The Vancouver Heritage House tour is coming up Sunday June 2, and I haven’t been this excited since Casa Mia was featured in 2014. Don’t get me wrong, the VHF works hard all year to curate a great mix of architectural styles, neighbourhoods and house sizes, but unless you work at, or have a daughter at Crofton House School, you likely won’t get inside the Old Residence.
There’s been a lot about laneway houses in the media over the last couple of years. Loosely defined, it’s a legal way of plonking down a small house in your backyard, and depending on your point of view, either exploiting or helping to ease the current rental squeeze.
Laneway houses have to be under 1,000 square feet.
I have just acquired a piece of St. Andrews-Wesley Church. A rug that’s worn in all the places that you’d expect of something that has graced the entranceway of this downtown heritage building for eight decades and hosted thousands of multi-denominational feet.
The renovations were made possible by the sale of church land and a 20-storey condo tower in 2002.St.
Last Sunday, when Fatidjah Nestman looked out of her high-rise on West 13th she noticed that an old painted ad for White’s Grocery had popped up when construction workers removed the cement siding from a building on Granville Street. Her neighbor, Karen Fiorini, took this picture of the ghost sign and kindly sent it to me.
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
In 2016, the Vancouver Historical Society, of which I was a board member, was contacted by the Port of Vancouver and asked what we’d like to do with a three metre-high sculpture made from BC granite that had been sitting on their land at the foot of Dunlevy Street since a previous board commissioned it 50 years before.
Long before Jimi Hendrix played the Pacific Coliseum on September 7, 1968, he had a Vancouver connection.
Jimi Hendrix played the Pacific Coliseum on September 7, 1968. Four years after the Beatles and 11 years after Elvis Presley played Empire Stadium and changed music forever. The difference was that Jimi had a Vancouver connection—his grandmother Nora Hendrix, a one-time vaudeville dancer who moved to Vancouver in 1911 with her husband Ross Hendrix, a former Chicago cop and raised three children.
Lynn Headwaters:
The BC Mills House Museum at Lynn Headwaters plays a cameo role in Rachel Greenaway’s brilliant new mystery Creep where the action all takes place in upper Lynn Valley. While the little house has sat at the entrance to the park for a couple of decades now, I only recently discovered its back story.
Frits Jacobsen arrived in Vancouver in 1968 and drew many of Vancouver’s long since demolished heritage houses.
By Jason Vanderhill
I first heard about Frits Jacobsen, and saw his beautiful drawings in a post by Jason Vanderhill on his Illustrated Vancouver blog. Jason kindly allowed me to repost it here.