The Book

Publisher: Madeira Park, B.C. : Harbour Pub., c2011

The book The Chuck Davis History of Metropolitan Vancouver is a history of Vancouver and its suburbs. It is BIG, detailed, solidly informative and very readable. It covers everything from Bowen Island east to Langley. It was published by Harbour Publishing, and, according to the author Chuck Davis, “it is the capstone of my writing career.”

The Vancouver Board of Trade was the lead sponsor for the book, and local business leaders were encourage to join in sponsorship. Each year in the book is sponsored.

In this, his ambitious magnum opus, Chuck embraced 125 years of material, with the signature exuberance and talent for storytelling that made him one of Vancouver’s most successful and beloved journalists and broadcasters. This volume represents the culmination of his life as a folk historian, someone who was obsessed and delighted by all things Vancouver, and of his immense contribution to historical knowledge of the city of Vancouver. It was nearly realized, but not quite completed before his death in November, 2010.

Harbour Publishing worked with Davis on The Chuck Davis History of Metropolitan Vancouver for five years, and has collaborated with the Vancouver Historical Society to complete the volume in 2011 to mark the city’s 125th anniversary, as was the author’s plan. Arranged chronologically, and illustrated with a trove of archival photographs, this volume includes influential characters both famous, like White Spot founder Nat Bailey, and nearly-forgotten, like Sara Anne McLagan, the first female publisher of a daily newspaper in Canada, plus many tales of eccentric locals and celebrity visitors. Here too are Vancouver’s unforgettable and formative events, from the tragic collapse of the Second Narrows Bridge to the city’s first rock ‘n’ roll concert (“the ultimate in musical depravity”).

The story of how Vancouver grew from a ramshackle tumble of stumps, brush and crude wooden buildings to today’s urban metropolis turns out to be interesting, complicated, frequently rancorous and occasionally even funny. And the book is, as the author hoped, “fun, fat and filled with facts.”

 “Arranged chronologically and illustrated with the greatest collection of archival Vancouver photographs ever published in one book, this volume bristles with characters both famous and forgotten. Here too are Vancouver’s major events – great fires, floods, world wars, epidemics, depressions – but also, and perhaps more remarkable, a multitude of memorable minor events like city hall’s official attempt to shut down the Dupont Street red light district in 1906, the 1925 kidnapping of the main suspect in the sensational Janet Smith murder case by the Ku Klux Klan, and much, much more.

– Dust Jacket