Heritage Vancouver Society has announced a tour of the Marine Building penthouse, to take place March 12, 5:30-8:00 p.m., with wine and hors d'oeuvres to be served, and tour led by Donald Luxon; all this yours for a $100 donation.
We thought of various penthouse songs--"Penthouse Serenade" (Nat Cole, Tony Bennett, Stan Getz); "Pent-Up House" (Sonny Rollins) and "Pent Up in a Penthouse" (Fats Waller). But what we really thought of was spending time in the Marine Building penthouse--no wine or hors d'oeuvres, but then, it didn't cost us a hundred bucks.
The Marine Building penthouse, described in the Vancouver Sun as exemplifying "ultra elegant, jazz age" design, was for many years the headquarters of Robert Friedland's Ivanhoe Capital Corporation, and those of us who toiled on Friedland projects spent many an hour there. Wine would have helped, but we made up for it in billing.
Friedland's base is now Singapore, and his net worth has been estimated by Forbes magazine at $1.15 billion--a leap from his status when he first arrived in Vancouver and was given a spare office in Ray Torresan's p.r. digs.
The Friedland fortune was built on mining, especially the extraordinary Diamond Fields project in Labrador, but he has had other interests, and the latest is movie making. Friedland's recently created Ivanhoe Pictures has, it's reported, two films in view: one is "Copper" (that title needs work) set on Mars in the 24th century. But our favorite, and one that seems particularly apt for Friedland, is called--wait for it--"Crazy Rich Asians."
Okay, enjoy your tour of the Marine Building penthouse. Been there. Seen that.
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