Places Archive

It was a treat to stand by the Parker Carousel at Burnaby’s Village Museum and remember a time—a very long time ago—when I actually rode a merry-go-round. My daughter’s past the age where she’d want to, and I’d feel silly. Although it’s tempting!

Thursday, July 24 was a memorable day. Harvey Oberfeld and I were the guests of Brian Forst aboard Brian’s lively 26-foot Sea Ray, the Thai Dancer, on a trip to the head of Indian Arm, site of the famous Wigwam Inn. …

This year marks the 77th anniversary of one of the more unusual moving jobs in Vancouver—when a barge took the city’s oldest building from its location at the foot of Dunlevy Street and, in the words of the archivist of that day, “tenderly transported it across the water to this beautiful park and set it down again, for safekeeping, among the flowers”….

Green Timbers Urban Forest in Surrey is unique: it consists mainly of trees planted from seedlings in the first attempt at reforestation in British Columbia. It sits on a square mile of forest astride the Fraser Highway. Stand by that highway and look east, and you’re directly facing Mount Baker. This highway was originally the Yale Wagon Road to the interior, built by the Royal Engineers in 1875….

At midnight on July 16, 1933 all trains of the Canadian Pacific Railway—which had been running at street level through downtown Vancouver for decades, infuriating motorists—came off the city’s busy streets and switched to a new tunnel. The railway would use the 1,396-metre-long (4,579 feet) tunnel for nearly 50 years. Today it’s used by SkyTrain….