Here & Gone: Vancouver’s Corner Stores
Michael Kluckner’s latest BC bestseller Here & Gone: Artwork of Vancouver & Beyond is gorgeous. One half is filled with his paintings of disappearing Vancouver (Here) and the other of his...
View ArticleThe First Vancouver Art Gallery
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History If you live in Vancouver, you know that the Vancouver Art Gallery is housed in the old law courts, an imposing neo-classical building...
View ArticleMissing Heritage: The Orillia
The Orillia is an excerpt from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History The Orillia was just a memory by the time I moved to Vancouver in the mid-1980s, but from time to time I see a...
View ArticleA short history of the 2400 Motel
I fell in love with the 2400 Motel on Kingsway 20 years ago when I was writing Frommer’s With Kids Vancouver. Loved the old fashioned, retro feel of the place and its huge red and blue neon sign. The...
View ArticleThe Lost Cemetery of Stanley Park
This story is from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History Mountain View Cemetery may have been Vancouver’s first official cemetery when it opened in 1886, but it certainly wasn’t...
View ArticleThe Imperial Roller Skating Rink and Other Missing Structures of Beach Avenue
For more stories like these please check out my new book Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History In 1907, more than 100 years before the famous laughing statues appeared at English...
View ArticleWould you buy a murder house?
A heritage house at Fraser and East 10th 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...
View ArticleBehind the Stone Wall on Lynn Valley Road
For more stories like this one, check out Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History, there’s a section on North Vancouver. I was driving along Lynn Valley Road for probably the...
View ArticlePacific Centre
Story and photos from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History When I moved to Vancouver from Australia in the mid-1980s, locals had already had a dozen years to get used to Pacific...
View ArticleWhose Chinatown?
I had the pleasure of visiting Griffin Art Projects with Tom Carter last Saturday. It’s a gallery of sorts hidden in an industrial building on Welch Street in North Vancouver. The exhibit features...
View ArticleHoward Fry and the Salt Spring Island Calendar’s 20th Anniversary
In 1999, Salt Spring Island was under threat. A German millionaire sold his holdings—roughly a tenth of the island—to Texada Land Corp. The company planned to log second-growth forest for development....
View ArticleThe Devonshire (1924-1981)
Story from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History The Devonshire originally opened as an apartment building, but within a few years was operating as the Devonshire Hotel. The...
View ArticleBC Binning’s Secret Mural
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History Next time you’re downtown and have a mascara emergency or need some aspirin, drop into the Shoppers Drug Mart at Granville and Dunsmuir....
View ArticleHow the First CPR Station became William Alberts House
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History The first transcontinental train arrived in Vancouver in May 1887, and it was a very big deal. Businesses closed for the afternoon, city...
View ArticleOur Missing Heritage: The Stuart Building
From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History The Stuart Building was a landmark that sat at the southeast corner of Georgia and Chilco Streets, marking the border between the city...
View ArticleJail for Sale
In a real estate crazed city like Vancouver where a heritage house can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars over its list price, turns out it’s just not that easy to sell an old jail. Realtor...
View ArticleBoot Hill: New Westminster’s Strangest Cemetery
In last week’s blog, I wrote about my visit to New Westminster to see the buildings that once formed part of BC Penitentiary, a federal prison that operated from 1878 to 1980. The most interesting part...
View ArticleWing Sang Building
Story from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History In 2006, I wrote a story for Marketing Magazine featuring Bob Rennie and his move into Chinatown. Just two years before, Rennie...
View ArticleWalks with Fred Herzog
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...
View ArticleWhen Harry met Percy
This story is from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History On May 30, 1959 Harry Jerome met Percy Williams—two of the most remarkable sprinters in Vancouver’s history. The meeting...
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