Vaudeville in Vancouver was huge given the age of the city and the era in which the theatrical genre thrived. From about the 1880s until the 1930s (when Vancouver was just growing up as a city) Vaudeville theatres around town — like the Pantages and the Orpheum — attracted popular traveling acts and kept locals […]

Vancouver is spectacular from almost any angle but I really love getting above it all when I’m taking a seaplane flight, helicopter ride, or am fortunate to do a ride-along with a traffic plane. There’s quite a bit of aviation history here in BC, as you can find in the Canadian Museum of Flight and […]

The PNE Forum building at Hastings Park holds its share of history, from hockey and lacrosse, to war-time injustices, roller derby and Nirvana. 1931: Archives# CVA 99-4015. Photographer: Stuart Thomson. Vancouver Exhibition Forum This 45,000 gross square foot building was constructed on the Vancouver Exhibition grounds in 1931. 1931: Construction of the Forum. Archives# CVA […]

One hundred years ago, our fair city was 28 years old and already survived a Great Fire, erected the tallest building in the British Empire, built a courthouse that stands today as the city’s art gallery, had a thriving interurban transit system and a population well over 100,000 (a fifth of what it is today). […]

The first tourist bus service began running in Stanley Park in 1908 but it wasn’t until the 1920s that a public bus service “challenged the supremacy of the electric streetcar”1 in Vancouver. 1940s: Grandview Hwy & the Bus Stop Coffee Shop. Archives# CVA 1184-3267. Photographer: Jack Lindsay. On March 19th, 1923 under BC Electric Railway’s […]