Every Place Has a Story

The Life and Art of Frank Molnar

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Update: Frank passed away in December 2020

I dropped around to see Frank Molnar this week and was happy to see that he’s painting again. Frank is pushing 80 now and he’s not in great health, but you could never tell this from his work.

I met Frank several years ago when I profiled him as part of the Unheralded Artists of B.C.

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Making History with Facebook for 2015

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Since this is my last blog for the year, I thought I’d put together a list of my top 10 favourite FB pages. My criteria is pretty simple: the page has to have a strong Greater Vancouver flavour, there has to be a historical element, and the page has to post reasonably often and with original postings.

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Christmas at Roedde House

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War for the Holidays opens tonight and runs until December 19

I went to a Christmas party at the Gregsons last night. Actually, the Gregsons don’t really exist; they are characters in War for the Holidays, a play set in 1915, and which takes place in an 1893 Queen Anne house in Vancouver’s West End.

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Vancouver Vanishes with Caroline Adderson

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For a number of years Caroline Adderson wrote outraged letters to City Council about the large scale destruction of heritage houses in her Vancouver neighbourhood. When her letters went unanswered, Caroline sent pictures—she still didn’t get a response.

In January 2013, the award-winning author took her fight to social media and started posting pictures of beautiful character houses and short descriptions of their social history, including the address, when it was built, the first owner and occupation.

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Fred Hollingsworth’s Sky Bungalow

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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.

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Murder in James Bay

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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.

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The Grain Elevators, a Fire and a Ghost Story:

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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.

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