Eve Lazarus
For more stories about L.D. Taylor’s Vancouver see: At Home with History: the secrets of Greater Vancouver’s Heritage Homes
Mayor Gregor Robertson held a press conference Friday announcing the City’s receipt of a $30-million anonymous donation to reopen Taylor Manor. After an extensive renovation and upgrade, the house will provide housing for 56 people with mental health issues who now live on the streets of Vancouver.
I met with Will Woods for coffee last week. Will is a young Brit who moved to Vancouver six years ago with his wife and little boy, and like a lot of us transplants, fell deeply in love with the history of the city.
You may have seen him hunched over the card files at the Vancouver Public Library’s special collections, checking out the journals at Vancouver Archives, or wandering the alleyways of the Downtown Eastside.
Update: The Dominion Building sold to Toronto-based Allied Properties Real Estate Investment Trust in October 2021. It had been in the Cohen family since 1943 (they operated Army and Navy until last year). It won’t surprise you to know that the 1910 building is haunted. Tenants have heard ghostly footsteps on the spiral stairs and some claim to have seen a ghost hovering about there….
Mother Tongue Publishing is a small trade publisher run by the amazing Mona Fertig from her heritage house on Salt Spring Island. While other publishers turn their backs on books that lack mass market appeal, movie options or foreign rights potential, Mona actively seeks out poets, first-time writers and unrecognized artists.
For more stories about Chinatown see: At Home with History: the secrets of Greater Vancouver’s Heritage Homes
Last October the Feds designated Vancouver’s Chinatown a National Historical Site. In November, the National Geographic named the Dr. Sun yat-sen Gardens one of the top 10 city gardens in the world.
Want a conversation stopper at your next party? Just bring up the impending real estate meltdown in Vancouver –the one where house prices implode.
You’ll be mocked and told how interest rates are at historically low levels and you’ll hear all about those swarms of filthy rich Chinese flooding our borders. Then, they’ll tell you that thanks to the feds and the CMHC, pretty much anyone can over-extend themselves with 5% down and 35 years to pay it back.
The Empress Theatre on West Hastings went up in 1908 and came down in 1940, and in its heyday it had the biggest stage west of Chicago. In the 1930s it was owned by Hollywood stars Fay Holden and David Clyde who also owned a house on 51st Avenue in East Vancouver
This is one of my favourite finds at the Vancouver Archives. The house at 755 Bute Street is long gone, but was once owned by Dr. James Farish, a Vancouver ear, eye and nose specialist. On September 4, 1918, Victor Bishop, 23, was home on leave from the War, when the builders—Jimmy and Henry Hoffar, asked him to take their seaplane for a test spin over Burrard Inlet.
