Eve Lazarus's Blog: Every Place has a Story, page 20

Wing 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 paid a million dollars for the Wing Sang Building. He bought it sight unseen and didn’t go inside for the first six months.

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Boot Hill: New Westminster’s Strangest Cemetery

In last week’s blog, I wrote about my trip to New Westminster to visit the buildings that once formed part of BC Penitentiary, a federal prison that operated from 1878 to 1980. The most interesting part of the day though was finding Boot Hill, the jail’s cemetery which has become part of two large apartment buildings on the edge of a ravine just off Francis Way and Blackberry Drive.

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Jail 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 Leonardo di Francesco has had parts of the former BC Penitentiary on the market since last December, so this week I drove out to New Westminster to check out the buildings and former prison grounds.

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Our 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 and Stanley Park from 1909 until its demise in 1982.

It didn’t have the elegance of the Birks Building, the grandeur of the second Hotel Vancouver or the presence of the Georgia Medical-Dental Building.

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How 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 council adjourned its meeting, the city band and fire brigade led a parade of hundreds to the station and the Mayor arrived in Vancouver’s only horse-drawn cab to meet the train at the Canadian Pacific Railway station at the foot of Howe Street.

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BC 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. Once you hit the cosmetics area, you might just forget what you came in there for, because opposite the front entrance and right above the gift cards is one of the hidden wonders of Vancouver—a stunning tile mosaic created by legendary artist BC Binning in 1958.

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The 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 building sat between the Georgia Hotel and the Georgia Medical-Dental Building and closed 40 years ago this month to make way for the head office tower of the Bank of BC.

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Howard 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.

Salt Spring Island residents may be laid back, but they are dead serious about their trees. They organized a fundraising campaign to buy close to 2,000 acres and turn it into a park.

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Whose 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 stories, photos, videos and paintings about Chinatowns in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, many from private collections.

Some of Tom’s personal collection is featured and includes everything from scrapbooks from the Marco Polo, to postcards from Ming’s and Bamboo Terrace in the late ‘50s to souvenir photos from Mandarin Gardens and Forbidden City.

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Pacific 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 Centre and the “Great White Urinal”—the name they’d not so affectionately dubbed the Eaton’s department store building.

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