JOHN MACKIE
Sun
BILL KEAY/VANCOUVER SUN Abe Charkow’s favourites tend to be the early black-and-white postcards that came out before the First World War. He also has a collection of postcards of shipwrecks.
FOURTH AVENUE, Kitsilano
PROMENADE, English Bay
WORLD BUILDING, Vancouver
SAWMILLS on False Creek
WHITE ROCK
HOTEL VANCOUVER
There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who collect old Vancouver postcards. But few if any have ever had a collection like Abe Charkow.
The 89-year-old’s collection stands at about 10,000 cards, and about 80 per cent are of Vancouver or British Columbia. Most of them would be pre-1920, or even pre-First World War.
Charkow spent three decades building the collection. But he has had health problems the last couple of years, and has decided to part with his postcards — all 10,000 of them.
This Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., his daughter Jill will be selling off the collection at the Vancouver Postcard Club’s annual show and sale at Hastings Community Centre, 3096 East Hastings St. (across from the PNE grounds).
Prices will range from a low of $5 to a high of $200, and you’ll be able to find old postcards of almost anything you could imagine.
In Charkow’s office, the postcards are arranged by subject on stacks of shelves. There are separate categories for Vancouver bridges, Central Park, Chinatown, Hastings Park, Mount Pleasant, Fairview, Wholesale District, Forest Lawn, and Queen Elizabeth Park.
There are categories for storefronts on Broadway, Commercial, Cordova, Georgia, Pender, and Westminster/Main. There’s a box filled with postcards of residences in the West End, and boxes for Vancouver train stations (CPR, CNR, Union Station, Great Northern Station). There are multiple boxes of postcards for Granville Street, Hastings Street and Stanley Park.
And that’s just the first couple of shelves.
Charkow’s favourite cards tend to be the early black and white cards that came out before the First World War. There is an incredible black and white card of what appears to be a policeman riding a horse across Fourth Avenue in Kitsilano, when the street was unpaved, streetcar tracks ran down the centre of the road, there were no cars in sight and Fourth was virtually all houses.
He also has a collection of postcards of shipwrecks such as the SS Mariposa, wrecked in October 1915 near Bella Coola.
In the days before newspapers published much photography photographers raced to the scene of disasters, snap photos, then produce a run of postcards for the public to buy. A good example is a postcard of a sinkhole on Broadway that swallowed a house. Someone has labelled the photo “the only drop in real estate in Vancouver’s history.”
Some of the subjects stagger the imagination, such as a postcard of sawmills on False Creek. At the time the sawmills were probably considered a sign of progress, but today people who see the pollution spewing from the sawmills’ burners are aghast.
Charkow started as a stamp collector, and got into postcards by accident. In Toronto on business, he went to a store looking for stamps and came across a box of postcards.
“He started off buying [hand] coloured cards, because they look nice,” says Jill Charkow. “Then he discovered no, it’s the black and whites that have the value.
“Most of his original collection he ended up finding in England, because that’s where the B.C. cards were mailed to. People who retired or moved from England to Victoria or Vancouver sent postcards home. It was the cheapest form of mail in those days.”
Charkow started haunting flea markets and antique sales looking for postcards. He noted the names of photographers and companies, and assembled a superb collection of cards by Philip Timms, early Vancouver’s best photographer.
Timms’ cards are extremely rare and are worth hundreds of dollars apiece; Charkow sold the bulk of his Timms collection to another collector a couple of years ago, but some extra Timms cards will be for sale Sunday.
Charkow focused on Vancouver postcards because he’s a born-and-bred Vancouverite. He had the financial resources to assemble the collection because he owned and operated a successful women’s clothing company, Fitwell Garments.
His first love, though, was music. Charkow played violin in a 1930s classical troupe called the Mozart Trio, which put on recitals around town. Alas, though he has many postcards of musicians, there are none of the Mozart Trio.
But he does have a cache of old newspaper articles and an amazing document detailing the financial success of a 1935 concert, from the attendance and ticket price (207 adult tickets at 50 cents each is $103. 50) to expenses (flowers $2.50, rental hall $35, piano $5, assisting artist $10, stamps $2.50, taxis $2.40, music $15.25) and the net profit ($24.81).
He was just as thorough with his postcards. Whenever he bought one, he’d put a value in pencil on the back, which is how Jill was able to figure out what each was worth.
Hence, each one of his 25 postcards of the old post office at Granville and Hastings is priced, as are his 33 postcards of the first Hotel Vancouver, 41 postcards of the second Hotel Vancouver, and six postcards of the third (current) Hotel Vancouver.
Many cards are quite expensive (a 1912 Vancouver Sun advertising postcard is $35), but a lot are quite cheap.
For about $10, you can pick up a lovely postcard of the Sun Tower when it was called the World Tower and had a globe at its peak; a somewhat shocking postcard of the bridge across Westminster Avenue (Main Street) before the east side of False Creek was drained for railway tracks in 1916; and an idyllic view of the old English Bay promenade around 1907 or so — small prices to pay for a piece of history.
