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

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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Behind 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 hundredth time this year, stopped at the traffic lights at Fromme. The Lynn Valley Care Centre is on the corner there, sitting behind a stone fence and a very big monkey tree.

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Would 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 murder history.

The Mount Pleasant house has sat empty for 30 years—since the day in August 1991 when the 20-year-old resident was murdered.

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The 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 Bay, the Imperial Roller Skating Rink opened in Morton Park at Denman and Davie Streets. Roller skating was surging in popularity and the rink was housed in a big wood framed building with a huge tower that looked out over Beach Avenue and boasted the “largest skating floor on the continent.”

In 1912 for instance, you could go skating at the Roller Rink and wander across the road, past the Englesea Lodge and out along the English Bay Pier.

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The 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 the first. Bodies had been buried on Deadman’s Island in Coal Harbour for thousands of years, and those who didn’t want their relatives interred  alongside the socially undesirable, the diseased or unchristened, moved their burials further into Stanley Park.

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A 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 freshly painted green and white bungalows had the feel of a country cabin.

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Missing 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 mention or a photo of this early mixed-use structure at Robson and Seymour.

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