Eve Lazarus's Blog: Every Place has a Story, page 21

The Lost Art of Lynn Vardeman

In 2012, Keith Carpenter a Vancouver artist and filmmaker, biked up to Simon Fraser University to visit a sculpture created by Lynn Vardeman.

Lynn was Keith’s photography professor in 1984. They’d become friends at the time but had lost contact over the years.

A talented photographer, filmmaker and sculptor, Lynn was born in Chicago but later moved to San Francisco to work and study.

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The 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 designed by celebrity architect Francis Rattenbury in 1906. What you may not know, was that the VAG started out in a gorgeous art deco building at 1145 West Georgia, a few blocks west from its current location.

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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 travels in countries such as Australia, Cuba, Mexico and Japan (Gone).

In the introduction to Here, he writes: “I see myself as a witness, certainly not an activist anymore or a serious historian.” I served on the board of the Vancouver Historical Society with Michael for several years and I see him as all these things.

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The Dunsmuir Tunnel

Story from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

While you’re stuck for an hour on the Lions Gate Bridge or crawling through the George Massey Tunnel, it may be comforting to know that traffic problems, just like the price of real estate, have always been an issue in Vancouver.

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The Cambie Street Rocket Ship

Story from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

Have you ever wondered why there’s a snazzy-looking rocket ship at the South-west end of the Cambie Street Bridge?

It was built for Expo 86, then shifted by helicopter to its current site after the fair ended.

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Peter Pantages and the Polar Bear Swim

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

It’s the 101st anniversary of the Polar Bear Swim on January 1, unfortunately like many events it won’t be happening at English Bay this year. Last year, it was the biggest event ever when about 7,000 people took the plunge.

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S1 E13 The Babes in the Woods Part 2

The Babes in the Woods is based on a story in Cold Case Vancouver: The city’s most Baffling unsolved murders

The Babes in the Woods is the story of two tiny skeletons found in Stanley Park in 1953. The case is still unsolved, but the investigation continues, and in part two I visit the site where the boys were found with the researcher who worked on a Babes in the Woods task force in the early 2000s.

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The Canada Post Tunnel

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

When the main Post Office was built on West Georgia Street in the 1950s, it was the largest welded steel structure in the world. It was essentially a five-storey machine that covered an entire city block, wrapped in an International style exterior and capped with a rooftop helipad—which was used all of twice before someone did the math and figured that delivering mail by helicopter from the post office to Vancouver International Airport wasn’t a viable option.

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S1 E12: The Babes in the Woods Part 1

The Babes in the Woods is based on a story in Cold Case Vancouver: The city’s most Baffling unsolved murders

The Babes in the Woods case is the story of two tiny skeletons found in Stanley Park. It is one of Vancouver’s oldest unsolved murder mysteries.

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We held a funeral for the Birks Building

Story from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History (also the cover photo). Photos by Angus McIntyre

At 2:00 pm on Sunday March 24, 1974, a group of about a 100 people, many of them students and professors from the UBC School of Architecture, came together in a mock funeral for the Birks Building, an eleven storey Edwardian masterpiece at Georgia and Granville with a terracotta façade and a curved front corner.

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