At Home with History

Would you buy a murder house?

by Eve Lazarus on February 27, 2021

You wouldn’t buy a house without having a building inspector check the foundation, so why wouldn’t you research your potential home’s history?

A heritage house at Fraser and East 10^th went up for sale last week for $1.4 million. It wasn’t the price-tag though (low by Vancouver standards) that captured people’s attention, it was the house’s murder history.

2549 Fraser Street. Jesse Donaldson photo, February 2021

Unsolved Murder:

The Mount Pleasant house has sat empty for 30 years—since the day in August 1991 when the 20-year-old resident was murdered. Wanda Watson had recently moved from hometown Victoria and was living in the house owned by her parents. It’s believed that Wanda surprised two robbers and was stabbed to death, and the house set on fire. Wanda’s murder remains unsolved.

Old houses have stories, but over the years they fade in people’s memories. Murders that happened before newspapers went online are just not that easy to find. House numbers change, neighbours move away, people forget, and while some homeowners will serve up a murder as dinner party fodder, most live in fear that a murder will bring down the value of their home.

In 2007, I wrote a booked called At Home With History: the secrets of Greater Vancouver’s heritage homes. The idea behind the book was that a house has a genealogy or a social history, and I included a chapter on murders that happened in houses that still stood.

2092 West 42nd, where Esther Castellani was slowly poisoned to death with arsenic in 1965. Eve Lazarus photo

HOUSE MURDERS:

The duplex where Esther Castellani was slowly poisoned to death by arsenic in 1965 and featured in Murder by Milkshake is still standing in Kerrisdale.That same year, 17-year-old Thomas Kosberg made milkshakes for his father, mother and four siblings, drugged them, and after they fell asleep, hacked the family to bits with a double-bladed axe. That story is in Vancouver Exposed and is now a podcast.

The Kosberg house at Main and 22nd where six people were killed in 1965. Eve Lazarus photo

In 1971, Louise Wise had just turned 17 when she was stabbed to death in her East Vancouver home. Her story is in Cold Case Vancouver and also a podcast.

The house on Lillooet Street where Louise Wise was murdered in 1971. Eve Lazarus photo

In 1975, Vancouver poet Pat Lowther, 40 was beaten to death by her husband in her house on East 46^th Avenue. And, in that same year, Shaughnessy’s 68-year-old Marion Hamilton was strangled by her cousin so that she could inherit her Nanton Street house.

Patricia Lowther was murdered in this East 46th Ave house in 1975. Photo courtesy BC Assessment

In the same neighbourhood, five decades earlier, 23-year-old Scottish Nanny Janet Smith was found shot in the head in the basement of her employer’s home. Her murder remains unsolved.

Janet Smith was found shot in the head at this house at 3851 Osler in Shaughnessy in 1924

Selling a murder house:

Grant Stuart Gardiner is a North Vancouver realtor who specializes in selling heritage houses. He says in British Columbia, a realtor is only obliged to disclose a murder if asked.

“I’ve never had somebody ask me if there has been a murder in a house, although I have had somebody ask me if there has been a death,” he says. “If there has been one you are duty bound to disclose it, but there’s no duty to research it and try and figure it out.”

Marion Hamilton was murdered in her Shaughnessy house in 1975

Grant doesn’t know about any murders in the houses that he’s sold, but he has had a death. He was showing a Grand Boulevard house one day when a woman came to look but refused to go up the stairs. “She said there’s some weird spirits or something spooky about this house.”

Much later a neighbour told him that a man had hung himself in the attic back in the ’50s. “If it’s not disclosed when you buy it the neighbours sure as hell tell you when you move in,” he says.

Tips on How Not to Buy a Murder House:

Ask your realtor if there’s been a murder or suspicious death in the house
Ask the neighbours
Google the address. The caution here is that occasionally savvy owners have kept the house and changed the street number.
Same idea, but this time do a free online search through your library on local papers, or if you have a subscription, through newspapers.com
Both the Vancouver and the Victoria public libraries have murder files packed full of old newspaper clippings.
Check the index of my true crime/history books—I may have already written about it.

I was invited on CKNW this week to talk about Would you Live in a Murder House?

Related:

Tags 2549 Fraser Street, At Home with History, Esther Castellani, Grant Stuart Gardiner, Janet Smith, Louise Wise, Marion Hamilton, Patricia Lowther, Thomas Kosberg, Wanda Watson

The Wigwam Inn at Indian Arm

by Eve Lazarus on December 10, 2016

I finally got to motor up Indian Arm and see the Wigwam Inn–well from the outside. You can’t get inside unless you’re a member of the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club.

From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

It seems crazy to me that it’s still fairly inaccessible (unless you own a boat), yet in 1910 there were four different sternwheelers taking guests up and down the Arm from Vancouver—the year the Wigwam Inn opened.

Alvo von Alvensleben:

I first “discovered” the Inn about 10 years ago. I was doing some research on Alvo von Alvensleben, an early Vancouver businessman and son of a German count who came to Vancouver in 1904, and not only has a name you couldn’t make up, he’s one of the most fascinating characters in BC’s history. For some reason, he has never rated a biography, so I’ve dedicated a chapter to him in my book At Home with History: the secrets of Greater Vancouver’s heritage homes.

Benny Dickens, an advertising manager for the Daily Province saw potential in creating a resort and bought up a few hundred acres at Indian Arm in the early 1900s. He quickly ran out of money and turned to Alvensleben.

Alvensleben financed the construction of the Dominion Building. His private residence is now part of the Crofton House girl’s school in Kerrisdale, he owned a hunting lodge on Somerset in North Vancouver and houses in Pitt Meadows, Surrey and Washington State that are still known as “Alien Acres” and “Spy House.” It was Alvensleben who made the Inn a reality, turning it into a German Luftkurot (fresh-air resort). At the same time, Alvensleben was also selling lots for $200 to $300, and promising a private boat service to Vancouver that “guaranteed to get business people to the office by 9:00 a.m.”

Inn changes hands:

When the war hit, Alvensleben headed to Seattle. The inn which had attracted guests like American millionaires John D. Rockefeller and John Jacob Astor, fell upon tough times after the government seized it in 1914. Over the years, the Inn changed hands many times, and all but disappeared from public view until the early 1960s when William “Fats” Robertson, 34 and his partner Rocky Myers, 30 took control.

In July 1962, Marine Constable Gale Gardener was one of a a couple of boatloads of RCMP officers from the liquor, gambling and prostitution squads, sent up to bust the old resort. They arrested 15 people and uncovered an illegal gambling operation, plates for printing counterfeit money, stolen art and 300 cases of beer. Robertson, and his partner were found guilty of trying to bribe an RCMP officer and received six years in prison. More owners followed until the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club bought the Inn in 1985. Now it’s strictly members only, and there’s no more room at the inn.

wigwarm-recently

From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

Tags Alvo von Alvensleben, At Home with History, Benny Dickens, Crofton House, Dominion Building, Indian Arm, Royal Vancouver Yacht Club, Wigwam Inn

West End Heritage–a chance to have your say

by Eve Lazarus on June 11, 2016

There are two vastly different West End housing proposals going before Vancouver council this week and both have implications about how we view heritage in our development-mad city. One, in Mole Hill, involves the community’s desire to designate Mole Hill as a Heritage Conservation Area; while the other is a way to redevelop and save a deteriorating 1920s West End apartment building.

I discovered Mole Hill about 10 years ago when I was writing At Home with History. It’s a small enclave in the West End that’s tucked in behind St. Paul’s Hospital, opposite Nelson Park and bounded by Comox, Bute, Thurlow and Pendrell Streets. The houses date back to 1889 and are swarming with social history. While the name sounds like something from the pages of Wind in the Willows, the area is actually named after Henry Mole, a retired farmer who was one of the first people to settle in the area. Anything left of his house now sits under the hospital.

The vast majority of the heritage homes are owned by the City of Vancouver and comprise 170 social housing units, a group home for eight youth, the Dr. Peter Centre which has 24 health care units, three daycares and community gardens. Public walkways full of shrubs and flowers spill over into lanes that wander between the houses. There’s a funky little Victorian cottage in the laneway at 1117 Pendrell that was saved from demolition in 2002 when the Vancouver Heritage Foundation had it moved a few blocks from Hornby Street.

Depending on who you talk to, the area’s heritage is either under threat or it’s being thoughtfully brought up to date.

Quentin Wright is the executive director at the Mole Hill Community Housing Society which provides affordable housing through a 60-year lease with the city. The problem, he says, is that three of the houses on Comox Street are privately owned, two have applied for redevelopment and it’s expected the third, which recently changed hands, will as well.

The immediate concern involves #1150, a 1903 cottage.

According to Michael Kluckner of the Vancouver Heritage Commission, zoning allows the owner to add density to his lot, and he has chosen to add an infill building in the back lane. Mole Hill residents were horrified by the size of the building in the first drawing and the city sent the architects back to the drawing board.

“The Heritage Commission rejected [the second drawing], as the cottage is the heritage item, and adding a huge addition onto its back (in the middle of the lot, as it were), wasn’t good,” says Kluckner. “The design was too glaringly modern. So the architect and owner came back to the Heritage Commission with this design (pictured above).”

Local civic historian John Atkin reckons the Commission made the right call. “In a situation like this, an infill should be in a contrasting design,” he says. “A faux heritage design would muddy the visual record. New should always stand out.”

Wright would like to see the laneway be recognized as part of the heritage landscape and be given legal protection.

West End — The Florida, 1170 Barclay Street

After I blogged about Charles Marega, I received an email from Lyn Guy saying that Marega’s old home—a 1920s two-storey apartment building called the Florida, was ringed with fencing and looked like it might be going the way of many older buildings in Vancouver.

Turns out that it’s good news. The owners want to work under a Heritage Revitalization Agreement to redevelop the building, add a couple of storeys to the back and increase the rental stock from 16 to 28 units.

You have until this Friday June 17 to tell the city what you think of the plan.

The Florida, 1170 Barclay — Photo courtesy Lyn Guy

Tags At Home with History, Henry Mole, John Atkin, Michael Kluckner, Mole Hill, Mole Hill Community Housing Society, Quentin Wright, St. Paul's Hospital, the Florida, Vancouver Heritage Commission, Vancouver Heritage Foundation

The work of Charles Marega (1871-1939)

by Eve Lazarus on March 26, 2016

Charles Marega died on March 27, 1939.

And, while you may not know his name you will know his work. Those are his two lion statues at the south end of the Lions Gate Bridge. And while the lions may be his most well known work, Charles (or Carlos as he was christened) was a prolific sculptor in Vancouver.

I first heard of him when I was writing about Alvo von Alvensleben for At Home with History. Alvensleben owned what’s now part of Crofton Girl’s School and the 20 acres it sat on at West 41^st Avenue and Blenheim in Kerrisdale. He hired Marega to carve a magnificent riot of gargoyles, bats, rabbits and assorted weird faces in the white plaster of his dining room ceiling.

Crofton House ceiling courtesy Crofton House

Marega maidens At that point Marega wasn’t very well known, but he had just shocked Vancouver’s sensibilities by carving nine topless terra cotta maidens on L.D. Taylor’s building (now the Sun Tower), which likely appealed to the flamboyant Alvensleben.

Other commissions include the bronze bust of David Oppenheimer, Vancouver’s second mayor at the entrance to Stanley Park; the statue of Captain Vancouver in front of Vancouver City Hall; the 14 famous people on the Parliament Buildings in Victoria; and the drinking fountain that sits in Alexandra Park to honour Joe Fortes.

As Marega was creating sculptures for public places, his plaster work was also in demand for private mansions. His work can be found at Rio Vista on South West Marine Drive, Hycroft in Shaughnessy Heights, and Shannon at 57^th and Granville.

While Marega worked for the wealthy, in the 1930s he and his wife Bertha lived a humble existence at 1170 Barclay Street–a simple two-storey grey stucco apartment building in the West End with the improbable name of “The Florida.”

Charles Marega's home in the 1930s — The Florida on Barclay

To make ends meet, Marega taught at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts (the forerunner to Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design). In fact, he had just finished teaching a class in 1939 when he had a heart attack and died. He was 68.

Tags 1170 Barclay Street, Alvo von Alvensleben, At Home with History, Carlos Marega, Charles Marega, Crofton Girl's School, Hycroft, Rio Vista, Shannon, Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts

446 Union Street

by Eve Lazarus on June 5, 2015

It may not be the grandest house on the Vancouver Heritage Foundation’s tour, but I bet 446 Union Street house is one of the most interesting, at least when it comes to its social history.

From: Sensational Vancouver

Adamo Piovesan built the brick house in 1930 for his wife Maria and their four daughters. Piovesan was a longshoreman when he could get work, but like dozens of Italian families in the area, the Piovesans bootlegged their way through the Depression. The family made beer and wine in the European tradition and bought rum from the government-run liquor store which they then resold in shots. Drinks sold for a dime, while a glass of bucaro, a wine usually made from raisins and the mash of a better wine, sold for a nickel.

Fines:

Once the Piovesan’s were raided and Maria had to pay a $300 fine—a massive amount of money that forced the family to bootleg more liquor to pay it.

Gilda, the oldest daughter remembers a colorful crowd of customers. There was Kitty the Bitch, Gumboot Annie, Shortie the Painter, Jimmy the Corker, and the Spaniard from the area, a stream of loggers from the camps, and railway workers arriving by taxi.

In 1944 the Piovesans moved out of the area to a bigger place on Franklin Street and sold their house to Wally “Blondie” Wallace and his wife Nellie.

Blondie Wallace:

While the Piovesans were small time bootleggers driven by need, Wally was one of the largest bootleggers in the area.

Wally was a neighbourhood hero, dodging the cops in his bootlegging operation by night and teaching the kids to box in the basement of his house during the day. He operated a thriving distribution centre from the garage just off a lane at the back of the house, and ran Wallace Transfer out of an old Union Street garage.

“That’s how he got caught,” says his niece Judy Maida. “He bought a whole fleet of moving and storage trucks and paid cash and they got him for income tax evasion because how does a guy who doesn’t make any money, all of a sudden put out $100,000 for a truck?”

When I visited the Union Street house in 2006 it was owned by Brian Dedora, a master gilder, who made his gilded picture frames in the garage where Wallace once stored his booze. Descendants of Adamo and Maria called around and left him with old photos and a great story. He told me that knowing something about the people who had lived there before him gave him a deeper connection to his house. “It’s sort of a custodial thing, like owning an antique or a painting,” he said. “I’m here to take care of it for my time.”

I’m told that the current owners are furniture makers and now use the garage for that purpose.

** I’ll be at the Marguerite house (#8) between 9:30 and 1:00 p.m. on Sunday. Please drop by and say hello!

Tags 446 Union Street, Adamo Piovesan, At Home with History, Maria Piovesan, Sensational Vancouver, The Vancouver Heritage Foundation, The Vancouver Heritage House Tour, Wallace Transfer, Wally Wallace

Online Porn for History Nerds

by Eve Lazarus on May 23, 2015

When I was researching my 2007 book At Home with History I spent most of my life at the Vancouver Archives and on the 7^th floor of the Vancouver Public Library. Now, instead of trekking downtown, much of the information is available to me here at home.

Today, the digital world just got a bit better with the launch of three very cool new online toys.

Goad’s Fire Insurance Map

Vancouver Archives has made the Vanmap even more exciting by adding a layer from a 1912 Fire Insurance Plan. Once onto Vanmap click on aerial imagery and you’ll see Goad’s Fire Insurance map. Michael Kluckner took me for a digital tour of his Grandview neighbourhood of 1912 where we found an “Isolation Hospital,” a huge estate called Wilga, and Brook House, complete with its turret. I zoomed into the DTES with CVA archivist Heather Gordon and we could see all the 1912 businesses and brothels along Alexander Street as well as a sawmill and police station, and the original shoreline shown in dashed lines.

The map is colour coded—yellow represents wood framed buildings and the pink are brick and stone—mostly in the downtown area. See Sue Bigelow’s post for a clear description of all its uses.

2636 Trinity Street — Heritage Site Finder Map

Heritage Site Finder Interactive Map

I’ve spent hours playing on this interactive map by the Vancouver Heritage Foundation. The map lists buildings and landmarks found on the Heritage Register—(and eventually other buildings not on the register) and there are around 2,300, many with photos and descriptions. It’s incredibly easy to navigate and you can search by address, zoom into an area, or just click on houses at random. This is a work in progress, so if you click on a building and can’t find a photo, keep trying. Better still if you have old photos of the building and information, send them to the VHF so they can add them. Eventually it will also be possible to add long demolished buildings so we can see how Vancouver looked through a historical filter.

digital building permits

Historic Building Permits online database

You’d think answering a question like ‘when was my house built?’ would be simple. It’s not. Or at least it wasn’t until Heritage Vancouver Society started to transcribe thousands of building permits (currently at 33,000) from the Vancouver Archives prior to 1929—the year Point Grey and South Vancouver amalgamated into the City of Vancouver. Before these permits were online—and it is a volunteer-dependent work-in-progress—you would have to go to the Archives and look through pages and pages of handwritten ledgers brought out to you in huge bound books. With the online database you can pull up every house built in a block, you can search for every building designed by a certain architect, or most impressive and simplest of all, you can find out when your house was built.

Tags 2636 Trinity Street, At Home with History, Brook House, City of Vancouver Archives, Goad's Fire Insurance Map, Heather Gordon, Heritage Site Finder, Heritage Vancouver Society, Historical Building Permits, Isolation Hospital, Michael Kluckner, Sue Bigelow, Vancouver Heritage Foundation, VanMap, Wilga

The Top 10 Most Expensive Houses in BC: nine are in Vancouver

by Eve Lazarus on January 2, 2015

If you’re a property owner in Metro Vancouver and looking for relief in this year’s property tax bill, well let’s just say it’s not going to happen. For property owners living in one of the priciest regions of the country—the West Coast real estate market keeps going up—and so does your bill.

The good news is that BC Assessment also released the 500 most expensive properties in the province today, and it gives you a glimpse into how the rich get richer.

Number 1:

Kitsilano tops the list with Lululemon founder Chip Wilson’s new 30,000+ SF home coming in at just under $58 million.

The second most expensive house comes with its own island (James Island) 780 acres, private docks and six guest cottages.

Belmont Avenue:

Five of the houses are on Belmont Avenue and all are new except for one from the ‘80s. In fact, with the exception of the 10th most expensive house on Point Grey Road built in 1962 there is only one heritage house in the exclusive top 10, which probably isn’t surprising given the frantic way we’ve been bulldozing these old beauties.

1388 The Crescemt — The Hollies at 1388 The Crescent in Shaughnessy is the 7th most expensive house in B.C.

The Hollies:

Number 7 on the list is the Hollies at 1388 The Crescent, and the only house in the top 10 from Shaughnessy. At $27.4 million it’s less than a half the value of Chip Wilson’s sprawling modern mansion and the only one on the heritage inventory.

The Hollies

I wrote about The Hollies in At Home with History. The heritage inventory describes the 13,000 SF house as a “rambling Neoclassical Revival structure.” The house was built in 1912 by George E. MacDonald, general manager of the Pacific Great Eastern Railway. With its giant entrance and huge columns, it looks like it would be at home on some exclusive Greek island.

It’s deceptive from the front gate, but inside, the mansion has six bedrooms, five fireplaces, an indoor pool designed by Arthur Erickson in the ‘80s, a putting green, tennis courts, a playground, and a coach house. The MacDonald’s sold the house and its two acres of land in 1921 and it changed hands several times until 1950 when it became a guest house. At one point the owners paid their property taxes by renting out the mansion as a wedding reception hall.

Ironically, considering the exclusion of “Orientals” in the first stage of Shaughnessy’s development, in 1991 the address changed from 1350 to 1388 The Crescent to attract Asian buyers.

Tags 1388 the Cresent, 3085 Point Grey Road, Arthur Erickson, At Home with History, BC Assessment, Chip Wilson, George E. MacDonald, James Island, The Hollies

The Ghosts of Townsend Place

by Eve Lazarus on October 14, 2012

Ghosts are said to be attracted to houses where there is a lot of activity. For Jim, a carpenter, and Lou, a massive renovation of their Queen Anne home on Townsend Place, in New Westminster, seems to have awoken them.

725 Queens Avenue, New Westminster — John Hendry House, Ca1890
New Westminster Archives

Townsend Place:

Whatever the reason, for a few years the old house was haunted. Jim and Lou moved into the 13-room house in 1967. At that time it was 61 years old and, like an elderly person, came with a history. As Jim said the house had also “taken a hell of a beating over the years.”

The haunting started casually enough. About two years after Jim and Lou moved in, the downstairs tenant asked them about a “medicine smell.” Jim and Lou had noticed the same old ointment kind of smell, and thought it was something that the tenant was using. Sometimes, a light switch with a tricky control would switch on and off.

The ghosts:

Once, an old family friend was staying overnight. “He woke up and saw a man looking out the window and the guy disappeared when he got out of bed,” says Jim. “The dog was under the bed and wouldn’t come out.”

The friend described a middle-aged man wearing a long coat and hat that looked like it came from a very different generation.

Lou had a number of encounters over the years. She would often feel a presence that she described to a reporter in 1982 as “a whirlwind around me. It’s cold and follows me.” She once saw an outline of a woman in a long dress and often talked of a presence that sat near her on the couch. The family dog, Rags, frequently stared at something that wasn’t there.

The kids:

Jim and Lou had three boys who shared the same bedroom. One night David, who was about 10, called his mother into his room in the middle of the night. “He told her the coat hangers were floating,” says Jim.

Jim has had two unsettling experiences.

Several years after moving into the house, he was going upstairs to bed. He turned out the lights downstairs, and when he got to the foot of the staircase he reached out for the newel post. Someone or something grabbed his hand and continued to hold it as he went up the stairs. He wasn’t scared, but it was strange and he had to shake his hand free.

Jim’s only other experience happened shortly after Lou died in 1988. One night after he’d gone to bed he woke to see a white smoky shape that gave off a faint glow.

He says at no time did the family ever feel threatened by the activity.

“A psychic came through here once and said that there are no ghosts here now. But he said it’s like when you live in a house or in a neighborhood for a long time and then one day someone comes by to visit,” says Jim. “They come and they go.”

Sounds like the psychic was right: the last time anything odd happened in the house was in 1989.

For more ghostly stories check out these podcast episodes:

S1 E9 Three Ghost Stories and a Murder

S2 E24 Halloween Special 2021

Victoria’s Ghost

Tags At Home with History, Halloween, John Hendry House, Townsend Place

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