The street in front, Government Street, was a bridge across James Bay when construction started. The city of Victoria originally granted the land that the natural history museum is now on to CP on the condition that they build and operate a hotel in the city for a minimum of fifty years. The architect, Francis Rattenbury (who also designed the provincial legislature buildings in Victoria and the fantastic power plants half way up Indian Arm), decided that filling the bay and parking the hotel centred in Victoria's inner harbour would make for a much more impressive presence. The original hotel (the part in these pictures) and the extension built in 1912 rest on Australian iron-wood pilings that are actually insufficient for the weight of the building - the hotel has settled about half a metre since it was constructed. I pointed out the repairs in the masonry to Elaine while we were there, but didn't think to take a picture. When the conference centre was added behind the hotel in the late 1980's stainless-steel pilings were driven nearly twice as deep as the pilings bearing the hotel and they only carry a fraction of the weight.

I have another photography gig tonight and was just killing time having dinner and a Guinness at the pub. I grabbed an old copy of the "British Columbia Historical News" from work to read over dinner and learned some very interesting things:

Turns out the James Douglas (the first governor of British Columbia and Vancouver Island, for which the main street in Victoria is named) was not born in Scotland as I was taught in school. Turns out that while his father was Scottish, James Douglas was born in the Caribbean and his mother was a Jamaican mulatto. And while it is common knowledge that the British put an emphasis on colonising Vancouver Island in the early 1860's to provide a bulwark against American "Manifest Destiny" expansionism, what is not common knowledge is the first 100 colonists brought by Douglas where blacks from California that wanted to leave the U.S. and become British citizens for fear of California joining the Confederate states (most of those colonists ended up bailing on Victoria and going back to the U.S. after the south lost the war, BTW). Interesting stuff.