Eve Lazarus
You wouldn’t buy a house without having a building inspector check the foundation, so why wouldn’t you research your potential home’s history?
A heritage house at Fraser and East 10th went up for sale last week for $1.4 million. It wasn’t the price-tag though (low by Vancouver standards) that captured people’s attention, it was the house’s murder history.
The Imperial Roller Skating Rink opened in 1907 at English Bay and boasted the largest skating floor in North America.
Morton Park:
In 1907, more than 100 years before the famous laughing statues appeared at English Bay, the Imperial Roller Skating Rink opened in Morton Park at Denman and Davie Streets.
Mountain View Cemetery may have been Vancouver’s first official cemetery when it opened in 1886, but Stanley Park was first.
Bodies had been buried on Deadman’s Island in Coal Harbour for thousands of years, and those who didn’t want their relatives interred alongside the socially undesirable, the diseased or unchristened, moved their burials further into Stanley Park.
The 2400 Motel on Kingsway opened in 1946. It still has an old fashioned, retro feel and its huge red and blue neon sign.
I fell in love with the 2400 Motel on Kingsway 20 years ago when I was writing Frommer’s With Kids Vancouver. Loved the old fashioned, retro feel of the place and its huge red and blue neon sign.
The Orillia on Robson:
The Orillia on Robson and Seymour Streets, was just a memory by the time I moved to Vancouver in the mid-1980s, but from time to time I see a mention or a photo of this early mixed-use structure at Robson and Seymour. One particularly poignant photo was taken before its destruction in the 1980s and shows the Orillia boarded up, covered in music handbills, smeared with graffiti, and the words “Save Me!” scrawled across one of the plywood boardings.
Before the Vancouver Art Gallery moved into the old courthouse on West Georgia, its home was a gorgeous art deco building a few blocks away.
If you live in Vancouver, you know that the Vancouver Art Gallery is housed in the old law courts, an imposing neo-classical building designed by celebrity architect Francis Rattenbury in 1906.
Michael Kluckner’s latest BC bestseller Here & Gone: Artwork of Vancouver & Beyond is gorgeous. One half is filled with his paintings of disappearing Vancouver (Here) and the other of his travels in countries such as Australia, Cuba, Mexico and Japan (Gone).
Missing Heritage:
In the introduction to Here, he writes: “I see myself as a witness, certainly not an activist anymore or a serious historian.” I served on the board of the Vancouver Historical Society with Michael for several years and I see him as all these things.
The Dunsmuir Tunnel opened in July 1932. It started at Waterfront Station, passed under Thurlow, crossed to Burrard and came out by the Georgia Viaduct.
While you’re stuck for an hour on the Lions Gate Bridge or crawling through the George Massey Tunnel, it may be comforting to know that traffic problems, just like the price of real estate, have always been an issue in Vancouver.
