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Create AccountAn ornate Shaughnessy mansion, home to a hospice for sick children supported by the Vancouver Canucks hockey team, was once the headquarters of the British Columbia branch of the racist Ku Klux Klan.
The fairy-tale bridge whose image more than any other symbolizes Vancouver was actually built by a beer company to develop its land investment in West Vancouver.
If you were strolling down Granville Street in post-war Vancouver, chances are that an affable photographer would step out from behind his camera to tell you that he’d just snapped your picture. Foncie Pulice was his name, and the sidewalk was his studio.
Gregor Robertson, politician, entrepreneur, MLA, mayor of Vancouver (2008–18) (born 18 September 1964 in North Vancouver, BC). Robertson served as the 39th mayor of Vancouver for ten years, the longest consecutive term in Vancouver’s history. He won three consecutive terms in 2008, 2011 and 2014. During his time as mayor, he helped to create and implement the Greenest City 2020 Action Plan while facing many challenges, including rising housing costs, homelessness and Vancouver’s opioid crisis.
The Carnegie Community Centre is a thriving refuge in the Downtown East Side. It occupies what was once the Carnegie Library — not only the main library for Vancouver, but for years the resting place of the Vancouver Museum’s most popular attraction: Princess Diane, an eternal visitor from Luxor, Egypt. She has proven to be a mummy with a very mysterious past.
A Parks Board gardener, clearing leaves near Beaver Lake, came across a cheap fur coat. Lifting it up, he made a grisly discovery — the skeletal remains of two young children. Dubbed the Babes in the Woods by the press, the sensational, unsolved case remains a haunting piece of Vancouver lore.
When BC Electric chairman Dal Grauer decided to move to new headquarters south of Georgia Street, he wanted a building that would symbolize optimism and progress. What he got was a gleaming 21-storey modernist structure that glowed with electric light 24 hours a day.
That stately building at the northwest corner of Hastings and Granville is known as the Sinclair Centre today. It houses federal offices, upscale clothing shops and a small mall. It was once Vancouver’s main Post Office, the site of “Bloody Sunday,” a violent Depression-era clash between police and unemployed workers.
When Capt. Jack Deighton and his family pulled their canoe onto the south shore of the Burrrard Inlet in 1867, Jack was on one more search for riches. He had been a sailor on British and American ships, rushed for gold in California and the Cariboo, piloted boats on the Fraser River and ran a tavern in New Westminster. He was broke again, but he wasted no time in starting a new business and building the settlement that would become Vancouver.
The Bowmac sign on Broadway was the largest freestanding electric sign in the world. It could be seen all the way from Burnaby, miles away. For a short while in 1965 it also helped a promoter hide the slow murder of his wife by arsenic-laced milkshakes.
When a troupe of English Music Hall entertainers swept through Vancouver in 1911, the star was an acrobatic little comedian who would soon become one of the most famous people in the world: Charlie Chaplin. Another player would carve his own niche in entertainment history, too. Arthur Stanley Jefferson became a beloved star after he changed his name to Stan Laurel and teamed up on film with Oliver Hardy.
Vancouver had never seen anything like it, a skyscraping wedding cake animated with flying geese, swimming fish and hovering zeppelins. The Marine Building was — and still is — a masterpiece of Art Deco architecture, but it was a financial disaster from the day it swung open its magnificent gilded doors.
The Second Narrows Bridge was intended to replace the nearby, accident prone bridge which had been hit countless times by ships. But on June 17, 1958, while still under construction, the new span suddenly seemed to inherit the curse of its forebearer.
Surrey, British Columbia, incorporated as a city in 1993, population 517,887 (2016 census), 468, 251 (2011 census). The city of Surrey is the second-largest municipality by population in British Columbia, after Vancouver. Part of Metro Vancouver, it is bounded by the Fraser River on the north and Washington state on the south. The municipalities of Langley and Delta lie to the east and west.
Constable Robert McBeath stopped a drunk driver on Granville Street in the wee hours of an October morning in 1922. It was routine police work for the twenty-four year-old constable, but it would cost him the life he had risked just a few years before, when he earned the Victoria Cross at the Somme.
The first gasoline-powered automobile had arrived in Vancouver in 1904, and there were not many more by 1907. But that year someone in the local Imperial Oil office determined that filling cars with a bucket and funnel was not very safe. So the first Canadian filling station — a hot-water tank and a garden hose — was set up at the company’s storage yard at Cambie and Smithe.
The labour camp strikers who assembled in Victory Square on April 23, 1935 wanted financial assistance from the city. Battered by the Depression and angry at conditions in the camps, the crowd of 2,000 demanded change. Mayor Gerry McGeer gave them an ultimatum instead.
The sparkling white terra cotta tiles of the Birks building lit the southeast corner of Granville and Georgia from 1913. Inside, sparkling jewelry, silver and fine china attracted the most demanding, and wealthy, clientele. It was a shock to the city when the Birks family decided to tear the impressive grand dame down in 1975.
“Meet me at the Birks clock” was the standard Vancouver rendezvous plan in the pre-cell phone era of 1913 to 1974. But the Birks clock itself has been a wandering timepiece. It started at Granville & Hastings, moved to Granville & Georgia, and returned to its original intersection — but across the street!
The Hudson’s Bay Company staked its claim to the northeast corner of Georgia and Granville in 1893. Through changes in fashion, technology and politics — as well as some architectural refinements — it has remained there ever since.
