By Lani Russwurm
Several years ago, I came across an art project by the Goodweather Collective that re-imagined a Vancouver in which the City had left select old growth trees in those roundabouts that dot the city’s residential neighbourhoods. Their photoshop work was convincing and it was jarring seeing our familiar urban landscape dotted with unfamiliar giant trees.
In 2012, I wrote a book called Sensational Victoria and one of my favourite chapters was Heritage Gardens. I visited and then wrote about large rich-people’s gardens like Hatley Park, and smaller ones like the Abkhazi Garden on Fairfield road built on the back of a love story.
I was driving along Hastings the other day when I saw a huge statue in the yard of Ital Decor in Burnaby. It looked suspiciously like one of the WW1 nurses that guarded the 10th floor of the Georgia Medical-Dental Building before it was imploded in 1989.
Mario Tinucci of Ital Décor, says the one in his yard is a fibreglass version that he cast from an original nurse, and made in 1990.
I had the pleasure of chatting with Bob Cain this week and discovering his beautiful photographs.
Bob grew up in Marpole, at a time when a swing bridge joined Marpole to Sea Island (it was dismantled in 1957 after the Oak Street Bridge opened).
“Marpole was a small town like Kerrisdale and Kitsilano,” he says.
On February 26, 1947 Vancouver Police officers Charles Boyes and Oliver Ledingham were murdered in a shootout at False Creek Flats. The officers are remembered in an exhibit at the Vancouver Police Museum that opens March 1, and their stories are part of Blood, Sweat, and Fear.
Sixty years ago today, CKNW creative director, Tony Antonias wrote the famous Woodward’s $1.49 day jingle.
Antonias, a New Westminster resident and former Aussie—who like most of us ex pats have kept our accents—started as a copywriter at the station in 1955. He stayed there for the next 40 years—to the day.
As Tony tells it, the jingle came about almost by accident after he hit the key on a new typewriter and it made a loud ding.
In July 2016, several large cardboard boxes filled with photographs, clippings, forensic samples, and case notes pre-dating 1950, and thought to be thrown out decades ago, were discovered in a garage on Gabriola Island. They are now with the Vancouver Police Museum and Archives, and form the basis of Blood, Sweat, and Fear: the story of Inspector Vance, Vancouver’s first forensic investigator.
On February 7, 1968 a Canadian Pacific Airlines flight from Honolulu was on final descent into Vancouver when it hit a small fog patch just above the runway. The Boeing 707 touched down, swerved out of control and smashed through light planes, trucks and a workshop before crashing into a concrete building. Martinus Verhoef, a 33-year-old flight attendant from West Vancouver was crushed to death in the buckled fuselage near the front of the plane, and Elmer Nedcalf, a 44-year-old airport employee from Richmond died in the wreckage from the workshop.