The Tilikum lives at the Maritime Museum in Victoria and it’s well worth the visit. At 38-feet long it looks like a flimsy thing to take out in Victoria Harbour on a windy day, let alone around the world, but in 1901 Captain John Voss and Norman Luxton, a reporter from Winnipeg, intended to do just that.
In 1912, when it was tough for a woman to make a decent living, Christina Haas arrived in Victoria and bought herself a brothel.
Thomas Hooper once had the largest architectural practice in Western Canada. He designed hundreds of buildings including the Victoria Public Library, the Rogers Chocolates and the Munro’s Books Building in Victoria.
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
In February 2014, Canada Post came out with two stamps in recognition of Black History Month. One shows Hogan’s Alley, the unofficial name for an area near Union and Main Streets and home to much of Vancouver’s early black community.
When Lani Russwurm jumped online in 2008 he was one of the first to write about history in his blog Past Tense. The blog morphed into a weekly writing gig with Bob Kronbauer’s Vancouver is Awesome and last year he published Vancouver was Awesome: a curious pictorial history, a hugely popular local history book which has sat on the best seller list for the past several weeks.
Marsha Fuller was cleaning out a client’s attic in Western Maryland a couple of weeks ago when she came across this postcard of a traffic accident featuring a Grandview street car in 1909. Marsha’s company, Your Mother’s Attic, helps the relatives of the newly dead sort out what is often a lifetime of possessions—she often comes across these types of historical treasures.
Tom Carter is a Vancouver-based artist known for exploring the city’s gritty urban environments.
Heritage Loft:
I visited Tom Carter in his heritage loft a couple of weeks ago. It was the same afternoon that we climbed up to the top of the Sun Tower, in what was in 1912, the tallest building in the British Empire.
And just because it’s the last day of the year, I thought I’d run a special post on my favourite Facebook local history pages of 2013. In no particular order and chosen because they offer real value for time expended–here is my top 10.
For a number of years Caroline Adderson wrote outraged letters to City Council about the large scale destruction of heritage houses in her neighbourhood.
A couple of weeks ago my friend Tom Carter and I climbed to the top of the Sun Tower, one of my favourite buildings in Vancouver.
It’s also one of our most familiar landmarks, and at one time the tallest building in the British Empire when mayor, L.D.