Eve Lazarus's Blog: Every Place has a Story, page 22

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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S1 E11: The Mount Pleasant Axe Murders

The Mount Pleasant Axe Murders podcast is based on a story from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

When police arrived at the house in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant area on December 10, 1965, the first thing they saw was the bright red Santa Claus painted on the front window.

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Our Missing Heritage: The Centennial Fountain

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

In 2014, the fountain that sat outside the former Vancouver courthouse was removed after nearly half a century. It had been turned off the year before after a leak was found in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s storage area. And, while the new rather sterile looking plaza hasn’t been wholeheartedly embraced, either was the fountain when it was designed by Robert Savery, a landscape gardener employed by the provincial government in 1966.

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S1 E10: The Renfrew Murders

Louise Wise turned 17 the week before she was murdered. A Grade 11 student at Windermere Secondary, Louise was the oldest of four children and lived on Lillooet Street in East Vancouver. Her father, Jack Wise, was a constable with the Vancouver Police Department.

A photo that ran in the newspapers shows a serious looking girl with brown hair pulled back off a face hidden behind large round dark-framed glasses.

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The Missing Telephone Operators of BC

November 5 is the 60th Anniversary of Vancouver’s last manual telephone exchange. Angus McIntyre writes about its history and the changeover.

By Angus McIntyre

If you grew up in the City of Vancouver in the 1950s you may well remember your telephone number looked like this: KErrisdale 3457-M. Or ALma 0609-L.

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