Eve Lazarus
The Oak Theatre sat at Kingsway near Royal Oak Avenue in Burnaby from 1937 to 1963.
Opening night with CKWX’s Billie Browne, was August 4, 1937. He introduced feature film White Bondage, comedy shorts Blonde Bomber and Hotel a la Swing, and a cartoon called Porky’s Building.
In March 1953, Steve Chizen was putting the final touches on the Cedar V Theatre on Lynn Valley Road. It would be North Vancouver’s third theatre—the Odeon sat at the corner of Lonsdale and 14th Avenue, and the Lonsdale Theatre that went up in 1911, would close forever in 1954.
Steve, who previously managed the Cameo Theatre in Whalley, chose the name Cedar V in deference to the several large cedar trees that were sacrificed for the building site.
Just before noon on March 6, 1945, the SS Greenhill Park blew up, killing six longshoremen and two seamen. Twenty-six others, including seven firefighters were injured in the explosion.
On March 6, 1945, nearly 100 men were either loading or getting the SS Greenhill Park ready for its voyage to Australia from CPR’s Pier B-C (now Canada Place).
This art deco beauty sat near the corner of Lonsdale Avenue and 14th Street in North Vancouver from 1938 to 1986. The 734-seat Nova Theatre opened in January 1938 and was owned by W.P. Dewees and managed by Agnes (Queenie) Albanuff. Mrs. Albanuff was clearly good at her job, because when Dewees sold the theatre to the Odeon chain in 1941, she went with it.
The Glencoe Lodge opened at the corner of West Georgia and Burrard Streets in 1906. Sugar baron, Benjamin Tingley Rogers had bought two houses, raised them, added two storeys and turned the building into a boutique hotel, operated by the fabulous Miss Jean Mollison.
Story from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
The Mollison Sisters:
Jean’s older sister Annie came to Canada from Scotland in 1888, armed with an introduction to the head of the CPR.
The Clarence Hotel/Malones Tap House on West Pender and Seymour Streets is one of the oldest hotels in Vancouver.
We held the book launch for Cold Case BC at Malone’s Taphouse on West Pender and Seymour early last November. It was perfect. Built in the early to mid-1890s, it’s one of the, if not the oldest pubs in the city.
It took more than a week to fix a large pothole in the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge last month. But in 1944, the Royal Canadian Engineers threw up a Bailey Bridge in just 10 hours.
The bridge was designed by Donald Coleman Bailey, a civil engineer from Southbourne, England. When the Germans blew up bridges in Europe, the good guys could quickly replace them with Bailey’s invention.
Edgemont Village, North Vancouver. Then and Now: 1949-2023
I came across this photo from the North Vancouver Museum and Archives a while back. It shows a fairly ordinary looking building on Edgemont Boulevard taken in 1949. I headed off to Edgemont Village last week to see what we’d replaced it. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the building is still there, surrounded by other buildings.
