“Straight as a plummet the steak of red below the long streak of white dropped for fully 100 feet. Then with a couple of preliminary flutters, the rushing air entered the distending ring of the parachute and it opened like a huge umbrella. A great sigh of relief went up from the 6,000 and some odd pairs of eyes who were watching the daring feat.”
The World, May 25, 1912.
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
In February 2014, Canada Post came out with two stamps in recognition of Black History Month. One shows Hogan’s Alley, the unofficial name for an area near Union and Main Streets and home to much of Vancouver’s early black community.
When Lani Russwurm jumped online in 2008 he was one of the first to write about history in his blog Past Tense. The blog morphed into a weekly writing gig with Bob Kronbauer’s Vancouver is Awesome and last year he published Vancouver was Awesome: a curious pictorial history, a hugely popular local history book which has sat on the best seller list for the past several weeks.
Marsha Fuller was cleaning out a client’s attic in Western Maryland a couple of weeks ago when she came across this postcard of a traffic accident featuring a Grandview street car in 1909. Marsha’s company, Your Mother’s Attic, helps the relatives of the newly dead sort out what is often a lifetime of possessions—she often comes across these types of historical treasures.
Tom Carter is a Vancouver-based artist known for exploring the city’s gritty urban environments.
Heritage Loft:
I visited Tom Carter in his heritage loft a couple of weeks ago. It was the same afternoon that we climbed up to the top of the Sun Tower, in what was in 1912, the tallest building in the British Empire.
And just because it’s the last day of the year, I thought I’d run a special post on my favourite Facebook local history pages of 2013. In no particular order and chosen because they offer real value for time expended–here is my top 10.
For a number of years Caroline Adderson wrote outraged letters to City Council about the large scale destruction of heritage houses in her neighbourhood.
A couple of weeks ago my friend Tom Carter and I climbed to the top of the Sun Tower, one of my favourite buildings in Vancouver.
It’s also one of our most familiar landmarks, and at one time the tallest building in the British Empire when mayor, L.D.
In 1913 Vancouver had a thriving theatre district that included eight movie theatres as well as stock theatres like the Pantages and the Empress——both completed in 1908.
Over the years we’ve managed to pretty well destroy all evidence of these theatres—the Capital, the Strand, two Orpheum theatres, and of course, most recently the Pantages Theatre at Main and Hastings that as Heritage Vancouver so succinctly put was “demolition by neglect.”
Theatre companies put on lavish productions at the Empress that called for sheep and horses on stage, as well as cars.