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 [...]

They 99th Grey Cup Championship is coming to Vancouver at the end of this week with a parade, festival, and final game in which our BC Lions are participating. The Lions had a bumpy start to their season at Empire Field but moved into their renovated home at BC Place and stormed up the ranks [...]

The Chinatown Festival this weekend will be celebrating the 125th anniversary of Vancouver’s Chinatown. Given that the City of Vancouver is only 124, it’s important to get to know this historic community. 500 block of Carrall near Pender. 1900s. Archives item# CVA 677-580 Background and history: “Vancouver’s Chinatown is a community with a long history. [...]

The Seawall is not only an icon of our city, stretching its arms around Stanley Park and the downtown core, but it’s a regular hang-out for locals and visitors alike. Starting today, there will be a detour at Sunset Beach while they do some reconstruction on some older portions of the retainer. Making sure that [...]

The Gastown Business Improvement Association founded the Gastown Blog in the summer of 2009 to breathe some new life into this historic community. With daily features, history lessons and business profiles, it’s a one-stop source for Gastown information. Over the last few weeks the Gastown Blog launched an initiative to put QR codes on old [...]

There are names you see around town yet rarely place them or their historical significance. From Abbott to Tatlow or Shaughnessy, Malkin is right up there. W.H. Malkin was a a major food wholesaler (Malkin’s Wholesale Grocers was at 57 Water Street) who became the Mayor of Vancouver 1929-1932. He slipped into the Mayor’s office [...]

The Atlas Obscura is an online directory resource for unique, intriguing, amusing, and peculiar attractions around the globe. Being a fan of historic and cultural oddities, I figured this would be a great thing to cover. On March 20th they are hosting “Obscura Day” highlighting the best destinations from South America to the North Pole. [...]

Exploring more of Vancouver’s history this week I took a gander at the listed photograph subject terms that I can search through on the City of Vancouver Archives website. Finding some of the most obscure results, I thought it would be fun to post a few retrospective photos of our city, featuring some unusual imagery. [...]

Photo: Kris Krug – 2005 Meeting under the Birks clock is as “Vancouver” as whistling the $1.49 Day Woodward’s jingle or stampeding through Army & Navy on shoe sale day. The iconic timepiece stood outside Birks’ flagship store on Granville and Hastings and was moved to Georgia and Granville – spending time at town major [...]

Although Stanley is our most famous, there are more than 200 other parks in our City that range from wetland, dog parks, beachfront, forest trails, golf courses, and colourful playgrounds. Some parks are named for their neighbourhood or geographical location however many are named in honor of a person. Lord Stanley – Stanley Park, Photo [...]