Eve Lazarus
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 displays there is a vast archive and amazing staff to help you navigate through it.
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 Edward School before the fire) has turned the mall into a landmark, but I can’t imagine calling it a destination by any stretch of the imagination.
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 in 1976, and the rates ranged between 10 and 40 cents an hour.
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 comes to ghosts, but even he can’t discount all the sightings and odd things that have happened over the years and the first-hand accounts from his staff.
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.
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.
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.
Stanley Cup riot June 14, 1994. Stuart Davis/Vancouver Sun
I crammed into a car with dozens of others who were openly drinking and yelling.
In the 1970s, the Scotia Tower and the hideous Vancouver Centre—currently home to London Drugs—obliterated a block of beautiful 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.
