Vancouver’s oldest company is older than the city itself. The story began in Germany in the last century when four young brothers, Godfrey, Charles, David and Isaac Oppenheimer left their native Frankfurt “to help in building a new continent.”
Read More![Red Robinson [Photo: redrobinson.com]](https://vancouverhistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/red_72_0040-600x445.jpg)
In the Fifties the adult world looked upon us as a rebellious generation. As a part of that rebellion we had discovered the merits and talents of black singers. To buy a record by Lloyd Price, Ruth Brown, Wynonie Harris or Laverne Baker you had to go to a record store and ask for it by title and artist. The record clerk would bring it from the back of the store or from under the counter in a plain brown sleeve. They were called “race records” and were not featured on the racks along with all the nice lily-white recording artists of the day
Read More
The futuristic saucer-shaped revolving restaurant and observation deck that soars halfway to the moon in the night sky over Vancouver was opened by a man who went all the way.
Astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the lunar surface—on Sunday, July 20, 1969—was the perfect choice to christen the Harbour House Restaurant atop the Sears Tower…
Read More
His name was Malcolm Alexander MacLean, so it’s no surprise to learn that Vancouver’s first mayor spoke Gaelic like a Highlander. He was born in Tyree, Argyllshire on Scotland’s west coast, in 1844. He arrived in Granville in January of 1886, three months before it became Vancouver….
Read More
Researching the earliest years of the Vancouver Board of Trade turns out to be more interesting than we’d anticipated. Most of us know at least a little of the history of The Board’s first president, David Oppenheimer (who was also the city’s second mayor), but another figure pops up in those early years whose name has almost vanished into an undeserved obscurity.
Read More