852 and 864 Cambie Street
There are two warehouses in this 1981 image, with the Tingley Building on the left, at 842-852, and the Mainland Building at 864. (G H Cottrell developed another slightly taller warehouse to the north, on the same block, around 1911 that can be seen in the image below).
F C Tingley spent $35,000 on his building, with no identified architect on the permit. To the south the Mainland Trust Company had hired the same builder for their warehouse in 1910, George Snider, and theirs cost $45,000. 860-864 Cambie was the address for the southern 33 feet of the Mainland Building, and it was on offer for lease separately in 1912 for $80 a month in the ‘Fireproof Building’.
Both buildings have lost their ornate (but precarious) pediments. This 1913 image shows that their original design is otherwise still pretty much intact, although the Tingley Building has different windows, having been extensively rebuilt.
Fred and his brother Clarence Tingley ran Barnard’s Express in the early 1900s. They had a stables three blocks from here, and also developed a warehouse on Mainland Street around the same time as the warehouse here. George Snider also designed and built that building, and as there are no particularly complicated aspects to designing a warehouse, he may well have designed both of these.
Mainland Trust was part of Mainland Transfer, whose history we looked at when we posted another Yaletown warehouse the company developed on Nelson Street. Closely associated with Canadian Pacific, they acquired a series of rival storage and cartage and storage businesses to become the city’s largest operation by the 1910s.
Fred Tingley’s death notices said he was born at Yale and as a young man drove “B.X.” stages on the Cariboo road, and had been a resident of Vancouver since 1899. He had a degree from Mount Allison University in Victoria in 1893, and married Sarah Niven in 1902. His full name was William Fredrick Chipman Tingley, but he was only ever knows as either ‘F C Tingley’ or Fred, never as William. Fred and Sarah Tingley took a motor trip with J C McPherson and his wife, to see the Rose Festival in Portland in June 1922.
In 1942 a $10,000 contract was awarded for the repair of the Mainland Building, which had ‘recently suffered considerable damage’. On February 12th fire swept through the building, and the images in the press of the conflagration were impressive. Eight firemen were injured, and 175 battled the flames, with 16 fire trucks attending. “Melted chocolates, strewn packages of chewing gum and charred, wet furniture was nearly all that was left of the stock, property of seven companies who stored goods in the warehouse building. Tenants of the building included the William Wrigley Jr. Co. Ltd., Fry-Cadbury Co. Ltd., Stanley Brock, hardware, A. O. Oldershaw, hardware, Hudson’s Bay Company furniture, and Manufacturers’ Sales Ltd., furniture.”
Fred Tingley died in 1947, aged 74 (a year after his wife). As well as other property interests in the city he was involved in Terminal City Motors, Pacific Stage Lines and Yellow Cabs, and was a director of the Vancouver Exhibition and its successor, the PNE.
Unusually, the use of the Mainland Building hasn’t changed. In 1975 864 Cambie was home to Lok Box Storage No. 1, and today it’s Yaletown Mini Storage, part of Storguard. Meanwhile the Tingley Building is now office space, since 2007 a branch campus of the American Fairleigh Dickinson University, ‘offering a diverse range of undergraduate and graduate programs’.
Image sources: City of Vancouver Archives CVA 779-E15.19 and CVA 359-33
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