Born in Ukraine, he immigrated to Canada in 1948 and became one of Vancouver’s biggest developers
Peter Wall arrived in Canada as a penniless refugee in 1948. But he rose to the top of the Canadian development industry, building some of Vancouver’s landmark buildings, including One Wall Centre, which was once Vancouver’s tallest tower.
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Wall died on March 2 in Vancouver at the age of 87. His family did not release his cause of death.
Wall was known as the most flamboyant of local developers. He liked to be photographed outside his latest tower wearing his distinctive wraparound sunglasses, a scarf around his neck and a big cigar jutting out of his mouth.
He also was a political force, a major contributor to both the provincial and federal Liberals. He was a big Paul Martin supporter federally, and one of the biggest donors to the provincial Liberals — a 2017 Vancouver Sun story said Wall and his nephew Bruno donated $914,425 to the B.C. Libs that year.
Wall’s childhood sounded like a horror story out of Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird. Born in Ukraine on Oct. 15, 1937, his family were German Mennonites who lived through Josef Stalin’s reign of terror. Wall never met his father, who was carted off by Russian soldiers in a purge in the late 1930s and never heard from again.
“(Stalin) killed my father,” he recalled in 2001. “The trucks came in the middle of the night, they loaded up all these men that could fight, and you never heard from them again. My father was one of them. He was never found.”
When the German army invaded Ukraine during the Second World War, Wall’s family hid in the basement lest they be shot. They wound up as refugees, travelling all over eastern Europe during the war.
“I started Grade 1 in about four countries,” he said. “Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Austria. Somehow we survived it.”
An uncle had moved to Manitoba in the 1920s and sponsored the family into Canada. They soon moved to Abbotsford, where they could make money picking fruit. Wall claimed his personal best was 243 pounds of strawberries in one day.
He got into the development business in 1958.
“I built a house for my mother,” said Wall, who was a university student at the time. “When it was finished, my mother didn’t want it. She said I could sell it and keep the profit. So I sold it and made $6,000. I said ‘Goodbye UBC.’”
In 1960, Wall co-founded Wall and Redekop Corp. with his cousin, Peter Redekop. In 1967, the company purchased the huge Shannon mansion site on Granville Street and announced it wanted to build townhomes, which provoked a big controversy among nearby homeowners.
It became a civic election issue in 1972, when Art Phillips and his The Electors Action Movement thrashed the ruling Non-Partisan Association. But the NPA gave final approval to the project, one of its last acts as council.
“Art Phillips came in and was trying to cancel it,” Wall said in 2001. “But we said ‘No you can’t cancel it, we’ll have to go to court.’ So they passed it.”
The partnership with his cousin ended in 1987, when Redekop opted to focus on low-rise residential developments and Wall concentrated on highrise towers. But Wall kept the Shannon site: another controversy erupted when he tore down the original townhouses designed by architect Arthur Erickson for a new project in 2014.
His most prominent building was One Wall Centre at 1000 Burrard, an elegant 48-storey glass tower that was the tallest building in Vancouver when it opened in 2001, on the highest point of land downtown.
But it was also controversial. The city said the glass approved for the project was lighter than the cool silver blue he started building with.
The city sued Wall, Wall countersued the city, and a compromise was reached in which the bottom 30 floors are dark glass and the top 18 are lighter.
He is survived by his wife Aliaksandra Varslovan, son Stephen, daughter Sonya, grandson Colin, nephew Bruno and ex-wife Charlotte.
