Eve Lazarus
This is an excerpt from Sensational Vancouver.
Eleanor Lum
Wayne Avery knew nothing about the history of his house until one day he saw an elderly Chinese woman peering through his front room window.
He invited her inside and discovered that she was Eleanor (Yip) Lum, and that she had been born in one of the bedrooms of his Strathcona house in 1928 by Nellie Yip Quong who later adopted her.
The second Doors Open Vancouver is coming up this Saturday October 3, and will give you a behind-the-scenes look at 18 city-owned buildings. Since you won’t have time to see all of them – here’s my top six:
1. Vancouver Fire and Rescue Training Centre:
Go see the city’s only burn building (meaning one that’s lit on fire), find out about the heavy urban search and rescue team, and of course, check out the hot firefighters.
Dan Rickard photography
A couple of weeks ago, Judy Graves, Tom Carter and I took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Orpheum Theatre.
The “new” Orpheum was designed in 1927 by Marcus Priteca, a Seattle-based architect who fashioned the theatre in a Spanish renaissance style and gave it an opulent air with some sleight of hand tricks.
Mayor Gerry McGeer lived at 4812 Belmont Avenue in Point Grey between 1927 and his death there in 1947. At around 10:00 pm on June 17, 2022 the house burned to the ground. It was unoccupied and apparently under renovation after not getting a demolition permit.
Sixth most expensive listing:
As of August 2014, the property at 4812 Belmont is apparently the 6th most expensive listing in Vancouver.
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
Before Vancouver settled on its current City Hall on West 12th, it had been housed in a number of really interesting buildings.
The first council started out in a tent shortly after the Great Fire wiped out most of the city in 1886.
Last week I wrote about Darren Bernaerdt who teaches Photoshop at Langara College. Each year Darren sends his students to the Vancouver Archives to look at old photographs, choose one that resonates with them, research it and then go out and photograph the same scene from the same angle and merge them together.
Four years ago Darren Bernaerdt decided to give photography students at Langara College a different kind of assignment. He sent them to Vancouver Archives to research 100-year-old photographs of the city, and then he put them on the streets to capture those same images, matching the exact perspective and angle of view.
While it could have been a really interesting then and now assignment, Bernaerdt was teaching Photoshop so he had the students put the old and new together and the finished results went into the Merging Time Exhibit at Vancouver Archives’ home at Vanier Park.
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
Bryan Adams has collected a ton of hardware over the years, but the one I find the most interesting is the City of Vancouver Heritage Award he was given in 1998 for transforming a derelict Gastown warehouse into a world class recording studio.
