Omega Point

“Why buy one when you can buy two for twice the price?”

Liv­ing in Van­cou­ver, one tends to notice that all the build­ings look pretty much the same, be they Van­cou­ver Spe­cials or not-yet-leaky condo tow­ers in Yale­town. How­ever, the 770 Build­ing takes the phe­nom­e­non to a whole other level:

In 1940 the Lubav­itch­ers pur­chased a small collegiate-gothic-style Brook­lyn build­ing (once a med­ical clinic) at 770 East­ern Park­way in Crown Heights, Brook­lyn, for the sixth Rebbe, Yoseph Yitzchak Schneer­son, who had recently immi­grated to the United States to escape Nazi persecution.

[…]

Because of the Rebbe’s charisma, energy and the devo­tion of his fol­low­ers, the build­ing in Brook­lyn has become a kind of holy ground for Lubav­itch­ers. It has been repli­cated world­wide, with vary­ing degrees of pre­ci­sion, mostly as Chabad centers

Really!

Per­son­ally, I like how the fur­ther you scroll—ahem, right—on the page, the cra­zier and more out-of-place the 770 copies get. Curi­ousity beck­oned, and though that side made no men­tion of it, I looked to see if a 770 Build­ing had shown up in Van­cou­ver yet.

As it turns out, while there’s a Lubav­itch Cen­tre in Van­cou­ver, good pho­tos are dif­fi­cult to find. Also, it’s at Oak and 41st and I really don’t want to go all the way down there right now.

Amus­ingly, the best photo I could find has a com­menter who astutely points out that it’s one of the many “steel crown” build­ings around Van­cou­ver, which comes back to my orig­i­nal point: Van­cou­ver has maybe five or six dif­fer­ent build­ing styles that are copied and pasted around as needed. It’s like liv­ing in SimCity.