Urban Repurpose is a hoarders delight. It’s crammed full of furniture, books, music, art, books and panels from the St. Alice Hotel

SkyTrain officially opened for business on January 3, 1986. The first train left New Westminster station at 5:20 am. Angus McIntyre tells me that the initial test section opened in June 1983. “You could take a free ride from Terminal and Main Station.” He has the First Riders Club certificate to prove it.

You can watch my 2 minutes and 13 seconds of fame here: The Empress of Ireland’s BC Connection Global News – This is BC: It was great to chat to Jay Durrant about the Empress of Ireland on Global News this week. One of the biggest surprises for me while doing the research for Beneath… Continue reading Beneath Dark Waters on the 6 pm News

North Vancouver’s Maplewood Flats is a wildlife sanctuary about one-third the size of Stanley Park. In the 1970s, it was home to a group of artists and environmentalists, and for a couple of weeks, it hosted the Dollarton Pleasure Faire.
Warning: some of Bruce Stewart’s photos contain nudity (and maybe your grandparents)

How does a house with a view and a West Vancouver postal code for under a million bucks sound? How about a third of an acre for under $250,000, minutes from the beach? Welcome to Passage Island, a 32-acre paradise sitting at the entrance to Howe Sound.

I was thrilled to receive an email from Paul Fletcher last week. He wrote to tell me that he had read Beneath Dark Waters: The Legacy of the Empress of Ireland Shipwreck and that his maternal grandfather was Tracey Harley Archer. Lost wife and son: In May 1914, 33-year-old Tracey Harley Archer was travelling on… Continue reading Remembrance Day: Honouring Tracey Archer

In 1965, George Klippert was arrested and charged with four counts of gross indecency. He admitted to having consensual sex with four different adult males. A psychiatrist assessed him as “incurably homosexual.” Klippert was labeled a dangerous offender and sentenced to life in prison.

When Sharilyn Kuehnel worked at Opus Art Supplies on the ground floor of the Dominion Building, she had a couple of ghostly encounters. The store had occupied what was once a bank. The manager’s former office had been repurposed into the store’s community classroom, while the bank’s vault became the inventory room.

When the Grays bought the house on Heritage Lane in Saanich in 1990, they didn’t know that it came with a few ghosts.  

Between 1869 and 1948, Britain shipped more than 100,000 boys and girls, some as young as four to Canada to work on farms and as household servants. These kids were either orphans or from poverty-stricken families, and the thought was that they’d be better off in countries like Canada, Australia and South Africa. They weren’t.

Bruce Stewart sent me an email a couple of weeks ago, saying that he had come across some photos of store windows that he’d taken in the 1970s, was I interested in seeing them. Of course I was, and I think you’ll love them as well. Where most of us will see a jumbled store… Continue reading Vancouver’s Store Windows – an Essay in Photos

October 3, 1975, marks the 50th anniversary of the fire at Burrard Terminals which killed five men, severely burned twelve others, caused $8 million in damages, and destroyed the workhouse, track shed and a large part of the shipping gallery in the former Moodyville area.

September 25 is World Maritime Day, and this year’s theme is “Our Ocean, Our Obligation, Our Opportunity.” It’s a theme that could easily apply in 1914 when the Empress of Ireland sank, killing four more passengers than the Titanic. Oliver Mardall: One of those passengers was 31-year-old Ensign Oliver Mardall of Vancouver. Mardall was a… Continue reading The Empress of Ireland and Oliver Mardall

The Lonsdale Quay fountain broke down in 2020 and cost $300,000 to fix. So we didn’t. Now we can gaze upon the $200 million Superyacht instead

I’m hitting the road this month and next, and I’ll be in Kelowna, Nelson, Trail and Abbotsford with stops back in North Vancouver and Vancouver. If you’re in the area, please stop by and say hello, I’d love to see you! Thursday Sept 11, 4:00 pm:    Mosaic Books, Kelowna Thursday Sept 11, 6:00 pm:   … Continue reading On Tour!

Story by Eve Lazarus, photos by Bruce Stewart A half a century has gone by since Bruce Stewart took these photos of False Creek. By the time I arrived in Vancouver in the mid-1980s, the city was in the midst of final preparations for Expo ’86 and had already undergone massive change. False Creek was… Continue reading False Creek in the ’70s

By Sébastien Hudon In the summer of 2020, my colleague Louis Pelletier, an historian of early cinema, and I learned that some very old film reels were to be auctioned off in England and bids would be accepted online. The one that caught our attention related to the Empress of Ireland. Louis and I grew… Continue reading The Story of a Missing Film and a Broken Ring

If you’ve tried to drive on or off the North Shore, you’re likely no stranger to gridlock and road rage. An online petition was posted on change.org last week hoping to tap into that frustration. The petition is asking for a third crossing to take pressure off our aging bridges in the face of massive… Continue reading Third Crossing – Here we go again

If you live on the North Shore, chances are that you spend at least some of your summer at West Vancouver’s Ambleside Beach. Did you know that you are sitting on reclaimed land? Prior to 1965, much of this land was a swamp. In 1914, Ambleside was subdivided into lots and filled with makeshift homes… Continue reading A Brief History of Ambleside Beach

A Fred Hollingworth designed studio and carport, has been given a last-minute reprieve from the bulldozer, as the District of North Vancouver looks for a way to save the structures, according to an article by Brent Richter in the North Shore News this week. I spent quite a bit of time in that studio with… Continue reading Selwyn Pullan’s Studio