Talk:Dominion Building
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[edit] Helyer's Death
I've got to find the relevant passage in Morley or Matthews; Helyer's death was a suicide related to the collapse of the Dominion Trust in 1913; "the staircase in front of the building" isn't quite the right syntax; there are two staircases inside the building; the one towards the main doors are the ones in question; as it's written it sounds like there's a staircase on the front of the building, which of course there isn't.
Comment about Sun Tower was true, so I put it back in; not sure why IP-address user decided it had to come out.Skookum1 14:00, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Have since come across two other refs as to how he died; both suicide by gun, one version saying in his office with a pistol, the version I came across tonight at BPL was by shotgun-blast at his Kerrisdale (?) home. Unless it's not Helyer, but someone else who offed himself during the same crash....no, it wasn't Helyer; it was the guy who lost everybody else's dough in the collapse of the Dominion Trust.....but I thought he took a dive down the inside stairwell (?)...one of these days I'm going to have to try and sort out my fuzzy recollections of all this stuff; pre-Great War Vancouver was a fairly busy place "scandal-wise".Skookum1 09:35, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] the von Alvenlebens
- The financiers of the structure were the Counts von Alvensleben from Germany, who were active in Vancouver's financial scene at the time. It was generally held at the time that they were a front for the Kaiser's money, which carried the suggestion that the Empire's tallest building had been built by its greatest rival.
OK, I got that from Alan Morley's book Vancouver: From Milltown to Metropolis and a pastiche of the usual Vancouver pop histories; the best write-up I've seen of their involvement in pre-Great War Vancouver high society and high finance is in Strangers Entertained, which is a provincial government centenary publication from 1971, giving histories of BC's ethnic groups to date; the von Alvenlebens were also the developers of the Wigwam Inn, which was a centre of German-speaking social life, apparently, or at least those in Alvensleben's circle. Anyway reading the article on Werner von Alvensleben I'm no longer sure that they were Counts; they were the sons of a Count, sounds like their elder brother got the title, didn't read the article closely; for purposes of frontier society that's as good as being a Count but aristocratic standing had cachet even without a tiara. Strangers Entertained I think covers some of the rumours of the Kaiser's backing, or that's somewhere anyway, maybe in Peter MacDonald'sd Historical Atlas of Vancouver; there might be stuff in the German and Austrian chapters (and the Czech chapter covers Bohemians, I think...) to do with this building worth adding here; there's certainly need for more input from what's in Strangers Entertained (which I no longer have) that could add to the Werner von Alvensleben article, and maybe enough to justify Gustav von Alvensleben; not notable to German history maybe, but definitely to BC history. Not that Wiki should be a who's who; but I recall from the book that there were some major dealings and a scandal or two; worth a read anyway for someone who finds the von Alvenslebens an interesting backstory to the Dominion.....Skookum1 (talk) 05:44, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
