I kid you not

Running down the center of the store is this lovely row of clerestory windows, letting in tons of natural light to the salesfloor below. This is the point where I started to realize there was something odd going on with this store and that not all was as it appeared from the main facade -- sure, I've seen stores put in cool ceiling treatments from time to time, sometimes even including clerestory windows, but this seems a bit much for a modern big box store. Plus, those are all old-fashioned divided light windows, which really doesn't make sense for a store that looked like it was from the 80s or 90s. So what's going on here? Well, I'm not really sure. The BC property assessment website claims that the store was in fact built in 1990, and because this is in Canada, I don't have access to newspaper archives and Historic Aerials doesn't have coverage. All of the websites that I can find that claim to have old aerial photos of Canada make you pay if you want decent resolutions (even the ones run by the federal government and the government of BC!); however, after a lot of digging through extremely non-user-friendly websites, I did find this image from 1979 that clearly shows this building already existing at that point (it's just southwest of the intersection between the railroad tracks and the north-south road at the center of the image), but without the new front (east) facade that Real Canadian Superstore added. I have no more concrete information beyond that, but the windows make me think it's probably from the 40s at the latest, and based on everything else in the area, I'm guessing it was originally a warehouse or some other sort of industrial use. I'd love to have more specifics than that, since this is quite an interesting place these days, but I've hit a dead end at this point. 

Yes, that was a really long post, but sometimes I just fall down the rabbit hole of research! Anyway, I have quite a bit of stuff planned for the next week or so, so I'm going to be missing a few days on the blog -- tomorrow for sure, and probably next Wednesday followed by all of the holiday weekend. Just saying this all now because I'll probably forget soon!