Every Place Has a Story

Cold Case Vancouver: The City’s Most Baffling Unsolved Murders

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Cold Case Vancouver: The City’s Most Baffling Unsolved Murders

Jennie Eldon Conroy:

A few days after Cold Case Vancouver was finished and sent off for editing; I received an email from Daien Ide at the North Vancouver Museum and Archives. Daien had come into the possession of a family album with the owner’s name, Miss J.

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Hidden Pasts, Digital Futures: Vancouver Circa1948

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Last Saturday I time-travelled to Hogan’s Alley and landed smack in 1948. Geographically, I wasn’t really that far away. I was standing inside a large box in Vancouver’s Woodward’s building using my body as a joy-stick to move through the streets of an area that’s been buried under the Georgia Viaduct since 1972.

The National Film Board teamed up with Vancouver artist Stan Douglas, and last year released an app that turned the second Hotel Vancouver and Hogan’s Alley into two digital worlds.

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Heritage Streeters with Michael Kluckner, Jess Quan, Lani Russwurm and Lisa Anne Smith

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Continuing on with a series I started earlier this year, I’ve asked a few friends to tell me their favourite Vancouver building and the one they miss the most.

Michael Kluckner     

Michael is the author of a dozen books. His most recent is Toshiko, a graphic novel set in BC in 1944.

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West End Guest House: one of the last ones standing

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Wandering down Haro Street in Vancouver’s West End, it’s a welcome surprise to come across the West End Guest House, a gorgeous Edwardian nestled in a sea of ugly, non-descript apartment buildings.

It’s one of the few houses that managed to survive the apartment blitz of the 1950s when the City of Vancouver removed the six-storey height limit, and instead of repairing and repurposing these character houses, the West End lost dozens of sturdy old places, built from first growth timber and stone and crafted by stonemasons.

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Vancouver’s top five heritage inns

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Occasionally it’s nice to celebrate heritage buildings that have survived the bulldozers and are being used in interesting ways. One of my favourites is the eccentric Accommodations by Pillow Suites.

Accommodations by Pillow Suites, Mount Pleasant

This eccentric former corner grocery store was built in 1910 near Vancouver City Hall and is a short-term rental suite. 

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Skwachays Lodge, Cultural Tourism and Vancouver’s “Gentrifying DTES”

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From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

I’m not a huge fan of facadism—the practice of keeping the front of the building and tearing everything else down behind it—but in the case of Skwachays Lodge, it made sense.

In 1913, W.T. Whiteway, the same architect who designed the Sun Tower, created a three-storey brick residential building at 31 West Pender Street that was known as the Palmer Rooms.

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From Newspapers to Exotic Escorts: Repurposing old buildings

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It’s hard to imagine today, but from the 1930s until the mid 1950s there were three daily newspapers—the Vancouver Sun, the Province and the Vancouver News-Herald operating in Vancouver—all independents fighting for market share in a population of less than 350,000.

The Vancouver News-Herald called itself “Western Canada’s Largest Morning Herald.” When it was founded in 1933 the Herald had a circulation of 10,000.

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Our Missing Hotel Heritage: What were we thinking?

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The much lamented—and never should have come down–second Hotel Vancouver should have the number one spot on any much missed heritage building list, but I’d argue that the Devonshire should be a close second. When it comes to hotels, we’ve pulled down a lot of them. Here’s my Top 7 list of downtown hotels missing from our landscape.

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