Sunday January 14 marks the 65th anniversary of the discovery of the Babes in the Woods. The murder of the two small children in Stanley Park is one of Vancouver’s most enduring murder mysteries and is part of Cold Case Vancouver: the city’s most baffling unsolved murders.   I caught up for dinner with my friend… Continue reading The Babes in the Woods Murder Investigation Turns 65

By Michael Kluckner Michael Kluckner is a writer and artist with a list of books that includes Vanishing Vancouver and Toshiko. We inherited a player piano when we bought our house in 2010. It’s a long story, but in the back of my mind I thought I might want to play it. As it turned out I… Continue reading Saving History: The Rec Room and the Player Piano

If you enjoy a good murder story, love heritage buildings, or just want to see what a morgue looks like, then you need to make your way down to the Vancouver Police Museum. For those of us who write about crime, the museum is ground zero when it comes to information, because apart from the static… Continue reading Saving History: Crime Maps, Surveillance Albums and Mugshot Books

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… Continue reading What was here before? The Kingsgate Mall

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… Continue reading Vancouver’s First Parking Meters

The Fireside Grill is situated on a ley line that runs down West Saanich Road, through Wilkinson Road, toward the Four Mile House—a reputedly haunted inn—to the Portage Inlet and Esquimalt Harbour. This story is an excerpt from Sensational Victoria. Tim Petropoulos, co-owner of the Fireside Grill since 2000, is a self-described skeptic when it… Continue reading The Ghosts of the Fireside Grill

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. I… Continue reading Aborted Plans: All Seasons Park

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. Graham, now a constable with the Saanich Police… Continue reading The Tragic Death of CPR Constable Thomas Sharpe

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. I crammed into a car with dozens of others who were… Continue reading City on Edge

In the 1970s, the Scotia Tower and the hideous Vancouver Centre—currently home to London Drugs—obliterated a block of beautiful of heritage buildings at Granville and Georgia Streets. The development took out the Strand Theatre (built in 1920), and the iconic Birks building, an 11-storey Edwardian where generations of Vancouverites met at the clock. I was… Continue reading Our missing heritage: the forgotten buildings of Bruce Price (1845-1903)

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. Homeowners… Continue reading More of Vancouver’s Buried Houses

The original Buntzen powerhouse came into service in 1904, and was replaced in 1951. A second gothic looking powerhouse was completed in 1914. #2 has been the host to a number of creepy films, including Stephen King’s It, Placid, Freddy Vs. Jason and Roxanne. Story from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History Indian… Continue reading The Buntzen Power Stations on Indian Arm

From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History Last year, Daien Ide, reference historian at the North Vancouver Museum and Archives was sitting at her desk when she got a tip. A 1994 model of a proposed Lions Gate twinned bridge had turned up at the Burnaby Hospice Thrift Store on Kingsway with a… Continue reading Saving History: Twinning the Lions Gate Bridge

Stephen Joseph Thompson was a photographer working mostly in Vancouver and New Westminster between 1886 and 1905. I’m obsessed with a photographer named Stewart Joseph Thompson. I first heard of him a few weeks back when I saw a photo he’d taken of Georgia and Burrard Streets in the 1890s. Last week, I found a… Continue reading Stephen Joseph Thompson, photographer (1864-1929)

A few weeks ago, Michael Kluckner ran a painting of a Kitsilano house on his FB page. I googled the address and was astonished to find that the house was still there on busy 4th Avenue, buried behind an ice-cream parlour. Michael tells me that only a handful of these buried houses remain, and he… Continue reading Vancouver’s Buried Houses

In 2017, Tom Carter bought scrapbooks from the Marco Polo that were found in a Chinatown dumpster. The club closed in 1983.  Story from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History By Tom Carter Tom Carter is an artist, a musician, a historian, and a private collector. He has kindly agreed to write a… Continue reading The Lost Scrapbooks from the Marco Polo

When I was going through John Vance’s personal files for Blood, Sweat, and Fear, a small article torn from the pages of the long defunct Vancouver Star caught my eye. Vance’s handwriting dated it October 23, 1931 and it mentioned the murder of Naokichi Watanabe. Vance had clearly kept the clipping because he had testified… Continue reading The East Cordova Street Murder Factory

Robert Ashton kindly sent me this photo of hundreds of Chinese men standing on a hill with rows and rows of white army bell tents in the background. He also found a 1920 copy of Pacific Marine Review with this story. “During the last five months, almost 50,000 Chinese coolies have passed through the port… Continue reading The Chinese Labour Corps: One of BC’s Best Kept Secrets

One of the best parts about messing around with history, especially criminal history, is digging up connections. Angelo Branca appears as a Canadian middleweight boxing champion in the 1930s, and as the scrappy East End (Strathcona) lawyer and defender of madams and bookies in At Home with History. In Sensational Vancouver, he is defence attorney to… Continue reading Italian Heritage Month – meet the East End’s Angelo Branca

If you live in North Vancouver you may have noticed the old Tudor-style house at Chesterfield and Osborne in the upper Lonsdale Area. It’s hard to see these days, because several years ago we allowed developers to built two large “carriage” houses, in what was once a magnificent garden filled with hollies, laburnums, cedars, black… Continue reading Chesterfield House