Eve Lazarus
City archivist Heather Gordon says the recent donation of a whopping two million negatives from the Sun and Province (Postmedia) photo library is the largest photographic collection that Vancouver Archives has ever received. It’s also one of the most important.
“The Sun and Province photographers were everywhere, documenting everything, so their work is an extraordinarily valuable source of information about Vancouver particularly between 1970 and 1995,” she says.
For my last post of 2017, I have compiled a list of my favourite history blogs. To make the list, the blog had to written by an individual and have a strong Metro Vancouver flavor.
In alphabetical order: 1. A Most Agreeable Place
Lana Okerlund, a Vancouver book editor and writer, has put together this quirky little blog about bookstores past and present.
The thing about the Kingsgate Mall at Broadway and Kingsway is you either love it or you hate it. It’s weird or wonderful, strange or quaint, creepy or quirky, but it rarely goes unnoticed.
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
The cupola (a replica of the one that used to top King Edward School before the fire) has turned the mall into a landmark, but I can’t imagine calling it a destination by any stretch of the imagination.
Vancouver received its first parking meters on November 12, 1946. The fee was five cents an hour.
For the first 30 years, police had responsibility for checking the meters, and I bet that assignment was the equivalent of standing in the corner with a dunce cap. Parking meter enforcement was transferred to a civilian force in 1976, and the rates ranged between 10 and 40 cents an hour.
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
When I think of all the demolition and destruction that we’ve put Vancouver through over the last century, it amazes me that we still have Stanley Park. It’s not from lack of trying though, developers have been trying to chip away at it for years.
A couple of months ago Murray Maisey sent me a clipping from the World regarding the death of Thomas Sharpe. Because Constable Sharpe worked for the CPR, I forwarded the clipping to Graham Walker, who did such an amazing job uncovering the murder of Special Constable Charles Painter last year.
On June 14, 1994, I started my shift in Surrey. My assignment for the Vancouver Sun was to wait until the end of the Stanley Cup final between the New York Rangers and the Canucks, catch the SkyTrain downtown, and report on what happened.
Stanley Cup riot June 14, 1994. Stuart Davis/Vancouver Sun
I crammed into a car with dozens of others who were openly drinking and yelling.
Last month, Michael Kluckner wrote a guest blog about the buried houses of Vancouver. It was hugely popular and readers wrote in to let me know about more of these houses. Today’s blog is a compilation of those comments, photos and emails.
Now a story in Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History.
