A City of Romance is Rupert

PRINCE RUPERT--Some places are just naturally romantic. Baghdad was one in the days of Scheherazade and her thousand and one Arabian nights stories. Another, a magnificent opera story which was never written, was George Carmacks and his Indian in-laws discovering gold on Bonanza Creek A third place with magic is rainsoaked, rumsoaked Prince Rupert, huddled here at the southern tip of the Alaska Panhandle with its people smoking their pipes upside down so they don’t drown. Romance is here. I never visit Rupert without sensing it.

Being closer to Japan, Rupert was to be Canada’s greatest west coast port--the Land of Tomorrow, which people say it always will be. There were 50,000 residents a few years ago, now thanks to the softwood lumber duties and other catastrophes, it is 30,000.

There are a lot of the little fishermen’s houses which look like San Francisco’s before, not after, the earthquake yet because it is Rupert, named for that gallant cavalier named Rupert of the Rhine, there is always a special touch of class to the place. The city hall is smaller than Vancouver’s but an architectural gem, graceful as the Parthenon, on which it may have been modelled.

Architecture, it turns out, is the basis of the newest romantic story in the little city of Prince Rupert. The other ingredients of the story are sex, murder, trrrradition!!!, shipwreck and backgammon. Just the sort of thing Sheheratzade needed for her stories and Giuseppe Verdi for his operas.

The story begins with the Prince Rupert library which is a funky old building where they can just manage to keep the rain from wetting the books. Chief Librarian is Alan Wilson who comes from a little burg in Ontario too small and unimportant to keep in memory. Probably a nice place, but not the
Athens of Eastern Canada. Of course many people don’t think Rupert is the Athens of B.C.

Alan, 48, spent some of his earlier years in Moscow, studying the bureaucratic structure of Russia for a Ph.D., learning languages such as German, Russian and good English, all of which he became fluent in. He was also at times a janitor and a professional gambler. He has won big money in Backgammon, which he says is the world’s oldest gambling game and which he can explain to you in boring detail.

Here, for our romantic story, is just a bit more history, a necessary ingredient. Railway builder C.M Hays, president of the Grand Trunk railway, wanted the new city of Prince Rupert to be elegant and to that end he hired none other than Francis Mawson Rattenbury, the architect of British Columbia’s legislature buildings, to design it.

Fast forward:

Rattenbury designs the new city with a hotel to rival Victoria’s Empress Hotel. He goes to England and is murdered by his wife’s lover.

Mr. Hays goes down with the Titanic.

World War One comes along. Nobody knows what happened to the blueprints.

Fast forward to a few years ago:

Wreckers demolishing the old Rattenbury residence in England find his architect’s drawings in the walls, where they had been stuffed for insulation, something the English can never get anough of.

Librarian Wilson enters this picture when he learns that the Rattenbury blueprints are soon going to be auctioned off in New York, probably for $150,000. His gambling instincts reactivate. Although he has no money, play, he pulls up a chair and joins the game. For an equalizer he does not have a pistol in his back pocket but he has a little known law which permits librarians to declare some papers national treasures which can be sold abroad only with much difficulty.

What follows is complex, interesting, but too complex for this brief report.

Fast forward again:

Wilson’s library gets the Rattenbury papers for $20,000. Two fairy godmothers, CN Rail and BC Hydro, pay ten apiece.

Is this the end?

By no means. Operas aren’t over until the fat lady sings.

Next, a message for Mr. Wilson at Prince Rupert library from a Mr. Rattenbury in California. A voice from beyond the grave? In a way, yes. It is the son of Francis Rattenbury, age 74, also an architect. He’s thrilled. What, he says, can he do to help?

Librarian Wilson has an answer. Mr. Rattenbury can design a new civic library for Prince Rupert, one at the harborfront with a bargeful of books anchored in front, a new, different, exciting kind of seagoing library. To which Mr. Rattenbury agrees, and so does the city council.

So Rupert, some time before its centenary celebration, is to have a new style library featuring one of the most famous names in B.C. architecture.

Only in a place like Prince Rupert, or maybe Baghdad or Bonanza Creek.

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September/03