Eve Lazarus
Occasionally it’s nice to celebrate heritage buildings that have survived the bulldozers and are being used in interesting ways. One of my favourites is the eccentric Accommodations by Pillow Suites.
Accommodations by Pillow Suites, Mount Pleasant
This eccentric former corner grocery store was built in 1910 near Vancouver City Hall and is a short-term rental suite.
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
I’m not a huge fan of facadism—the practice of keeping the front of the building and tearing everything else down behind it—but in the case of Skwachays Lodge, it made sense.
In 1913, W.T. Whiteway, the same architect who designed the Sun Tower, created a three-storey brick residential building at 31 West Pender Street that was known as the Palmer Rooms.
It’s hard to imagine today, but from the 1930s until the mid 1950s there were three daily newspapers—the Vancouver Sun, the Province and the Vancouver News-Herald operating in Vancouver—all independents fighting for market share in a population of less than 350,000.
The Vancouver News-Herald called itself “Western Canada’s Largest Morning Herald.” When it was founded in 1933 the Herald had a circulation of 10,000.
The much lamented—and never should have come down–second Hotel Vancouver should have the number one spot on any much missed heritage building list, but I’d argue that the Devonshire should be a close second. When it comes to hotels, we’ve pulled down a lot of them. Here’s my Top 7 list of downtown hotels missing from our landscape.
This story appears in Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the city’s hidden history
I wrote about the Garden family a couple of weeks back. William and Mary Garden arrived in Vancouver in 1889, opened up the Garden and Sons Wholesale Tea and Coffee on East Hastings, and lived for a time at a house at Thurlow and Alberni.
Look for the full story of Jennie Eldon Conroy in Cold Case Vancouver: the city’s most baffling unsolved murders
A couple of weeks ago, Daien Ide, reference historian at the North Vancouver Museum and Archives came into the possession of a photo album. At first she thought it was just a nice family photo album once owned by a Miss J.
Green Island is one of 21 lighthouses in B.C. recently granted heritage status. This story is from a chapter on lighthouses that never made it way into Sensational Victoria.
“The winter wind whistles down the Portland Canal from Alaska and seas lash away at the tower and the dwellings, shellacking them with ice so thick that the whole station resembles ice sculptures at a bizarre winter carnival, and the keepers need a hammer to open a door.
If you are like me and have a couple of Michael Kluckner’s books at home, you might be surprised to learn that his latest effort is a graphic novel.
In his latest book, Toshiko, Michael has replaced his paint brush with a pencil, and he’s taken a leap into fiction.
Turns out, Michael kicked off his career as a cartoonist back in the ‘70s, and in many ways, this is a return to his roots.
