Eve Lazarus
June is Italian heritage month, and this year Italian Days was held on Sunday June 9, 2024
I hate crowds, so I can’t give you a first-hand account of Italian Days this year. Having watched a couple of YouTube videos though, I can tell you that it was a gorgeous day that drew thousands of people to eat, drink and be entertained on Commercial Drive in what the Italians (or possibly City Hall) are billing as the largest cultural street festival in Vancouver.
1967:
It’s been 57 years since the first Stanley Park Easter Be-In. A local take on the be-in that had taken place in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park two months before and set the tone for the Summer of Love.
Vancouver’s event was much smaller, but about a thousand hippies, and three times as many onlookers, turned up at Ceperley Park near Second Beach in March 1967, wearing colourful beaded vests with jeans and tattered evening gowns, even monk and clown costumes.
The friendship between Bruce Stewart and Fred Herzog began because of a mutual love of photography and went onto span half-a-century.
Bruce Stewart has been documenting Vancouver ever since his father gave him a reflex camera for his eleventh birthday. A few years later, he started an after-school job at the Department of Biomedical Communications at UBC working with legendary photographer Fred Herzog.
Howard Fry spent three decades as a commercial photographer in Vancouver. In 1998 he retired to Salt Spring and became embroiled in a battle to save part of the island from development.
Salt Spring Island:
In 1999, Salt Spring Island was under threat. A German millionaire sold his holdings—roughly a tenth of the island—to Texada Land Corp.
I had the pleasure of visiting Griffin Art Projects with Tom Carter last Saturday. It’s a gallery of sorts hidden in an industrial building on Welch Street in North Vancouver. The exhibit features stories, photos, videos and paintings about Chinatowns in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, many from private collections.
Some of Tom’s personal collection is featured and includes everything from scrapbooks from the Marco Polo, to postcards from Ming’s and Bamboo Terrace in the late ‘50s to souvenir photos from Mandarin Gardens and Forbidden City.
At 2:00 pm on Sunday March 24, 1974, a group of about a 100 people, many of them students and professors from the UBC School of Architecture, came together in a mock funeral for the Birks Building, an eleven storey Edwardian masterpiece at Georgia and Granville with a terracotta façade and a curved front corner.
November 5 is the 60th Anniversary of Vancouver’s last manual telephone exchange. Angus McIntyre writes about its history and the changeover.
By Angus McIntyre
If you grew up in the City of Vancouver in the 1950s you may well remember your telephone number looked like this: KErrisdale 3457-M. Or ALma 0609-L.
An Interview with Jazmin Welch, book designer about working on Vancouver Exposed
I’m excited to tell you that Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History is now in bookstores. And, while the saying goes “don’t judge a book by its cover,” I have to disagree.
