Eve Lazarus's Blog: Every Place has a Story, page 16

The Marvellous Inventions of Barney Oldfield (1913-1978)

You can be forgiven if National Inventors’ Day (February 11) passed you by yesterday, but it gives me a great excuse to write about one of British Columbia’s own treasures.

Horace Basil (Barney) Oldfield was a mechanical genius and inventor who lived most of his life in Saanich, just outside of Victoria. He and brother Brian founded the Prospect Lake Garage in 1934 on Old West Saanich Road, which amazingly still operates as a family-run business.

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BC Binning’s Missing Murals

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

BC Binning wasn’t just an important artist; as a teacher, he influenced architects such as Arthur Erickson, Ron Thom and Fred Hollingsworth. His tiled murals are still outside the BC Hydro building (now the Electra Building) on Burrard Street, as well as in and outside his West Vancouver house which was designated a heritage building in 1999 and a National Historic Site in 2001.

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Henry Switzer and his Shocking Pink House

A few years ago, I wrote a story about a West Vancouver house that became a local landmark. Readers told me that they fondly remembered the pink house on the hill as the “airplane house,” the “Jetsons House,” the “windmill house,” and the “helicopter house,” because it appeared to have wings. Legend has it that Henry Switzer designed the house in an afternoon.

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Barr and Anderson: Established 1898

Back in the 1960s, Doug Archer was an apprentice plumber with Barr and Anderson, a Vancouver company founded in 1898 and the name behind the mechanical work in some of our oldest buildings – a few of which still stand.

Recently, Doug sent me photos of eight of the buildings they had worked on.

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Victory Square: What was there before?

This story is from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

Heritage Vancouver released their annual top 10 watch list last month, and rather than look at endangered buildings, they have focused on space. I was interested to find Victory Square on the list—or rather not the square itself, but the buildings that surround it, some of which date back to the 1800s.

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How Drawings and Photos are Reminders of Vancouver’s Missing History

Janet Stewart was going through her mother Edna’s things after she passed away recently and came across four sketches by Frits Jacobsen of various Vancouver buildings in the late 1960s. She googled his name, came across a story by Jason Vanderhill on my blog and kindly sent me photos.

I posted Jacobsen’s drawing of the corner of Hornby and Nelson Streets from 1969 on my Facebook page Every Place has a Story.

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Behind the Wall at the Hotel Vancouver

This story is from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History. This is my last blog for 2021, thank you so much for following. I’ll be taking orders for signed books for delivery before Christmas until Monday December 6. 

When Beatrice Lennie graduated from the first class at the Vancouver School of Decorative and Applied Arts (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design) in 1929, it took four piano movers to shift her diploma piece.

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Remembering Olga Hawryluk (1922-1945)

Thursday November 25 is International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. This is the story of Olga Hawryluk, 23 that first appeared in my book Blood, Sweat, and Fear: The Story of Inspector Vance and is also a podcast.

On May 2, 1945, Olga finished her shift at the Empire Café on West Hastings at 2:30 am and was walking to her home in the West End.

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Doug Bennett, Doug and the Slugs (1951-2004)

The idea behind my book Sensational Vancouver is that a house has a social history or a genealogy much like a person, and it was a way for me to tell stories about Vancouver’s famous and infamous, ordinary and extraordinary filtered through the houses in which they lived. One of the stories in the book is about Doug Bennett, lead singer of Doug and the Slugs, and the house he and his wife Nancy bought in 1987.

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Thornton Tunnel

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

There is a fake house at the corner of Frances Street and Ingleton Avenue in Burnaby that has fooled even some of its closest neighbours since 1967. Rumours have spread that it’s everything from a government safe house to an animal crematorium, but the truth is far more interesting.

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