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ROCK ON: The Beedie Development Group reached billion-dollar status after adopting California’s “tilt-up” wall technique for erecting commercial buildings. As for raising the roof, company founder Keith Beedie’s son, and now president, Ryan did so figuratively at Stanley Park’s open-air Malkin Bowl. That’s where he invited 3,000 friends, colleagues and others to a recent rain-spared Rock’N The Park concert that headlined Huey Lewis & The News. Produced by Catherine and Paul Runnals’ city-based brandLIVE firm, it benefited One, the poverty and preventable-disease advocating organization, the Music Heals Charitable Foundation and generated $50,000 for the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society.

Dedicating the show to wife Cindy, who urged him to stage it, Beedie echoed Lewis’s lyrics: “Doing it all for my baby for everything she does for me.” What she has done includes delivering three children, including Paige, a guitarist-pianist-singer who is recording a demo album and plans a post-varsity career in music. If that entails performing at a future Beedie concert, she might heed Huey Lewis’s advice in his The Heart of Rock & Roll hit song: “When they play their music, ooh that modern music, they like it with a lot of style. But it’s still that same old back-beat rhythm that really drives ’em wild.” It sure did in Malkin Bowl.

STAY BABY STAY: Even when it’s your sixth time, organizing 22 events over 10 days in seven venues takes serious planning. So it was when Indian Summer Festival managing director Laura Byspalko and artistic director Sirish Rao made July 7 their opening-gala date. By then, though, Byspalko was getting kicks herself from her and Rao’s seemingly unplanned first child, a girl, due July 9. Such babies, like certain entertainers, often arrive late. That being so, Byspalko was at the Roundhouse Community Centre to greet gala-goers although, because of rain, not on its open-air rotunda as hoped. Instead, folk thronged where artists performed and eight restaurants Vikram Vij had recruited, including his own My Shanti, served fare. Meanwhile, the Surya Brass Band played loudly enough to spur the appearance of baby Rao who waited till Wednesday to weigh in at 7.9 pounds.

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SHINE! ON: Volume hair salon owner Dean Thullner founded a concert staged by 200 or so medical, showbiz and hair-and-fashion-industry volunteers that reportedly raised some $2 million to benefit a local hospital foundation. “Looking like a million, the show could easily go on the road,” this column reported. But Thullner and the beneficiary parted ways for uncorroborated reasons that the former said would have entailed cutting some gay-related themes from the annual concert’s tableaus. With that relationship ended, Thullner and volunteers have readied a seemingly look-alike show named Shine! Expected to sell out at the previous event’s Commodore ballroom locale Sept. 10, it will benefit the Canadian Mental Health Association and Lions Gate Hospital’s HOpe Centre.

SNAKE EYES: Along the lines of the QE Theatre’s culturally inclined rodents, an exaggeratedly British-accented actress once regaled a New York theatre manager with: “There are mace in my dressing-room wall.” Knowing that stagehands gambled on the other side, he replied: “Madam, those are not mace. They’re dace.”

BIG HAND: It was 1976 when former BCTV news producer Al Clapp overcame opposition, inertia and sparse budgets to stage Habitat Forum on Jericho-waterfront parkland. An informal adjunct to the United Nations Habitat Conference on Human Settlements, it broadened Vancouver’s then-nascent global reputation for environmentalism, sustainability, neighbourly conduct and suchlike. Clapp died in 2013, but his name resurfaced Thursday when UBC’s School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture awarded its inaugural Alan Clapp Prize in Urban Design to Julia Eyerund.

MINUS ONE: Architects’ fondness for the arithmetical + sign in their corporate titles may result in a firm acknowledging a principal partner’s departure by rendering itself as Mullion, Spandrel, Purlin ­– Gable, say.

FAR OUT: Today’s real-estate frenzy has kayoed the investment rule of buying edge-of-town property then waiting for the boundary to move beyond them. Not that Granville-at-57th was Sticksville in 1967 when Peter Wall and Peter Redekop paid $750,000 for the four-hectare Shannon estate. It included the heritage register A-designated mansion that sugar magnate B.T. Rogers built a century ago. Equivalent to 50 large lots, the property was flipped forward by a teacher’s cooperative that had paid $500,000 but couldn’t move in. Redekop did so temporarily. Wall followed, mainly for the Tuesday-night poker games he still holds in downtown’s Wall Centre. Further gambling entailed scrambling to finance rental-apartment development just before a 1970s city council imposed non-conforming zoning. New condos now occupy the site’s eastern half, with 156 more being readied closer to Adera Street. Meanwhile, Wall Financial Corp. recently pocketed $60 million for a Nelson-off-Burrard property — nowhere near the edge of town — that cost $16.8 million in 2013.

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