Eve Lazarus
The following story is an excerpt from Sensational Victoria: “Murders in the Capital.”
A few years after the Bests’ bought their James Bay home, a young woman knocked on the door and asked if she could come and take a look inside. She told them that her grandparents had lived in the cottage in the 1950s and she’d grown up believing that they were killed in a car crash.
Here are five of my favourite eccentric BC houses that still stand (or did at the time of research).
1. The Hobbit House(s)
There are two in Vancouver and one in West Van designed by Ross Lort in the early 40s, and against all odds, all survive. Hobbit house at King Edward and Cambie is now part of a town house development.
It’s been incredibly exciting seeing Sensational Vancouver claim the top spot on the Best of BC list for the past four weeks, and it’s made me pay close attention to the book section in the Vancouver Sun.
What I’ve noticed is that M. Wylie Blanchet’s The Curve of Time, has ranked in the top 10 on the National Bestsellers list for the past seven weeks.
The Tilikum lives at the Maritime Museum in Victoria and it’s well worth the visit. At 38-feet long it looks like a flimsy thing to take out in Victoria Harbour on a windy day, let alone around the world, but in 1901 Captain John Voss and Norman Luxton, a reporter from Winnipeg, intended to do just that.
In 1912, when it was tough for a woman to make a decent living, Christina Haas arrived in Victoria and bought herself a brothel.
Thomas Hooper once had the largest architectural practice in Western Canada. He designed hundreds of buildings including the Victoria Public Library, the Rogers Chocolates and the Munro’s Books Building in Victoria.
Alice Munro, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in Ontario, but she lived in both North and West Vancouver, and wrote three of her most important books while living on Rockland Avenue in Victoria. She and Jim founded Munro’s Books in 1963. The following is an excerpt from Sensational Victoria.
To mark the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, this week’s blog is a story about Mabel Fortune Driscoll who survived the disaster, moved to Victoria and lived there until her death in 1968. The full story appears in Sensational Victoria.
Mabel Helen Fortune was 23 when she set off for a tour of Europe with her father Mark, mother Mary, younger brother, and two older sisters.
In honour of International Women’s Day on Friday March 8, it seems fitting to feature Victoria print maker Pat Martin Bates. An excerpt from Sensational Victoria:
At 85, Pat Martin Bates is still strikingly beautiful. The day I visit her she has a scarf wrapped around her dark hair and she’s wearing a jacket full of blues, reds, and purples with chunky silver jewelry.
