Eve Lazarus
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
Before Vancouver settled on its current City Hall on West 12th, it had been housed in a number of really interesting buildings.
The first council started out in a tent shortly after the Great Fire wiped out most of the city in 1886.
The gorgeous woman pictured on the cover of Sensational Vancouver and featured in my chapter on Legendary Women is Tosca Trasolini. Tosca was a member of the Flying Seven, Canada’s first all-female aviators’ club. The club formed in 1935—the year she turned 24—after Margaret Fane—one of the Flying Seven flew to California to meet with Amelia Earhart, president of the Ninety-Nines—an American organization for women pilots.
When North Vancouver’s Dene Rossouw takes a photograph he’s not looking to capture the physical reality of the scene he wants to evoke a mood, an emotional experience or just draw our attention to a detail that we might not otherwise have noticed.
His photo of the Dominion Building on West Hastings is shot from an unusual angle–looking up Cambie Street that manages to capture the character and the energy of the building.
The Vancouver Heritage Foundation is piloting a project with the Musqueam Indian Band to offer a tour of Vancouver from a slightly different perspective then the usual whip around Stanley Park, Spanish Banks and the Museum of Anthropology. Actually, we did all those things on a four hour bus ride, but we also got some insights into traditional Musqueam territory and why several well-known sites hold significance for them.
Last week I wrote about Darren Bernaerdt who teaches Photoshop at Langara College. Each year Darren sends his students to the Vancouver Archives to look at old photographs, choose one that resonates with them, research it and then go out and photograph the same scene from the same angle and merge them together.
Four years ago Darren Bernaerdt decided to give photography students at Langara College a different kind of assignment. He sent them to Vancouver Archives to research 100-year-old photographs of the city, and then he put them on the streets to capture those same images, matching the exact perspective and angle of view.
While it could have been a really interesting then and now assignment, Bernaerdt was teaching Photoshop so he had the students put the old and new together and the finished results went into the Merging Time Exhibit at Vancouver Archives’ home at Vanier Park.
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
Bryan Adams has collected a ton of hardware over the years, but the one I find the most interesting is the City of Vancouver Heritage Award he was given in 1998 for transforming a derelict Gastown warehouse into a world class recording studio.
A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to get in on a tour exploring several DTES buildings with Judy Graves, Tom Carter and John Atkin. Judy spent decades advocating for the homeless, and this is her stamping ground. Tom lives and paints from his downtown loft, and John lives in Strathcona, so I’m the only one from the ‘burbs (and with a driver’s licence as it turns out.)
We started at the Carnegie Community Centre, which is an amazing place that I’ve driven past thousands of times, but never ventured inside.
