City boards up Ming Sun building after flood
Posted December 10, 2013 11:49 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – Police officers stood guard overnight outside the historic Ming Sun building in Vancouver’s Japantown.
Vancouver Fire crews were called to a suspected burst sprinkler that flooded the building with around four inches of water Tuesday evening.
The building was then boarded up to wait for city engineers to further assess the damage.
Civic historian John Atkin says the building has major significance to the city’s history.
“The building itself is 1890, so that for Vancouver, is four years after we burned the city to the ground so it’s quite old.”
But he says the building’s real significance is the role it plays in the history of Japantown itself.
“It was bought by the Yoshida family in 1906. And the Yoshidas have an extraordinary history in Vancouver. One of their daughters was the very first female to graduate from UBC.”
Atkin says it’s just one of a handful of landmarks that remain in the historic but small area of the city.
“The pity with Japantown was the forced re-location of every Japanese-Canadian resident there. And then the fire sale of property the following year, it really killed the community.”
The city has ordered a number of emergency repairs to the building after an exterior wall crumbled in the summer.
It says it supports the heritage aspect of the building but its primary concern is the safety of the structure.
