Eve Lazarus
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
If you read my blog regularly, you know that I’m a huge fan of West Coast Modern, and especially of Fred Hollingsworth, an amazing North Vancouver architect who died this year at age 98 after changing the face of architecture.
The following story is an excerpt from Sensational Victoria: “Murders in the Capital.”
A few years after the Bests’ bought their James Bay home, a young woman knocked on the door and asked if she could come and take a look inside. She told them that her grandparents had lived in the cottage in the 1950s and she’d grown up believing that they were killed in a car crash.
A little before 10:00 am on October 3, 1975, David Samson, an inspector with the Canadian Grain Commission, was walking down the tracks to the Burrard Terminals when he saw a few of the workers he knew moving quickly away from the grain elevators.
The full story is in Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History.
This is an excerpt from Sensational Vancouver:
A reporter once asked Phyllis Munday if she’d ever been really frightened during all her years of climbing mountains. “Thunderstorms,” she told him. “I hated thunderstorms.”
What she didn’t mention was the time she saved husband Don Munday’s life from a grizzly bear by charging at it with an ice axe; when she regularly carted 60 pounds of backpack over flood swollen creeks; the times she had to avoid quicksand and avalanches and plunges into hidden crevasses.
Cold Case Vancouver: The City’s Most Baffling Unsolved Murders
Jennie Eldon Conroy:
A few days after Cold Case Vancouver was finished and sent off for editing; I received an email from Daien Ide at the North Vancouver Museum and Archives. Daien had come into the possession of a family album with the owner’s name, Miss J.
Last Saturday I time-travelled to Hogan’s Alley and landed smack in 1948. Geographically, I wasn’t really that far away. I was standing inside a large box in Vancouver’s Woodward’s building using my body as a joy-stick to move through the streets of an area that’s been buried under the Georgia Viaduct since 1972.
The National Film Board teamed up with Vancouver artist Stan Douglas, and last year released an app that turned the second Hotel Vancouver and Hogan’s Alley into two digital worlds.
Continuing on with a series I started earlier this year, I’ve asked a few friends to tell me their favourite Vancouver building and the one they miss the most.
Michael is the author of a dozen books. His most recent is Toshiko, a graphic novel set in BC in 1944.
Wandering down Haro Street in Vancouver’s West End, it’s a welcome surprise to come across the West End Guest House, a gorgeous Edwardian nestled in a sea of ugly, non-descript apartment buildings.
It’s one of the few houses that managed to survive the apartment blitz of the 1950s when the City of Vancouver removed the six-storey height limit, and instead of repairing and repurposing these character houses, the West End lost dozens of sturdy old places, built from first growth timber and stone and crafted by stonemasons.
