Eve Lazarus
Hastings Sunrise:
At just shy of three acres, Burrard View is not a big park. It runs between North Slocan, North Penticton, Yale and Wall Street. The park slopes down to the water and is shaped like half a house.
The building on the west side of the park has been the Cottage Hospice since 1999.
We’ve been taking advantage of the lack of traffic on the roads to take Pickles, our Chiweenie on some new trails. This week we ended up in North Burnaby, parked at the bottom of Boundary and walked along the Trans Canada Trail to Willingdon.
While I’m familiar with the squatters at Maplewood Flats and Cates Park on the North Van side of Burrard Inlet, I’d never heard of Crabtown, a collection of squatters’ homes built on raised pilings between the railway tracks and the water.
A few months back, I spent a frustrating hour searching for a plaque at the corner of West Hastings and Hamilton Streets. It was unveiled in 1953, as evidenced in a Vancouver Sun article and photo.
It wasn’t there.
Graeme Menzies, co-author of 111 Places in Vancouver that you Must Not Miss, tells me he did the same thing while researching his book and it’s entry #41: “Hamilton’s Missing Plaque.” Turns out it was taken down about five years ago when the CIBC building was demolished and it was never replaced.
When I think of street photographers, the first names that usually spring to mind are Fred Herzog, Foncie Pullice, Greg Girard, Michael de Courcy, Curt Lang and Bruce Stewart. But there were so many other great photographers shooting Vancouver in the 1950s to 1980s—names like Paul Wong, Tony Westman, Angus McIntyre and Svend-Erik Eriksen (Where were the women?)
These days everybody has a cell phone, and while you might think that makes street photographers irrelevant, there’s a group called Vancouver Street Photography Collective that are doing some really interesting things.
Aaron Chapman’s latest book Vancouver After Dark: The Wild History of a City’s Nightlife is a delightful romp through the ghosts of nightclubs past. Aaron’s behind-the-scenes stories are told in such a way, it’s like sitting down and having a beer with him. There are too many clubs to list here—everything from Chinatown’s Marco Polo to Oil Can Harry’s, The Smilin’ Buddha, to the Cave.
Jack Cash (1918-2005) started as a Vancouver Sun photographer in the 1930s. He spent most of his life in North Vancouver and went on to have an amazing career.
I first heard about Jack Cash when I was researching his mother Gwen Cash, who when she went to work for Walter Nichol at the Vancouver Daily Province in 1917, became one of the first female news reporter in the country.
It wasn’t easy getting a seat at the West Vancouver Library last Wednesday night. The West Van Historical Society presented Local Voices: Shooting the North Shore with Ralph Bower, retired Vancouver Sun photographer and Mike Wakefield, who also recently retired from a 35-year photography career with the North Shore News.
The place was packed.
For the last year or so I’ve been receiving emails from a realtor named Trent Rodney at West Coast Modern. They come with an invitation to drop by one of the dwindling stock of West Coast Modern houses on the North Shore, sip a cocktail, eat catered food and listen to jazz.
