1. It’s in Victoria

2. It’s 52 years old. That means Munro’s has survived Amazon, consolidation and e-books.

3. Carole Sabiston’s tapestries. Eight large banners depict the seasons and decorate the interior of Munro’s. Carole is an incredibly accomplished textile artist. Her commissions include the giant Sunburst for the Expo ’86 opening ceremony in Vancouver and the five-panel work of mountains and oceans at Government House.

4. Its connection to Alice Munro. Nobel prize winner and one of my literary heroes co-founded the original Munro’s Books in 1964.

5. Jim Munro. Not only does Jim have great taste in wives (Alice Munro and Carole Sabiston), when he retired in 2014 he handed over the store and inventory to four long-time staffers (they pay him rent).

6. The Staff. They understand books, customers and needy authors and are amazingly knowledgeable. They also stage events, book launches and readings.

7. The Books. There are roughly 30,000 in the inventory and a huge children’s section. Just try to leave without buying several books, it’s physically impossible.

8. Local Interest Section. It’s huge, it’s right up the front, and it’s all about B.C. authors.

9. Jim Munro. Not only does he love books, he also loves heritage buildings. He and Carole still live in the 1894 Rockland Avenue house that he bought with Alice in 1966. He bought the former bank building that houses Munro’s in 1984 and restored it. Now it’s a tourist attraction.

10. The building. Originally designed for the Royal Bank of Canada in 1909, it’s a gorgeous neo-classical building with marble and hardwood floors and sweeping 24-foot-high ceilings. It was designed by architect Thomas Hooper who also designed the Roger’s Building, Hycroft (Shaughnessy) and Christina Haas’s Cook Street brothel.

For more about Munro’s Books, Jim Munro, Carole Sabiston, Alice Munro and Victoria grab a copy of Sensational Victoria: bright lights, red lights, murders, ghosts and gardens.

Bookstores all over Canada are hosting Authors for Indies tomorrow. For a full listing of participating stores in B.C. see Authors for Indies

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

I’ve lived in Lynn Valley for 20 years and while I’ve heard rumours of a nudist camp at the top of Mountain Highway, I always thought that it was an urban myth. After reading an article this week, I found their website, fired off an email, and accepted an invitation from PR director Daniel Jackson to spend this afternoon at Van Tan.

Daniel and Vanessa met me at the first locked gate, which is just past the new parking lot and a flood of weekend hikers. We drove about two clicks up a curvy, unpaved road shared with a steady stream of determined mountain bikers, then through another locked gate, and onto several acres of private property.

Just under 60 members belong to the club, which has a board of directors like any other non-profit society. There are a few trailers that look semi-permanent, and Daniel and Vanessa have designed a “timber tent” that’s put together like a movie prop and breaks down into little pieces that are easily stored in winter. It would be like sleeping in a greenhouse.

The most interesting thing about the nudist camp is its history. It was founded in 1939 and purchased from a group called the Millionaire’s Club when it was little more than a clear-cut grassy knoll and used for clay pigeon shooting. The club’s buildings—including a sauna inside a log cabin with a hand-split cedar roof—date back to the 1940s and ‘50s as does the fire suppression reservoir which holds 40,000 litres of water and looks strangely like a swimming pool. There’s a shower, a diesel back-up generator, composting toilet and propane heater.

At the bottom of the property is a cliff with a stunning view of Mount Baker, Mount Seymour, Burrard Inlet, and quite possibly my house.

Daniel says they plan to turn the cliff into a climbing area for nudists.

While they could always use a few new members, Daniel says reaching out to the community is more about changing their image. “[The media] still play off there’s something going on up there and it’s not wholesome.”

In fact, most of the secrecy surrounds individual privacy. Members don’t talk about what they do, where they live, or their last names. And membership is intentionally cheap—just a few hundred dollars a year. Members are asked to put in 10 hours of work a year, but it’s all pretty casual. You can chop wood for the sauna and hot tub, work in the community garden or on trail maintenance, but it’s not Survivor, if you just want to sit by the ‘fire suppression reservoir’, no one’s going to kick you off the mountain.

“I always say it’s the secret that keeps itself, once you’ve come and had a look, really nothing out of the ordinary is taking place here,” says Daniel. “Gardening is the number one activity.”

And, yes, after a few uncomfortable minutes of holding direct eye contact, the whole nudity thing becomes a very small deal. It’s a bit like hanging out with a very pleasant naked gardening group.

Check it out for yourself at Van Tan’s open house June 19.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

Jason Vanderhill dropped around a couple of weeks ago armed with a ton of old copies of the Vancouver Sun that he’d been given by Anders Falk and family. It was a blast looking through them—they ranged from the 1930s to the 60s and covered major events such as visits by the Royal family, the opening of the Granville Bridge, and putting a man on the moon.

The “Great Flag Controversy” is one of my favourites, and was featured on the front page of the Vancouver Sun with a local spin, 52 years ago today.

The cover shows the flag favoured by Prime Minister Lester Pearson, and an alternative below it, designed by Vancouver artist Jack Shadbolt.

According to the story, Shadbolt and a Vancouver art director called Ted Bethune were horrified by the PM’s pick saying that it would portray Canada as a nation of skinny weaklings.

Both men told reporter Moira Farrow that the proposed Pearson flag had an insipid, scrawny design instead of a big, bold symbol. “Shadbolt thinks the Pearson design is a thin, scraggly thing that would look terrible on a flagpole,” writes Farrow.

Personally I don’t like either of them, and I do like Shadbolt’s work. But it’s irrelevant, because as we all know George Stanley’s flag won the day, based as it was on the flag of the Royal Military College of Canada. The Maple Leaf flag replaced the Union Flag, and has lasted now for over half a century.

In case you were unaware, February 15 is National Flag of Canada Day.

The longest a Canadian flag has survived in recent history before a do-over is 53 years. Do you think it’s time for a new flag or should we stick with the one we have?

• Disclaimer: all information and photos not in the Vancouver Sun article were sourced from Wikipedia.

Foncie, to my knowledge, never crossed the bridge or took the ferry to North Vancouver—at least not for his work, but he did capture many of our most colourful citizens. A street photographer who worked mostly on Hastings and Granville Streets, he photographed people out shopping, going to a show, or on their way to work.

It’s estimated that he created over 15 million images with his home made camera.

Janet Turner, archivist at the North Vancouver Museum and Archives watched a documentary about him on the Knowledge Network, and then found more and more Foncie photos popping up in the collection and in donations.

She has curated a small exhibition at the Community History Centre in Lynn Valley.

Foncie photos aren’t dated unless the recipient writes on the back, so the time period is mostly a good guess, but that’s part of the fun.

There’s a photo of Dorothy Lynas, namesake of the school at Indian River.

Another shows Gertie Wepsala, who Janet tells me was a Canadian Olympic Ski Champion. She married Al Beaton, who has a place in the Sports Hall of Fame as a member of the Canadian Olympic Basketball team in 1940 and 1941. Al helped develop Grouse Mountain Resorts and built the world’s first double chairlift from the top of Skyline Drive, and later managed Grouse Mountain. Both he and Gertie qualified for the Olympics, but the games were cancelled during the war years, and the couple didn’t compete.

There’s a photo of the three Fromme sisters—Vera, Julia and Margaret—spending a day on the town; one of a young Walter Draycott, and another of his friend Tom Menzies, the curator at the Museum of Vancouver in the ‘40s.

Like the Fromme family, Draycott was a North Vancouver pioneer, he has a street named after him, and his statue sits in the little square at the corner of Lynn Valley Road and Mountain Highway.

Marie Desimone, a shipyard worker at Burrard Dry Dock is captured on the way to catch the ferry to work.

There’s Bette Booth with her husband Bob, an architect who built his own West Coast modern home near Capilano River and worked on both the Burrard Dry Dock and Westminster Abbey in Mission.

And Jack Cash, a prolific photographer himself, and son of the formidable Gwen Cash, who appears in Sensational Victoria, is shown in a photo with his oldest son and wife Aileen (Binns).

And, there is a photo of Eva with her sister Jennie Conroy, taken shortly before Jennie’s murder in 1944.

When Foncie retired in November of 1979 he told a Province reporter that when he started as a 20-year-old back in 1934 there were six companies in Vancouver. Street photography, he said, really started to take off during the war. “At one time, I was taking 4,000 to 5,000 pictures every day,” he told the reporter.

Millions of photos were thrown out. “I’d keep them for a year, then throw them out. I realize now I should have saved them but it’s too late.”

Foncie Pulice died in 2003 at the age of 88.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

Never heard of Manson’s Deep? You’re not alone. It’s one of the deepest points in Howe Sound just off Point Atkinson. It’s also been a burial ground for old sailors since 1941.

Manson’s Deep gets its name from Captain Thomas Manson who came to Vancouver from Scotland in 1892.

According to an article by Kellsie McLeod*, Manson, himself was buried there in 1946. Part of the service, she writes was the recital of a poem: “Now again, ‘Old Cap,’ you’re with your first love, with the sea. We hear you shout, ‘Stand by and tack, when the Shetland Isles you see.”

Kellsie’s own husband, Ernie McLeod, had his ashes scattered from a tug into Manson’s Deep in 1977. Ernie was a rum runner and appears in Sensational Vancouver “built on rum,” chapter as well as in the ghost chapter because the house that he and Kellsie lived in on Glen Drive was haunted.

You may even catch the ghost of Captain Manson on the annual Vancouver Heritage House Tour Sunday. The West 2^nd Avenue house is one of nine houses that you’ll be able to get inside. Others include craftsman houses in Kerrisdale and Kitsilano, a Tudor in South Granville, and WilMar on Southwest Marine Drive. WilMar, a 9,000 square-foot 1925 house on a two-acre lot was in the news recently because of redevelopment plans that will hopefully save the old mansion from demolition.

If Art Moderne is more to your taste, the Vancouver Heritage Foundation has you covered. You can get a peek inside the Barber Residence—that’s the big white concrete house that sits up on the West 10^th Avenue hill near Highbury in Point Grey.

Apparently there is some dispute as to who designed this futuristic looking house (remember this was 1936). My money is on Ross Lort, a super talented architect who is featured in At Home with History. At one point Lort worked with Samuel Maclure, and he designed Maxine’s on Bidwell, G.F. Strong building on Laurel, the Park Lane Apartments on Chilco and Casa Mia on Southwest Marine Drive.

If you need to buy tickets on Sunday, they are $42 or $31.50 with student ID. You can pick them up after 9:00 a.m. at the information booths at 3118 Alberta Street and 2744 Dunbar. These are also two of the tour houses.

* Westcoast Mariner, 2000

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.

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.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

Some described the noise of the bridge collapsing into the Second Narrows as gunfire or an explosion, others as a rumble or a loud snapping sound. On June 17, 1958 at 3:40 p.m., people from all over Vancouver stopped to listen, as two spans collapsed, tossing 79 workers into Burrard Inlet and killing 18 of them.

Bill Moore was working on the bridge that day.

“There were rivets snapping off and steel grinding against steel. We looked for a place to hide. There was no place to go. Some of the overhead steelwork crashed down on top of the pier and toppled into the water. Scaffolding fell around us,” he told a reporter. “I didn’t see very much but I could hear what was going on. Then everything was still. I’ve heard about ‘deafening silences.’ Now I know what they’re like.”

The massive rescue operation that followed was modelled after a worst-case scenario plane crash at YVR. Some of the men were identified by the brand of cigarettes that they smoked.

Phil Nuytten, the North Vancouver entrepreneur, scientist and inventor of the Newtsuit, was only 17 at the time, and one of two divers sent to recover the bodies. The other diver, Len Mott, 27, became the nineteenth person to die on the job as a result of the bridge collapse.

This is a small part of Nuytten’s story that I’ve taken from an oral history at North Vancouver Archives.

“It was pretty macabre. The tool belts had pulled these guys down and they were standing on the bottom. Their upper torso was buoyant because they had life jackets on, but the tool belts were heavier than the lifejacket would support so they were standing on the bottom, with their arms and their hair facing in the direction of the current. They looked like they were walking, but they were long dead,” said Nuytten. “We found one guy who was crushed in a girder and there was no way to get him out. He was actually smashed in there. So an apprentice commercial diver named Lenny Mott was to try to burn this guy out of this girder and he wound up drowning.”

In 1994, the bridge’s name changed to the Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing to honour those who died on the job that day.

The following sources were used for this post:

Eric Jamieson’s Tragedy at Second Narrows; How Come I’m Dead? by Glen McDonald (former Vancouver Coroner), and North Vancouver Archives

If you think that museums are full of old fossils and boring exhibits, it’s time to get yourself down to All Together Now: Vancouver Collectors and their Worlds.

I went on opening night this week when 20 collectors were hanging out with their obsessions and it’s one of the craziest nights I’ve had in a long time. There were collections of movie posters, pocket watches, pinball machines and action figures mixed in with artificial eye balls, toasters and corsets.

We’re not talking stamp collectors here.

Exhibit curator, Viviane Gosselin came up with the idea. She told me she sent out a call to various collectors about 18 months ago. “I wanted to be blown away,” she says. And she was.

When you walk into the exhibit you hit Angus Bungay, the action figure collector. Viviane  recreated his own room.

“We know that collections are conversation pieces,” she says. “I wanted conversations about the history of disability, conversations about food security–that’s why we have a seed collector.”

Harold Steeves, a descendant from the pioneer Steveston family, collects heirloom vegetable seeds.

“The history of disability is something that fascinates me and I wanted to work with David Moe who collects vintage artificial limbs,” she says. “We are trained not to look and stare at people wearing prostheses and this is the exhibition that says stare all you want.”

Maurice Guibord has close to 5,000 pieces in his Expo 67 collection. He was 13 when the fair was staged in Montreal and he says it opened up the world for him. “It truly changed my life,” he says.

Maurice is placed between Melanie Talkington, a woman who collects corsets and Willow Yamauchi, a journalist with the CBC, who collects Drag Queen outfits, particularly those that relate to her father’s group the Bovines. Willow’s dad “Hydrangea Bovine,” performed in Vancouver in the ‘80s. She says she was too young to see them perform, but the Queens used to take her sister shopping. “My sister had really big feet so they took her shoe shopping so they could buy stilettos.”

Neil Whaley tells me he still remembers the first time he collected, it was 16 years ago and it was a vintage glass Christmas parasol wrapped in wire that cost about $40.

“I was sitting on a bus in San Francisco, my heart was pounding with excitement,” he says. “it was a real adrenaline rush.” The buzz didn’t last though. Neil has since swapped Christmas ornaments for Vancouver items like the 1920s beach umbrella that says “Read the Daily Province,” pictured below.

“Yesterday I met this guy who collects bras,” Viviane tells me. “It took me back a little bit, but now I’m thinking how would I display a hundred bras? We could do the history of fashion through bras.”

I can’t wait for the next one.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

Just before you hit the bike only section of Point Grey Road at Alma you may have noticed that the corner lot is missing a lovely old heritage house. The lot sold for $4 million last year, and of course was advertised with a demolition permit and plan for a “brand new 2,800 sq.ft. house on a fantastic view lot” attached.

So sure was the realtor that no one would want a 1935 four-bedroom house that there wasn’t even a picture of it on the listing—just one of the ocean and mountains and of Hastings Mill Park across the street.

Real estate listing for 3691 Point Grey Road, 2015

And, shortly after it sold, it came down.

But this post isn’t about the rampant destruction of our heritage homes or our blatant disregard for stories and history, I wanted to find out more about the new house, the one that’s causing all the controversy. On the comment section of Vancouver Vanishes, the cube house that’s going up on the lot has been called a “bunker style building,” a “container,” “unfriendly and uninviting” and “doesn’t fit the neighbourhood.”

Since I’m a sucker for West Coast Modern architecture and willing to give this a shot, I called Tony Robins, the architect for the cube, who by the way, had nothing to do with the old house’s destruction.

“I wanted it to be leading-edge, modern architecture and I love the idea of a cube where the whole ground floor is glass,” he told me. “I’ve seen some comments that it’s too exclusive and it’s turning its back to the street, but actually the kitchen, dining, living-room is more open to the street than any other house on Point Grey Road. And how often does anyone see anyone in upstairs windows? Really it’s very pure, it’s meant to be a very modern house.”

Robins doesn’t know whether the owner will live in it because it’s already changed hands since the sale last year. But he says the old heritage house was in poor shape, and the original buyer, a realtor, wanted a new one.

And, he says, his cube house fits perfectly well into the neighbourhood.

“I don’t believe in doing fake heritage just because there’s some other fake heritage houses around,” he says, adding that he also designed the white house next door. “I believe that those houses are very intriguing and fit within the realm of every house being different along there.”

The cube house is black on the outside, but light and airy inside. There’s a massive skylight over the hallway and a deck off the master bedroom, and a hot tub on the roof top deck that is also the lid of the house.

I just hope that the new owners will live there long enough to create some stories.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

Kathryn Murray’s association with the Mission to Seafarers goes back to 1902—the same year the Flying Angels Club came to Vancouver. Kathyrn’s great grandmother Florence Sentell was bringing a fruit basket to the Mission when she met Charles Westrand, Kathryn’s great grandfather.

The Mission which still provides assistance and care to seaman from over 90 countries, has been housed in a heritage building at the foot of Dunlevy for almost half-a-century. The Mission owns the house while the Port of Vancouver owns the land and leases it back for $1 a year.

Sixteen years ago the Mission was easily accessible and surrounded by gardens that led to the waterfront. Post 9/11 madness, the Port is wrapped in a chain link of security which has marooned the house in a kind of cul-de-sac. It shows in the numbers. Before the security fences shot up, about 24,000 seafarers visited the Mission every year. Last year only 3,500 visited.

Kathryn thinks part of the problem is that people have forgotten about them. The other problem is the Internet. They are literally at the end of the line and get whatever the Port doesn’t use.

“The guys come and just can’t get proper Internet and that’s really something that’s required when they only have an hour or two and they really need to talk to people back home.”

It would cost $20,000 to get a better connection.

And the Internet is huge for men who may be in town for just a few hours. Kathryn, who manages this location and another at Roberts Bank—has watched a seafarer attend his mother’s funeral through Skype, another watched his son take his first steps, and she saw one man pick up a teddy from the gift store to teach his child the A, B, C’s. She says, the men who visit—and it’s almost all men, call her “Mother.”

House is threatened

The Mission is about to lose even more of its garden as the Port’s activities expand (think First Order). In the long term, the fate of the house is threatened, and this is tragic because the building and its location are an essential part of Vancouver’s history.

First Nations call the site Kumkumalay meaning “big maple trees.” It was the site of the Hastings Saw Mill and the old mill store and the first public school. The homeless set up camp here during the worst of the Depression. Hastings Mill was a significant employer of Japanese Canadians which led to Japantown.

The Mission’s house was built by BC Mills Timber and Trading Co. in 1906 as the offices for sales of pre-fabricated houses, schools and churches. The building was a showplace with each office paneled in a different type of wood—fir, hemlock, red cedar and balsam—and painted over when the Vancouver Harbour Commissioners moved in. The National Harbours Board were next to own the house, and the Mission took possession in the early 1970s.

Next time you’re in the area, visit the house while you still can. Maybe bring some books and games or clothes that you no longer need. Kathryn and her visiting Seafarer’s will be most grateful.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

Rhona Duncan died years before I moved to North Vancouver, but whenever I drive up Larson and cross Bewicke I think of her. And, 40 years later, her murder still haunts my friends and neighbours who either knew her or of her. This is a short excerpt from a chapter in Cold Case Vancouver: the city’s most baffling unsolved murders.

Rhona Duncan, her boyfriend Shawn Mapoles, and their friends Owen Parry and Marion Bogues left the party on East Queens Road in the early hours of July 17, 1976. It was a warm summer night and they took their time walking in the direction of their homes. The teens, who were to enter Grade 12 at Carson Graham in the fall, stopped at the municipal hall on West Queens. Owen and Shawn lived up the hill, and Rhona and Marion lived in the Hamilton area. The girls wanted to be by themselves to talk about the night; it was an easy walk down Jones Avenue.

Rhona and Marion stopped and talked for a while and then parted company near Marion’s home at the corner of Larson Road and Wolfe Avenue. Rhona disappeared into the darkness of Larson Road, turned south on Bewicke Avenue, and was at the intersection at West 15^th, the quiet residential street where she lived, when someone stopped her. She was in sight of the safety of her home.

By 4:00 a.m. Rhona, the oldest of four girls, was dead. She had been raped and strangled.

Shawn found out about his girlfriend’s murder the next day from one of his friends. Later that morning the RCMP arrived, bagged his clothes and interviewed him. He voluntarily took a polygraph, and when DNA came on the scene two decades later, he volunteered his as well.

Shawn, who still lives in North Vancouver, told me: “I felt guilty. Normally, I would walk a woman home, but Rhona didn’t want me to walk her home that night.”

Police asked Shawn if he remembered anyone paying a lot of attention to Rhona at the party. He told them that while he knew a lot of the kids there that night, he couldn’t remember anything that seemed strange or out of place. “We were just getting to know each other, so I was focusing my attention on Rhona, not on my surroundings.”

On July 22, five days after the murder, the RCMP announced that they had formed a special squad to check for similarities in the unsolved sex slayings of at least 12 women since January 1975.

Police say they’ve interviewed hundreds of witnesses and suspects in the Rhona Duncan case, performed polygraphs on the higher priority suspects, and tested DNA. The case remains inside eight boxes of evidence in the cold file room, where every now and then it’s taken out, dusted off, and re-examined.

The last update I have is from a 2003 interview in the Outlook with Sergeant Gerry Webb. He told a reporter: “The present focus of the investigation is to continue with DNA collection from outstanding suspects.”

The problem is of course, that police can only take DNA voluntarily, and guilty people are unlikely to comply.

Cold Case Canada is a  public group page on Facebook dedicated to bringing unsolved murders to light.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

On July 26, 1924, Janet Smith was found shot in the head by a .45 calibre automatic revolver in the basement of a Shaughnessy house. The murder of the Scottish nanny rocked Vancouver. The murder touched on high-level police corruption, kidnapping, drugs, society orgies and rampant racism. This is a short excerpt from At Home With History: the secrets of Greater Vancouver’s heritage homes.

Janet Smith was an attractive 23-year-old Scot who looked after Fred and Doreen Baker’s baby daughter. The Baker’s, with Janet in tow, had recently returned to Vancouver after three years in London and Paris running a “pharmaceutical business.” They decided to return home in 1923 after Scotland Yard began to investigate the business as a front for drug smuggling.

The following year, Janet was found murdered in the Shaughnessy house where they were staying.

Police botched the Smith case. First it took two days to find the bullet. Then the embalming of her body destroyed evidence at the eventual autopsy. Police first called it suicide, later saying that Janet had somehow accidentally shot herself while ironing. Finally, they clued in that there were no powder burns around the bullet hole, and unless Janet also beat herself in the back of the head, burned herself on the back with the iron, and changed her clothes after she was dead, her death was no accident.

The newspaper headings changed to “Smith Girl Murdered.”

Wong Foon Sing, the Baker’s Chinese houseboy, found Janet in a pool of blood, and became a convenient fall guy. Frustrated that they couldn’t get a confession, at one point several men, including high ranking members of the Point Grey Police Department, dressed up as Ku Klux Klansmen, kidnapped him, dragged him to an attic, tied a heavy rope around his neck, put him on a stool, and pretended to kick it out from under him. After a staggering six weeks of torture, they dumped him in the middle of the night. Police found him stumbling along Marine Drive, rearrested him and shipped him off to Oakalla prison.

Over the years, armchair detectives have come up with a few different scenarios in an attempt to solve her murder. Some say it was Fred Baker, who killed Janet to hide his drug use and illegal business dealings. Others say she was raped and murdered after a wild society party at Hycroft Manor, after which her body was dragged to Osler Street to throw off the investigation. Still others suggest it was Jack Nichol, son of Walter Nichol, the Lieutenant-Governor and publisher of the Province.

No one thinks it was the Chinese houseboy.

Wong was finally acquitted and fled to China in March 1926.

Janet’s body rests uneasily at Mountain View Cemetery, buried by Vancouver’s Scots. Around the corner from the headstone are some coins put there to pay the “ferry man” for her safe passage to the afterlife.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

Before CRAB Park was created in 1987, there was a funky Spanish Colonial-style building that sat on the pier at the foot of Main Street. Built in 1931 as the terminal for the Canadian National Steamship Company, access was by way of a roadway over the CPR railway tracks.

Tom Carter found this ca.1930s map from a Hotel Greeter’s Guide at MacLeod’s Books.  It shows the CN terminal, the ferry to North Vancouver, the North Arm ferry to the Wigwam Inn, Pier B-C which was eventually replaced by Canada Place, and Pier D which burned down in July 1938. (Note the two missing piers at English Bay, how Crystal Pool is highlighted, and the “Old Mill Site” in Coal Harbour).

While Canadian Pacific Railway owned the Princess line of steamboats, the competition—CN had a healthy line of Prince’s—Henry, David, Robert, Charles, William and George until the war years when steamship service dropped and stopped altogether in the 1950s.

It’s a bit unclear what CN did with the building in the intervening years, but by 1973 it was in full swing as the Oompapa Restaurant and Happy Bavarian Inn.

Over the next decade it changed hands at least twice. Here it is as the Dock,

And as O’Hara’s and missing the distinctive maple leaf.

And demolished in 1983.

For a story on the last remaining house on the waterfront in the immediate area just to the east of Crab Park see Hastings Mill and the Flying Angel Club.

I worked for the Vancouver Stock Exchange in the late 1980s—the same time that Forbes Magazine published a cover story calling it the “Scam Capital of the World.” While I never met Nick Masee, the mysterious disappearance of he and his wife in August 1994 has always intrigued me. This is a short excerpt from Cold Case Vancouver.

Before Nick Masee retired from his job as head of private banking with the Bank of Montreal, he worked for some of the Vancouver Stock Exchange’s most colourful stock promoters, regularly socializing with high-rollers such as Murray Pezim, Harry Moll, Nelson Skalbania and Herb Capozzi.

Nick, 55, ate with them at Hy’s, Il Giardino and Chardonnays. He went on weekend fishing trips to Sonora Lodge. He flew in private jets to boxing matches in Las Vegas, and stayed at their Scottsdale mansions. He was a guest at one of Pezim’s weddings on a luxury yacht.

But while the Masees may have associated with the rich and powerful, they were living way beyond their means.

As a banker, Nick pulled in around $85,000 a year. Their modest North Vancouver home was heavily mortgaged and they owed $70,000 on their credit cards, Lisa worked at the Yokoi Hair Salon on Cambie Street. Unlike their jet-setting contemporaries, Nick and Lisa’s getaway was a time-share in Maui.

Nick was banking that his new venture as a director of a sketchy VSE start-up called Turbodyne Technologies would propel him into the big leagues.

Eve Lazarus photo, 2015

The first hint that something was wrong was the unlocked door at the Masees’ house. The security system was off, their car was in the driveway, their 17-year-old cat was inside the house and so were their passports. Two plastic ties, similar to the ones that police use for handcuffs, were found just inside the front entrance.

The RCMP have no idea whether they are missing or dead. Corporal Gord Reid is keeping an open mind. “It’s a head scratcher,” he told me. “I’ve got missing people that I assume are murdered because they are not the kind of people who would be able to disappear. But the Masee’s could. He was a sophisticated guy. They both had passports from other countries, they had lived around the world, he understood international banking, and they had some money stashed aside.”

And, Nick knew his way around the Vancouver Stock Exchange. He was known to invest in his clients’ deals. At the time they disappeared Nick’s tennis partner, Nelson Skalbania was on trial for stealing $100,000 from a former business associate’s trust fund. Nick was scheduled to testify as a witness for the prosecution.

The night before they disappeared, Nick booked a table for four at their favourite haunt, Trader Vic’s. He called to say they would be delayed, but never turned up.

There was some evidence that Nick and Lisa were on the lam. They flew to the Cayman Islands a few months before they disappeared to set up a bank account with $50,000 worth of stock. Parallels were drawn with Fred Hofman, a fellow Dutchman who Nick had introduced to other members of the Dutch community. Hofman returned the favour by stealing and then running off with their money.

For now, the Masees remain North Vancouver RCMP’s biggest missing person case.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

This great Foncie photo of two women police officers ran in Sensational Vancouver, in a chapter called “Lurancy Harris’s Beat.” Lurancy was the first female police officer in Canada when she was hired along with Minnie Millar by the Vancouver Police Department in 1912, and one of my favourite historical characters.

The photo and much of the information about early women police officers came from the Vancouver Police Museum. At the time, the women in the photo were not identified, and the photo was thought to be 1940s.

Kristin Hardie at the Police Museum has now solved the mystery and tells me that the woman on the left is Jeanette Heathorn and she worked as a police matron in 1938 and 1939. Bessie Say, on the right, was VPD constable 193 and was employed between 1921 and 1941. That also narrows down the date of the Foncie photo to between 1938 and 1941.

Bessie is intriguing.

According to a 1970 newspaper article that Kristin sent, Bessie who died at 90, was a retired Vancouver city police matron and former first-class constable in charge of the women’s section of the jail.

Before Bessie arrived in Vancouver she had been a prison guard in England and in Australia.

“In her early days she was keen on horse racing and kept up her interest in hockey, going out to games until a year before her death,” notes the reporter. “She was believed the first fully trained policewoman to be employed by any force in Canada when she was sworn in as matron at the city jail in September 1921.”

I don’t doubt it. Poor Lurancy and Minnie were thrown into the job with no training, no uniform and no gun.

And, three decades later when this photo was taken, things weren’t much better. Women didn’t get uniforms until 1947, they weren’t allowed to drive police cars until 1948 (they went to calls on foot or took the street car), and it wasn’t until the 1970s that women had the right to carry firearms and were assigned the same duties as their male counterparts.

Apparently Bessie didn’t slow down after retirement. She was active in the Red Cross during the Second World War, and according to the article, travelled extensively. “She was camping at 84. She took a daily walk, even through last December’s snow.”

Jeanette also lived a long life. She died in 1992 aged 86.

For more about Vancouver’s first woman police officer see Lurancy Harris

For another photo mystery that was solved see: The Story Behind this 1924 photo

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

I’m writing a book about John F.C.B. Vance, the first forensic scientist in Vancouver, and this week I wrote about his first day of work as the new City Analyst. My book is non-fiction, but sometimes you need some creative license. My challenge was to get to get Vance from his house in Yaletown to Market Hall, a lovely long-gone gothic building on Westminster (Main Street) which doubled as City Hall. 

I decided that Vance would take the streetcar. I went to Vancouver Archives website, found a map of 1907, blew up the sections of downtown Vancouver, ran them off, taped them together and stuck them on my wall.

Next I played City Reflections. William Harbeck shot the earliest known surviving footage of Vancouver that year by mounting a hand-cranked camera to the front of a streetcar as it rattled through downtown and the West End. Just five years later poor William was dead, a victim of the Titanic, and the film disappeared for decades until it turned up in the home of an Australia film buff who thought he was looking at Hobart, Tasmania.

In 2007, the Vancouver Historical Society reshot the same route and put the two side by side.

You can watch the film here.

While it was fascinating to see what’s changed, I was surprised at how much has stayed the same. Back then, as now, construction was everywhere, on every block. The home of the new post office (Sinclair Centre) was going up at Hastings and Granville, as was Fire Hall No. 2 on East Cordova, and the recently defunct Pantages Theatre would soon open as a 1,200 seat vaudeville theatre. Slogans on banners shouted out the benefits of development. As today, Vancouver was attracting investment and visitors from around the world, and property prices were soaring.

The Vancouver Opera House and the second Hotel Vancouver are long gone, as is the CPR Station, a massive chateau-style building that dominated the foot of Granville Street. But Spencer’s Department store (now SFU) remains, as do several of the buildings between Richards and Homer. The former Royal Bank of Canada is now the film production campus of the Vancouver Film School, the Flack Block built in 1898 from proceeds from the Klondike is still east of Cambie, and what used to be the Central School, is now part of Vancouver Community College. Woods Hotel, just a year old when the film was shot, is now the Pennsylvania Hotel.

In 1907, the Province was one of three daily newspapers. An ad that year boasted that it was read in 90 percent of Vancouver homes, and sold for five cents.

How those times have changed.

I’m not sure how long in real time it would have taken Vance to get to work that day, but it took me most of the week to get him there on paper.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

The first time I heard about the Black Hand, I was researching Detective Joe Ricci for Sensational Vancouver.

Joe was a kick-arse Italian cop who worked for the Vancouver Police Department between 1912 and 1928 and didn’t get bogged down in the details. He’d kick down the doors of opium dens, shoot first and ask questions later, and not worry too much about legal things like warrants and warnings.

The Black Hand (La Mano Nera) was an extortion racket, a sort of early form of the Mafia, that was well established in major Italian communities in American cities in the early part of last century.

Typically, a member of the Black Hand Society would send a letter to a target threatening violence, kidnapping, arson or even murder if they didn’t pay protection money. The letter was often decorated with a smoking gun, a noose or a knife dripping with blood, and accompanied with the message: “held up in the universal gesture of warning” drawn in thick black ink.

In November 1923, Joe was flipping through the circulars and pictures of wanted criminals, when he stopped at one, sat back and whistled softly. Starring back at him was the face of Dominic Delfino, a lieutenant and hit man for the Black Hand Society who was wanted by every police department in the U.S. after his escape from jail several years before.

Just a few hours earlier one of Joe’s informants had tipped him off that a “very bad Italian—maybe a murderer” was being held in a jail cell in Nelson, BC, on an immigration charge. The prisoner had boasted: “I shot my way out of the death house, and they’ll never hold me very long.”

Delfino had been held in a county jail in Pennsylvania charged with multiple murders. Before he could be transferred to his execution in New York, two of his colleagues disguised as nuns managed to smuggle in a saw and a revolver. Delfino escaped, murdering four guards on the way out.

Joe decided to play a hunch and went to Nelson to see for himself. Delfino wouldn’t talk, but the detective identified him from the mug shot. Delfino was sent back to the States and electrocuted. Ricci received front page headlines and collected a $500 reward.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

Did you know that a commuter train used to run right through downtown Vancouver? I found out about it when I was over at Tom Carter’s studio checking out one of his amazing paintings. There it was, a train chugging across Hastings Street.

The train came up again when I was writing a blog post a couple of weeks ago about getting the star of my next book—Inspector Vance—from his home in Yaletown to his lab at Hastings and Main Street. The 1907 map that I downloaded from Vancouver Archives showed four large blocks from Hastings to Water Street and from Cambie to Carrall Street were occupied by the BC Electric Railway Company.

The streetcars were already in place by then, in fact had been since 1891, but the interurban train came later, in 1911 after the BCER opened its spiffy new terminal, and a car full of officials made the first trip from Vancouver to New Westminster on March 1.

It’s hard to imagine now, but over five kilometres of track ran through city streets.

Tom, who seems to have a bottomless well of ephemera when it comes to anything to do with Vancouver history—particularly buildings, theatres and transportation—sent along this map (above) of the BCER in downtown Vancouver from the 1920s.

At its height, BC Electric operated 457 streetcars and 84 interurbans.

And, some good news. The BCER’s formal terminal is still there on the corner of Carrall and West Hastings Street.

For an upcoming blog I’m going to try and put together a list of the top 10 worst decisions when it comes to destroying Vancouver’s history and heritage. But I’ve got to think that the “from rails to rubber” should be right up there with the demolition of Birks and the second Hotel Vancouver.

Essentially, rails to rubber meant the end of the streetcars and interurban system. It was a nod to the power of the car and a desire not to spend the money to upgrade the transit system. If you’ve tried to drive across Vancouver lately, you’ll likely agree that it was the dumbest decision ever.

Nevertheless, the last streetcar made its final run in Vancouver in 1955, and three years later, the last of the interurbans finished up service in Steveston.

Sources for this story:

• Tom Carter
• Canadian Rail, Jan-Feb, 2010
• Canada’s Historic Places: BCER Terminal
• The Buzzer Blog: A short history of interurbans in the Lower Mainland, 2009

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

If you live in Vancouver, you know that the Vancouver Art Gallery is housed in the old law courts, an imposing neo-classical building designed by celebrity architect Francis Rattenbury in 1906. What you may not know, and I did not until stumbling over a photo recently, was that the VAG started out in a gorgeous art deco building at 1145 West Georgia, a few blocks west from its current location.

The original 1931 building—the same year the VAG was founded—was designed by local architects Sharp and Thompson. It fit perfectly into the largely residential West End neighborhood of the times, had a main hall, two large galleries and two smaller ones with a sculpture hall, library and lecture hall. The names of what were considered great painters of the times (all non-Canadian, and all men) were carved at the entrance.

Charles Marega was commissioned to sculpture busts of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci which flanked either side of the front door. Architect George Sharp, a respected artist, taught at the Vancouver School of Art.

After the war, Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris, who lived on ritzy Belmont Avenue, raised $300,000, and the building was expanded to three times its original size. It could now accommodate 157 Emily Carr works, and the building was left alone for another three decades.

In 1983 the VAG moved into its current digs at the old courthouse. Two years later the art deco building was demolished. Now we have the Trump Tower and the FortisBC building in its old space.

For more in Our Missing Heritage Series see:

Our Missing Heritage (part one) The Georgia Medical & Dental Building and the Devonshire Hotel

Our Missing West Coast Modern Heritage (Part two)

Our Missing Heritage (part three) The Empress Theatre

Our Missing Heritage (part four) The Strand Theatre, Birks Building and the second Hotel Vancouver

Our Missing Heritage (part five) The Hastings Street Theatre District

Our Missing Heritage (part six)

Our Missing Heritage (part seven)

Our Missing Heritage (part eight) 

or just go to Our Missing Heritage for the complete, sad list.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.