Eve Lazarus
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
To the Deep Cove residents who were so enraged by this chunk of steel. Thank you. We love our tree.
I was walking my dog in Princess Park last week and came across this fabulous tree sculpture hidden in the forest.
*See update Hobbit House sold
I toured the Hobbit House this week. The South Cambie house is one of two story book cottages in Vancouver—a third is in West Van. The house has had a ton of media attention since it went up for sale, mostly speculation about its imminent demise.
There are some beautiful homes on the Vancouver Heritage House Tour this year—a couple of old Shaughnessy manors, a quirky turreted terra cotta and stone house in Mount Pleasant, and a colorful Edwardian on Kitchener Street, but the one I am most interested in is a tenement building in the DTES.
Heritage Vancouver released its annual top 10 endangered site list today and it spells more bad news for the last of the West End mansions.
The heritage conservation organization has flagged three properties: the Legg Residence at 1245 Harwood Street, Gabriola Mansion at 1531 Davie Street, and three houses that sit side by side at 1301, 1309 and 1315 Davie Street.
After visiting Chef Chuck’s fabulous spotted house last week, I’ve been casting around for other crazy paint jobs, and suddenly my purple house seems pretty tame. Bizarre paint jobs range from skittles to Dalmations. Here are my favourites.
Last Mother’s Day weekend the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas put up signs that said “God hates homosexuals.” Aaron Jackson didn’t agree.
Spite Houses:
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Spite Houses and ran a picture of a lime green house painted with large purple dots. The back story was the owner had run afoul of the local heritage commission, was denied a building permit for a porch, and chose his colour scheme out of spite.
To mark the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, this week’s blog is a story about Mabel Fortune Driscoll who survived the disaster, moved to Victoria and lived there until her death in 1968. The full story appears in Sensational Victoria.
Mabel Helen Fortune was 23 when she set off for a tour of Europe with her father Mark, mother Mary, younger brother, and two older sisters.
A Spite house is a building “constructed or modified to irritate neighbours or other parties with land stakes. Spite houses often serve as obstructions, blocking out light or access to neighbouring buildings, or as flamboyant symbols of defiance. Because long-term occupation is at best a secondary consideration, spite houses frequently sport strange and impractical structures” Wikipedia.
