Temple of Poseidon

by Ross Crockford

On January 15 of 1901, the city was abuzz. For decades, the principal way to travel to the mainland had been aboard dilapidated old paddlewheelers and steamships – “barnacles on the wheel of progress,” the Daily Colonist called them – built by the Hudson’s Bay Company. Now, at last, a new player was entering the local ferry business: the mighty Canadian Pacific Railway.

The news was electrifying. Although the Esquimalt & Nanaimo railway had been completed in 1886 and the CPR had been running its Empress liners to Asia since 1891, the CPR’s investment in coastal ferries, reaching canneries and sawmills and ports to the Klondike gold fields, heralded a regional economic boom.

Victorians were not to be disappointed. As Robert D. Turner describes in his wonderful 2001 book, Those Beautiful Coastal Liners, the CPR quickly built “a new and dynamic fleet of coastal steamships, renowned for speed, elegance and fine service, that became the dominant shipping presence along the coast[.]” Under the supervision of Captain James William Troup, the CPR’s B.C. Coast Service built 19 ships (all dubbed Princesses), many of them featuring lush, woody salons and sleeping cabins based on designs by architect Francis Rattenbury. The service’s flagship, the Princess Victoria, could motor between downtown Victoria and Vancouver in under four hours.

To complement the new ferries, in 1904, Troup retained Rattenbury to design a terminal on the Inner Harbour. Rattenbury created a larger version (photo left) of the half-timbered mansions he’d already designed around town. But the Coast Service boomed – passengers on the Vancouver-Nanaimo run grew from 11,000 in 1917 to 147,000 in 1923 – and his terminal quickly became obsolete. In 1920, Troup warned that it was “no longer fit for occupancy, and [that] extensive repairs must be undertaken before the building literally falls down.”

Rattenbury's first terminal

So Troup asked the architect to create a new terminal. “I would be more than delighted to design this building,” Rattenbury replied. By then the harbour included his Parliament Buildings and the Empress Hotel, which had opened in 1908. “So much of it [the harbour panorama] is my life’s work that I would put my whole heart into designing a building that would harmonize and add to the beauty of the surroundings.”

Rattenbury proposed a neo-classical temple, similar to his Bank of Montreal on Douglas Street, flanked by Ionic columns. Since an all-stone building would be expensive, his architectural partner Percy Leonard James suggested using reinforced concrete covered with “cast stone” made of cement and powdered Newcastle Island rock, which could be shaped to create exterior details – such as the fabulous heads of Poseidon, Greek god of the sea, overlooking each corner of the building. (The heads were carved by George Gibson, a Scots artisan who also created the speaker's chair in the Parliament Buildings, and much of the cast-stone and wood sculpture in Christ Church Cathedral.)

Rattenbury's second terminal

An exterior detail

A view of the terminal's interior

The terminal’s interior was equally as grand. The main floor had ornate 17-foot ceilings, a large fireplace, and lounges and waiting rooms finished with marble and Haddington Island stone. The hipped roof of Welsh slate covered two floors of spacious offices. (Troup’s was in the northwest corner so he could monitor the harbour traffic, which he also did from his waterfront home, near today’s West Bay marina.) When the building opened in 1924, it was considered one of Rattenbury’s best, and its success led him to join the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada that year.

The Depression and World War II took their tolls on the CPR’s steamships, however, and by the 1950s, its fleet was sadly out of date. In 1958, a series of paralyzing CPR shipworkers’ strikes compelled premier W.A.C. Bennett to create BC Ferries, and the government’s roll-on, roll-off car ferries won most of the traffic to the mainland. By the 1960s, the Princess Marguerite was the only CPR vessel sailing out of downtown Victoria. The company moved its offices to Vancouver in 1968, leased the terminal to the Royal London Wax Museum in 1970, and sold the building to the province in 1975.

This story was originally published in 2010 in Ross Crockford's book, Victoria: The Unknown City.