It's May 1953 and a man is walking down Burrard Street on a clear night. He sees something and stops walking. To no one in particular he says "hotdamn, what is that sonofabitch!" Then he takes off his hat, runs his fingers through his hair, and stares in amazement for a good few minutes. He takes a step back, and then a step to the right, so as to see it from different perspectives. Thoroughly impressed, he snaps his fingers and grins. "Well if that ain't somthin" he exclaims before replacing his hat and walking off.

The other day I walked into a big chain grocery store and then I walked to the flour aisle (well, not exclusively flour -- it's also home to jams, biscuits, and custards), where I found one of the store's many malodorous stockboys. I approached him, in swift steps, the way a brisk man approaches an urgent business matter, and as I did so, he put away the cell phone he was busily texting on and looked up. Then I said, "Do you sell Wild Rose Delicious Cake and Pastry Flour?"

Naturally, I was just fucking with him -- the stuff hasn't existed for decades. But just because the good folks who ran Wild Rose are long dead and the company has been defunct for a couple generations doesn't mean they've stopped advertising. No. If you'd like proof, head to the alley off of Gore Avenue between Pender and Hastings and see for yourself.

This here is what's commonly called a ghost ad -- the finest extant example in Vancouver, so far as I can tell. I don't think I need to elaborate on what a ghost ad is, it being a fairly straightforward matter (antiquated, painted on to a public surface of some kind), but I do think it's worthwhile to ponder why we should care about these ghost ads.

First of all, they're amazing -- just look at them! They're painted on walls in amazing colours and obsolete typefaces! They represent products that probably no longer exist! (or that you've never even heard of -- what the hell's a brigantine?) They have incredible slogans like "You can't lose with Paris shoes"! How can you not love these things, honestly.

It's three or four in the morning and I'm standing, or wavering, or possibly leaning on a wall of some kind - anyway I'm upright (I am vertical! I am amazing!), outside a nightclub called Lotus, and I may be glassy-eyed, and I may be unsure of where I'm sleeping tonight, but I'll be damned if I'm not looking at ten bare breasts, erect nipples and everything. On the side of a building that is. Were our streets always this sexy?

Yes. Ever since 1912, at least. It was winter that year when the building we've come to know and love as the Sun Tower - replete with the nude busts of nine comely lasses (sorry, 'muses') - was unveiled, easily trebling the number of awkward midday hard-ons on Pender Street. (Alright. So maybe they're not that arousing. It looks like they might have even lifted weights in their spare time, or did a little amateur boxing. But still. Some people are into that.) At any rate you can be sure that when these buxom beauties bounced into our prudish little town it was risque, it was juicy, it was gossip-worthy and scandalous, what with the halcyon days of the 25 cent peep show having not quite arrived yet.

The World Building, as it was first called, appeared thanks to the slickest newspaperman this side of Chicago, L. D. Taylor (it took on its current title in 1937 when the Vancouver Sun moved in - they left in 1965). Call it his Hearstian panache, call it something relating to the fact that he was allegedly once married to two women at once, call it damn good business sense - L.D. knew what Vancouver needed (of course he knew - he was mayor seven times!), and what our city needed, L.D. so wisely decided, was a giant building with breasts. And so it was built, and it was tall and grand and green and amazing.