Eve Lazarus
The rocket ship at the southwest end of the Cambie Street Bridge is a replica of one built in 1938 for the annual PNE parade.
Story from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
Cambie Street Bridge:
Have you ever wondered why there is a snazzy-looking rocket ship at the southwest end of the Cambie Street Bridge?
On January 1, 2020 the Polar Bear Swim celebrated its 100th anniversary. It was by far the biggest year ever, with about 7,000 people hitting the water of English Bay. Being an Aussie, I really don’t get the appeal of plunging into frigid salty water, but I do love the history behind this crazy local tradition.
The Canada Post tunnel opened in March 1959 and carried mail from the West Georgia Street building to Waterfront Station. By the mid-1960s it was obsolete. By 2013 it was gone.
When the main Post Office was built on West Georgia Street in the 1950s, it was the largest welded steel structure in the world.
At 2:00 pm on Sunday March 24, 1974, a group of about a 100 people, many of them students and professors from the UBC School of Architecture, came together in a mock funeral for the Birks Building, an eleven storey Edwardian masterpiece at Georgia and Granville with a terracotta façade and a curved front corner.
In 2014, the Centennial fountain that sat outside the former Vancouver courthouse was removed after nearly half a century. It had been turned off the year before after a leak was found in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s storage area. While the new, sterile looking plaza hasn’t been wholeheartedly embraced, neither was the fountain when it was designed by Robert Savery, a landscape gardener employed by the provincial government in 1966.
November 5 is the 60th Anniversary of Vancouver’s last manual telephone exchange. Angus McIntyre writes about its history and the changeover.
By Angus McIntyre
If you grew up in the City of Vancouver in the 1950s you may well remember your telephone number looked like this: KErrisdale 3457-M. Or ALma 0609-L.
In the late 1980s when I worked at the Vancouver Stock Exchange, we’d sometimes hang out at Trader Vic’s, the Polynesian-style bar and restaurant that sat in the parking lot of the Westin Bayshore Hotel.
1961 – 1999:
It’s been gone since 1999—taken to Vancouver Island and left to rot.
I was reminded of Trader Vic’s again when I was reading Aaron Chapman’s Vancouver After Dark and looking at the photo of the building disappearing on a barge underneath the Lion’s Gate bridge.
An Interview with Jazmin Welch, book designer about working on Vancouver Exposed
I’m excited to tell you that Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History is now in bookstores. And, while the saying goes “don’t judge a book by its cover,” I have to disagree.
