BURST
Bill Reid is one of the most renowned artists in B.C. history. But on Feb. 21, 1977, the Vancouver park board started tearing down one of his most striking works.
Reid and some helpers had done a mural on the side of an old airplane hangar for the Habitat Forum, a conference of non-governmental organizations that took over Jericho Beach from May 27 to June 11, 1976.
Habitat Forum was an offshoot of a United Nations Conference on Human Settlements that took place in downtown Vancouver. Politicians from more than 140 countries attended the main conference, but for the public, the action was at Jericho.
Reid’s mural greeted people as they walked into the Habitat Forum, which made use of several hangars left over from when Jericho had been a seaplane base for the Royal Canadian Air Force from 1920 to 1947. The mural was on what was known as Hangar 3.
It was done in a First Nations motif, and was stunning, a vibrant blend of blue, red, black and white.
“It appears to be a design that mimics a housefront,” said Aliya Boubard, curator at the Bill Reid Museum.
“Designs like these would have traditionally been painted on the front of longhouses and depicted the crests of families who lived inside the home.
“It’s unclear what the main figure in the centre top appears to be, but the figure in the centre underneath looks to be a human. On either side, there is a wolf and underneath the wolf is a salmon-egg design.”
To make the mural, Reid had taken one of his existing designs, projected it onto the south side of the aircraft hangar, then painted it with the help of some artists, who used lifts to get up high.
The exact size is unknown, but was probably four to five storeys high and over 30 metres wide. The exterior of the hangar was clad in corrugated metal panels, and the mural was painted over them.
The Habitat Forum was wildly popular – attendees still get teary eyed about the world’s longest bar, which ran the length of one of the hangars. But it was only on for 2½ weeks, and after it was over, the Vancouver park board started talking about tearing all the hangars down .
The park board had only gotten full control of Jericho in 1973-74, after the federal government transferred control to the city. And it didn’t seem to have been happy when the Habitat Forum’s Al Clapp and crew took over the old hangars for a conference.
Terri Clark is the former head of public relations for the park board. She said the park board’s longtime superintendent, Stuart Lefeaux, had been “hoping against hope that they’d be able to take down some of the hangers and make a proper park, as he would call it.”
Arts groups were alarmed, and argued that the hangars could be repurposed.
“With almost biblical stubbornness, the park board seems determined to have the walls of Jericho come tumbling down,” said artist Jack Shadbolt in a letter to the Sun on Dec. 8, 1976.
“By all means let them proceed with (knocking down) Hangars 5 and 6 and (building) the park in general, but by the name of sanity why not leave Hangar 3 (with the Bill Reid mural on it) and the great cement plaza until the possibilities for their creative use have been tested?”
The B.C. Woodcrafters Guild wanted to use one hangar as a workshop, and the Pacific Aviation Museum Society wanted to convert two hangars into an aircraft museum.
But on Dec. 21, 1976, the park board voted to rip Hangar 3 down, although it voted to keep some hangars, at least temporarily.
It took about two weeks to tear it down. On March 2, 1977, Province photographer Colin Price took a dramatic photo of the hangar virtually gone save for the top half of the Reid mural.
The park board’s Lefeaux continued to argue to tear down the rest of the hangars. On Oct. 12, 1979 an arsonist burned one of the two remaining hangars down. On Nov. 14, 1979, the last hangar also went up in flames.
And the park board finally had a clear site for the big park they wanted.
