Lives of the Building
An immigrant builder who stepped off the first train into a brass band’s welcome. A founder of the city’s art gallery and symphony. A one-armed adventurer who bought the whole block. One address.
The Cast
Filter the cast of the Rogers story — every one of them verifiable, most of them barely believable.
The Immigrant Builder
1865–1945
Welsh-born and, by the family’s account, raised speaking only Welsh, Rogers arrived on Vancouver’s first transcontinental passenger train in 1887 and built his fortune — and his monument — on the corner of Granville and Pender.
The Cultural Founder
m. 1902
Jonathan’s partner in business and civic life, Elisabeth Rogers helped keep the Rogers Building in the family — foreclosing on One-Arm Sutton’s mortgage in 1938 and later steering its sale to the Koerner Foundation.
The Adventurer
1884–1944 · owner 1927–1940
He earned the Military Cross at Gallipoli, chased gold in Siberia, armed a Chinese warlord, and bought the Rogers Building — reportedly, the story goes, because the manager wouldn’t renovate his office.
The Self-Made Architect
c. 1871–1922
Nova Scotia-born and never formally trained, Gould came up through building and contracting in Boston before establishing his Seattle practice in 1905.
The Beaux-Arts Hand
1874–1929
Harvard and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris; a draftsman with Carrère & Hastings; a designer on a string of great world’s fairs. Champney brought the French Renaissance polish to the partnership.
The Supervising Architect
1886–1973
Wood moved to Vancouver to run Gould & Champney’s local office and supervised the Rogers Building’s construction — keeping an office in the finished building.
The Engineers
active 1890–1944
The New York engineering firm behind the Flatiron Building and the Metropolitan Life Tower poured the Rogers Building’s pioneering concrete frame.
The Adventurer · In Nine Episodes
The building’s second owner (1927–1940), Major General Francis Arthur Sutton, M.C., lived a life that reads like pulp fiction — except that the papers reported it as news.
By his own account an engineer chasing adventure, Sutton is sub-contracting on railways and bridges in South America and working in Mexican oil refineries by the age of twenty.
He lands with golf clubs labelled as surveying gear. His Military Cross citation records that he repeatedly threw enemy bombs back at great personal risk; by his own account one exploded and took his right hand — earning him a nickname to go with the medal.
Assigned to the Army’s Inventions Department of the Ministry of Munitions, he improves the trench mortar — and, he wrote, insisted on testing his designs himself at the front.
Chasing gold, he ships in a cargo that, by his own memoir, included 10,000 pairs of shoes, 700 tons of nails, and 50 tons of horseshoes — makes a fortune, and then loses it, along with the remainder he speculates away in Shanghai.
Bankrupt, he builds a production line for the Stokes mortar and sells it at great personal risk — rising to major general and advisor to the warlord Zhang Zuolin.
Rich again, he lives large in Shanghai — the era of his life, as he told it, of racehorses and fortunes as easily lost as won.
He arrives with a fortune and a plan to open the Peace River country with a railway to Edmonton. He buys the Rogers Building — reported as the city’s largest real estate deal to date — reportedly in part because the manager had refused to renovate his suite of offices.
He buys an estate on Portland Island, meaning to build a resort with a golf course and raise thoroughbred horses — one more grand scheme for a man who never ran short of them.
The railway never materializes; the 1929 crash takes the rest. Elisabeth Rogers forecloses in 1938, and the building returns to Jonathan Rogers in 1940.
The Offices Upstairs
Jewellers, consuls, tailors, historians — the working life of the building is its own biography.
Held the southeast corner storefront from opening day for nearly seventy years.
Maintained offices in the building.
Operated in the basement — its sidewalk CAFETERIA sign is visible in the 1913 photograph.
Known for an Art Deco neon sign dating from 1946.
The heritage consultant and the city’s great popular historian both kept offices here.
At capacity, more than 1,000 people worked here each day, and 18,000 passed through the bronze doors.