I love stepping under the canopy of Stanley Park‘s forest trails, detouring from the concrete paths of the Sea Wall and surrounding thoroughfares. A few years ago I profiled the origins of several Stanley Park Trail Names including Merilees, Rawlings, Tatlow, Thompson, and Tisdall. Tourism Vancouver recently launched their ultimate guide to Stanley Park (useful […]

New Westminster will be celebrating the 120th anniversary of the Burr Block building this month. The old provincial capital was destroyed by fire in 1898 (twelve years after Vancouver’s “Great Fire”) and the Burr Block at 411-419 Columbia Street was only one of two buildings that remained. Today, it’s the home of the Met Hotel, […]

Walking around Stanley Park nowadays there are hardly any remnants of the zoo that once housed over 50 species of animals, from monkeys and cobras to penguins and kangaroos. However, the old cement polar bear habitat still haunts the grounds just west of Brockton Oval and south of the Vancouver Aquarium. When I was young […]

Look at an image of Vancouver before the 1990s and you’ll notice a very different landscape. Apartment towers have sprouted up at a rate of 3,000 units per year, which is 1,000 more annually than twenty years ago. Moving away from brick and stone, transforming into a city of glass. Apartment-dwellers outnumber those in row […]

Vancouver is only going on 126 years old but despite its infancy compared to most other world-class cities, it had a community that supported the arts right off the bat. I dug around the Vancouver Archives to find evidence of everything from Vancouver’s vibrant vaudeville days to its fanatical film-going culture, in neighbourhood theatres to […]