Every Place Has a Story

The Nanaimo to Vancouver Bathtub Race

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The Nanaimo to Vancouver bathtub race ran from 1967 to 1996 

When I moved to Vancouver in the mid 1980s, I lived in an apartment at Third and Cypress in Kitsilano. Over the next 12 years, I moved two more times up Third Avenue, and one of my summer highlights was heading down to the beach every July for the Nanaimo to Vancouver bathtub races.

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The Stanley Park Be-Ins

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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.

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The Evolution of Devonian Harbour Park

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The name of the 11-acre green space at the entrance to Stanley Park known as Devonian Harbour Park has nothing to do with its indigenous history, the land’s connection to the Kanakas, the buildings that once dotted its landscape or Vancouver. The park was named after the Calgary-based Devonian Group of Charitable Foundations which forked over $600,000 to develop the site to its present look in 1983.

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The Day the Bridge Fell Down

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The Ironworkers Memorial Bridge collapsed June 17, 1958 killing 18 men, and one diver the following day. It is the worst industrial accident in Vancouver’s history. Thanks to Bruce Stewart for sending photos that his father Angus shot of the tragedy.

Bill Moore:

Bill Moore died on June 17, 1993—exactly 35 years after he survived the collapse of the Ironworker’s Memorial Bridge.

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Walks with Fred Herzog

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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.

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The Photography of Svend-Erik Eriksen

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I’m a big fan of Svend-Erik Eriksen’s photography of Vancouver in the ’70s. Last week I called him up and asked how he got started.

Erik, is an animator by trade, but his interest in photography goes back to the 1950s when he was a kid in Namu, BC. His parents had immigrated from Denmark and sponsored a Hungarian refugee family who lived with them for a year.

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Meet Vancouver’s Newest Street Photographers

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When I think of street photographers, the first names that usually spring to mind are Fred Herzog, Foncie Pullice, Greg Girard, Michael de Courcy, Curt Lang and Bruce Stewart. But there were so many other great photographers shooting Vancouver in the 1950s to 1980s—names like Paul Wong, Tony Westman, Angus McIntyre and Svend-Erik Eriksen (Where were the women?)

These days everybody has a cell phone, and while you might think that makes street photographers irrelevant, there’s a group called Vancouver Street Photography Collective that are doing some really interesting things.

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Vancouver in the Seventies

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Fred Herzog, Foncie, Selwyn Pullan, Michael de Courcy, Bruce Stewart, and Angus McIntyre were just a few who took up a camera in the Vancouver of the ‘70s, and were documenting images of everything from buildings to the changing skyline, and from neighborhoods to neon.

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