The City of Vancouver, incorporated April 6, 1886, is 124 years old on Tuesday. To mark the event, writer Chuck Davis — whose eye for the strange and obscure is keen — wandered through his website, www.vancouverhistory.ca, looking for 124 oddities in the city’s past. That website is a kind of preview of Chuck’s forthcoming book, The History of Metropolitan Vancouver. There are more than 2,000 pages of local history on the site, most of which are not strange and obscure.
Chuck Davis marks the City of Vancouver’s birthday with 124 strange and obscure facts
In 1880 the influential London Truth newspaper editorialized: “British Columbia is not worth keeping. It should never have been inhabited at all. It will never pay a red cent of interest on the money that may be sunk in it.”
In 1792, a Spanish exploration party in these waters taught the local native people a song called Malbrouck, and recorded in their journals that the men were singing the song as they paddled away. We know the tune as For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.
On Jan. 6, 1953, Vancouver’s longest wet spell began. It ended 29 days later. There had been recorded rain on every one of those 29 days.
In 1878 the Moodyville Tickler, Burrard Inlet’s first newspaper, appeared. It had a very brief, tongue-in-cheek existence. For example, if you paid more than the going rate for an obituary, it became more complimentary.
In 1886, with a population of about 1,000, Vancouver had three daily newspapers.
It is said that in 1867, when newly-arrived John (Gassy Jack) Deighton arrived at Burrard Inlet, he told the mill workers there they could have all the whiskey they could drink if they helped him build his saloon. The Globe went up in 24 hours.
In 1883 the first locomotive arrived in Vancouver ... on a ship. It was used for local work.
In 1861, Col. Richard Moody of the Royal Engineers named a big island in Richmond in honour of 16-year-old singer Lulu Sweet, a visiting member of a touring San Francisco musical revue.
On Feb. 12, 1954 the first “civilian” to drive over the brand-new Granville Street Bridge — the third bridge built at that site — was the same woman who was first to drive over the second bridge when it was new in 1909. She had been widowed between the two openings, and so had a different name ... but both times she was at the wheel of a brand-new Cadillac.
In 1893, the exclusive Vancouver Club was formed. Shortly after its inauguration it ran into financial problems, and its china and silverware were repossessed. They were used — complete with the club’s crest — in the restaurant of the man who had supplied the stuff.
In 1930, a world record for egg-laying was set by “No Drone, No. 5H,” a hen from the Whiting farm in Surrey. She had laid 357 eggs in 365 days. “No Drone” was preserved for posterity and her stuffed form put on display at the World Poultry Congress in Rome.
In 1869 our first (unofficial) postmaster was hotel owner Maxie Michaud. He had walked here from Montreal.
On Aug. 21, 1949, the biggest quake in B.C.’s recorded history, 8.1 on the Richter scale, occurred off the Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwaii). Its major force was felt to the uninhabited west of the islands and damage was minimal. Newspapers reported on one local result: A clock had stopped in the home of Mrs. Laurie Sanders, Imperial Street in Burnaby.
In 1938 The Teahouse at Ferguson Point in Stanley Park, a restaurant today, was built as an officers mess for a military defence garrison.
In 1865 the first telegraph message from the outside world to arrive at Burrard Inlet told of the assassination of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln.
In 1965, the tunnel at Vancouver’s main post office, built to carry mail to the CPR station, was closed permanently for that purpose, having proved impractical. It would later be used for storage and creepy movie scenes.
In the 1880s, a company of American cavalry raided an Apache village in Arizona. Among other things, they discovered a stack of Canadian Pacific Railway pamphlets advertising lots in Vancouver’s posh “Brighouse Estates.”
In 1889, the writer Rudyard Kipling visited Vancouver and bought land here: two lots at the southeast corner of East 11th Avenue and Fraser Street.
In 1900, the Canadian Pacific Railway financed a film to promote Canadian immigration to the West. It took two years to film because the filmmakers weren’t allowed to show snow.
In 1901, on June 23, there was snow in South Vancouver.
In 1926, baseball’s Babe Ruth hammed it up on stage in Vancouver during a personal appearance tour of North America. He posed as a batter, with Vancouver mayor L.D. Taylor crouching behind him as catcher, and the city’s chief of police grimly umpiring.
In 1938, the Vancouver Art Gallery board refused to buy an Emily Carr picture, priced at $400, because, said art writer Tony Robertson, “it wasn’t art as they understood art. They were eventually persuaded it was and paid up.”
On Jan. 16, 1953 police raided the Avon Theatre on Hastings Street, presenting Erskine Caldwell’s play Tobacco Road, and arrested the cast on charges of an indecent performance. One of the cast appeared to be peeing into a cornfield.
In October 1961, the RCMP raided Vancouver bookstores and the main library to seize copies of Henry Miller’s novel Tropic of Cancer. Today, you can buy Miller’s book at drugstore book racks.
In 1882, when the first electricity came to B.C. (at the Moodyville sawmill on the north shore of Burrard Inlet) the mayor and council of Victoria made a special trip over here to see the lights turned on.
In 1884 huge, knot-free beams, 34 metres (112 feet) long by 70 cm (28 inches) square were shipped to Beijing from Burrard Inlet sawmills. They’re still there, part of the Imperial Palace.
In 1931, Vancouver International Airport opened. Cowley Crescent, the road surrounding the first terminal, was created when the airport’s designer, William Templeton, took a pencil and traced a line around a light bulb held down on the plans. You can still see that bulb-shaped road from the air today.
In 1931, a party of local dignitaries was taken up in a plane on the day the airport opened to see what it looked like from the air. A well-known city alderman became airsick up there and threw up in the police chief’s hat.
On July 22, 1931 Jack Kendrick, who later worked as a commissionaire at the airport in the early 1990s, was born. This is the same day that the airport opened.
In 1886, butcher George Black organized horse races down muddy Granville Street.
On Feb. 16, 1940 the Canadian premiere of Gone With The Wind was held at Vancouver’s Orpheum Theatre. Vivienne Leigh’s daughter happened to be attending a private school here, and was in the audience (unannounced, at her mother’s insistence).
In 1886, when the city’s first fire engine and its supporting equipment arrived (two months after the Great Fire), there were no horses available to pull it. For a time, it had to be pulled to fires by the firefighters themselves.
In 1960, during construction of the Trans-Canada Highway through the Fraser Valley, a man named Charlie Perkins stood guard over his ivy-covered fir tree, directly in the path of the new road. He had dedicated the tree to fallen comrades in the First World War, and the public outcry over the possible destruction of the tree resulted in the engineers curving the road around it, a unique circumstance in the construction of a national highway. You can see that curve on the Trans-Canada to this day.
In 1905, the first auto club race around Stanley Park was held. Eleven cars started, five finished. All the finishers were Oldsmobiles.
In 1908 “Jeff, the Boxing Kangaroo” amused big crowds in Vancouver at the Pantages Theatre.
By 1965, the funky old building at Main Street and East 15th Avenue in Vancouver, originally Postal Station C, later a federal department of agriculture office block, had been empty for three years. A special investigation branch of the RCMP moved in. The Mounties would be there until 1976. (Today, it’s Heritage Hall.)
In 1891, when the population of Vancouver was about 13,000, the Vancouver Opera House, built for the Canadian Pacific Railway, opened on Granville with 2,000 seats.
In 1886, the first badges for the Vancouver police were made of American silver dollars, with one side smoothed down and engraved Vancouver City Police.
In 1910, a man in Surrey was fined $10 for speeding in his 1907 Marion car. He was travelling at 12 miles per hour.
In 1891, world-famed actress Sarah Bernhardt appeared in Vancouver, but audience numbers fell off sharply when it was found she acted only in French.
On Nov. 6, 1942, in wartime Vancouver, one of the lions (carved in 1908 by John Bruce) in front of the provincial courthouse, (now the Vancouver Art Gallery), carved in 1908 by John Bruce, was damaged by a bomb. The culprit was never caught.
In 1924, local newspapers reported that the Point Grey wireless station had picked up mysterious signals from the planet Mars. It was believed the Martians were attempting to contact us.
In 1892, B.C. premier John Robson, after whom Robson Street was named, was visiting London, England. He got his finger caught in a cab door, infection set in, and he died.
On May 10, 1947, Vancouver schoolchildren circulated a petition calling for an end to wartime taxes on candy. In response, the price of chocolate bars was lowered from eight cents to seven cents.
In 1894, gold was discovered on Lulu Island.
In 1898, on Oct. 15, the Nine O’Clock Gun was fired for the first time in Stanley Park ... at noon.
On July 21, 1954, with landscaping on the largest quarry at the future Queen Elizabeth Park completed, Mayor Fred Hume buried a time capsule beneath Centuries Rock in the park. It is to be opened in 2054. Mark your Daytimer.
On Aug. 22, 1964, the Beatles hit Vancouver. There had been a delay at customs, and at a press conference later a reporter asked the boys why it had happened. John Lennon replied: “We had to be deloused.”
In 1899, the city’s first CPR station (a tiny building) was moved from the north foot of Howe Street to No. 10 Heatley Street. CPR worker William Alberts, who had been badly injured on the job, was allowed to move into the old, unused station and use it as a rent-free residence for the rest of his life. He lived there for 50 years.
In 1903, W.S. Holland shot and killed a timber wolf at the corner of Burnaby and Cardero streets in the West End.
On Oct. 12, 1953 Vancouver’s Frank Ogden — better known these days as Dr. Tomorrow — established the Canadian light-plane altitude record by flying a Mooney M-18 Scotsman to an altitude of 19,400 feet. With a conventional internal combustion engine, he set this “impossible” record by flying up until he ran out of gas and then gliding back. “It took place,” Ogden explained, “out of the Toronto Island Airport. The record has never been broken. Mainly, I suspect because most pilots are sensible enough to want 20 to 30 gallons of gas left in the tanks to get back. I flew up until I ran out of gas and glided back to the same airport.”
In 1909, brand-new world heavyweight boxing champ Jack Johnson fought an exhibition bout in Vancouver with boxer Victor McLaglen, who would later become an Oscar-winning movie actor.
In 1894, the forerunner of the Museum of Vancouver was created. The first donation was a stuffed swan.
In 1909, Vancouver took its first mechanized ambulance out for a test drive. It ran over and killed an American tourist.
In 1936, a group of local women, the “Flying Seven,” conducted the city’s first “flyover.” In the flyover the seven women — each of whom had her own plane — alternated their flights, keeping a plane aloft over the city for 24 uninterrupted hours as a demonstration of air defence.
In 1932, a 14-year-old boy named Gerald Hobbis, nicknamed Cap, traded a bunch of old magazines for his first bicycle. He repaired it in his basement and sold it for $10. Cap would become a hugely successful bicycle retailer.
All the grey squirrels in Stanley Park today are the offspring of a gift of eight pairs from New York City in 1909.
The ceiling on the second floor of the rotunda in Vancouver city hall, opened in 1936, was covered with gold leaf from several B.C. mines.
In 1936, on April 25, Vancouver retailer Charles Woodward, said: “My prediction is that within 40, at the outside 50, years Vancouver will be the largest city in Canada.” Not yet.
Mayor L.D. Taylor, who died in 1946, was once briefly married to two women at the same time. [See the Daniel Francis book, L.D. Taylor and the Rise of Vancouver for details.]
In 1910, Vancouver’s Cedar Cottage neighbourhood got its name from an Interurban train stop there. The station, in turn, was named for the Cedar Cottage Brewery.
In 1931, on Aug. 2, the Province newspaper had this startling lead to a story: “One person in every 300 in British Columbia is insane.”
In 1930, Vancouver got its first shipment of “Lillybet” dolls, modelled after five-year-old Princess Elizabeth, who is Queen Elizabeth II today.)
In 1927, a Wurlitzer pipe organ, with 13 sets of pipes, was shipped from the Wurlitzer factory in North Tonawanda, N.Y., to Vancouver for use in the brand-new Orpheum Theatre. It’s still there, the only pipe organ in Canada still in the theatre in which it was originally installed.
Sliced bread came to Vancouver in 1937.
When the parking meter came to Vancouver in 1946, the fee was five cents for one hour’s parking.
In 1922, visiting vaudeville entertainer Benny Kubelsky, performing at the (old) Orpheum Theatre, met a young Vancouver girl named Sadie Marks. They met again in Seattle in 1926 and were married. We know them better as Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone.
In 1912, a group of Vancouver businessmen conceived a plan to build a 15-metre-high dam across the Second Narrows. Port Moody, which would have been flooded, protested. Picky, picky.
When the Burrard Bridge opened in 1932, Cedar Street disappeared. When the bridge went in, it connected to Cedar Street south of the bridge. The name Burrard was simply extended and Cedar disappeared.
In 1912, an English revue company called Karno’s Comedians performed in Vancouver. Included in the cast: Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel. Their real fame would come later.
The 1937 movie The Great Barrier was an adventure based on the CPR’s crossing of the Rocky Mountains. The locomotive used in the movie that brings the first train in was No. 374, the actual locomotive that came into Vancouver in 1887, and which is now on display in the Roundhouse in Yaletown.
In wartime 1943, Kitsilano Beach was used for rehearsing commando beach assaults.
In 1928, on Jan. 1, 16-year-old Ivy Granstrom made her first entry into the chilly waters of English Bay in the Polar Bear Swim. Ms. Granstrom, blind from birth, would go on to appear at 77 consecutive Polar Bear events.
In 1918, RAF pilot Lt. Victor Bishop crashed his little H-2 “flying boat” onto the roof of a West End doctor. He stepped out of the plane into the upstairs hallway of the house and, with the assistance of one of the residents, walked down the stairs to the front door and outside through a gathered crowd to a waiting ambulance.
In 1929 Charles Lindbergh, visiting Seattle, refused an invitation from Vancouver mayor L.D. Taylor to fly into Vancouver because, Lindbergh said, “Your airport isn’t fit to land on.” That embarrassed Vancouver, and prompted the push to build one that was.
On Aug. 25, 1943 at rededication ceremonies in Stanley Park, the official party was driven by Frank Plant, who had driven Lord and Lady Stanley and Mayor David Oppenheimer and Mrs. Oppenheimer to the original dedication 55 years earlier.
In 1914, the mayor of Vancouver banned performances by visiting English music-hall performer Marie Lloyd. At one point in her show she had lifted her floor-length gown up two inches to reveal a watch on her ankle. The shameless hussy!
In 1920, in Surrey, loggers found an eagle’s nest so big it was too large for a farm wagon to haul away.
On Aug. 15 1949, radio’s Jack Cullen, who was switching stations, did his last show at CKMO and his first show at CKNW at the same time. He had taped his ’MO show earlier, and did his ’NW show live.
In 1917, during a business trip to Portland, Prussian-born Vancouver businessman Alvo von Alvensleben was arrested. It seems British intelligence officials had sent a list of “dangerous German spies” to the U.S. Justice Department, and Alvensleben’s name topped the list.
Some of the stained-glass windows at St. John’s Shaughnessy Anglican Church at Nanton and Granville Streets in Vancouver are made from shattered fragments of 11th century stained glass from England’s Canterbury Cathedral. The cathedral had been bombed during the Second World War.
In 1928, alderman J. DeGraves of the street-naming committee recommended to the Town Planning Commission that the name of Union Street be changed to Adanac, “Canada” spelled backwards. Done.
In 1964, Vancouver’s Mayor Bill Rathie and park board chairman George Wainborn drove the last spike in the Stanley Park miniature railway.
In 1930, the Barnet Lumber Mill in Burnaby was the largest in the world.
In 1919, more than two thousand pieces of Vancouver property were listed in the newspapers for sale by auction. They had been seized for nonpayment of taxes, some for amounts less than $10.
In 1932, the M.V. Scenic began service, the only floating post office in the British Empire. She would serve to 1968, known as the Burrard Inlet T.P.O. (Travelling Post Office.)
In 1938, a Vancouver Chinatown restaurant, C.K. Chop Suey, had its licence cancelled for employing two white waitresses.
One of the minor performers in the 1925 Lon Chaney movie treatment of Phantom of the Opera was Vancouver choreographer Aida Broadbent.
The statue (erected in 1921) in front of Vancouver’s CPR station of the angel bearing a fallen soldier heavenward is an exact replica of statues in Winnipeg and Montreal.
In 1936. B.C. was visited by the governor-general, Lord Tweedsmuir. He was better known as writer John Buchan, the author of a best-selling mystery, twice filmed, with a third version recently televised, titled The Thirty-Nine Steps.
In 1920, in November, construction on the Peace Arch was stopped to allow time for the concrete to set. It would not resume until June 1921.
In 1936, on July 4, a visiting cricket team from Hollywood came up to Vancouver to play a local team at Brockton Point. Included in the Hollywood team’s roster: Errol Flynn, Boris Karloff and C. Aubrey Smith.
On May 10 1955, Tommy Burns died in Vancouver at 74. He was the only Canadian to have been world heavyweight boxing champion. Four people attended his burial: a boxing fan and his wife and two gravediggers.
In 1921, Henry Green, musical director of an orchestra that became the genesis of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, skipped town with the orchestra’s money, never to be heard from again.
The Lost Lagoon fountain in Stanley Park, installed in 1936, was purchased from Chicago, a leftover from that city’s world fair.
In 1964, the Vancouver Public Aquarium captured the first killer whale ever to be studied alive in captivity. He (yes, he) became known as “Moby Doll.” He was originally thought to be female.
In 1923, on July 27, the first sitting U.S. president to visit Canada, Warren Harding, came to Vancouver. Fifty-thousand people turned out to hear him speak in Stanley Park. Exactly one week later, Harding died in San Francisco.
On April 6, 1945 the town of Coevorden, the Dutch city from which Capt. George Vancouver’s family derived its name, was liberated from Nazi occupation by Canadian soldiers. In a happy coincidence, April 6 is the City of Vancouver’s birthday. Coevorden, in Dutch, means “cow crossing.”
In 1920, in Port Coquitlam, a fire destroyed the firehall and half the buildings in the downtown. The fire had started in the fire chief’s kitchen above the firehall.
In 1929, the New Westminster Exhibition was opened by a British politician named Winston Churchill. The 55-year-old Churchill was not yet prime minister.
In 1924, Lansdowne Track in Richmond opened, named for a former governor-general. The peat bog on which the track was built acted like a sponge and horses ran slower at high tide.
In 1937 when B.C. premier Duff Pattullo opened the bridge named for him he said, “It is a thing of beauty.”
England-born Alan Young was a big hit from 1961 to 1965 in Mr. Ed, a sitcom about a talking horse. Young started in showbiz in 1937 at radio CJOR in Vancouver.
On Feb. 19, 1938, a mysterious big bang was heard in Vancouver. It woke thousands of people, yet no cause was ever found.
In 1937, The Vancouver Sun was forced out of its 125 West Pender location by a fire. It bought the building across the street and moved in there. The paper stayed there for the next 28 years. Forty-two years after the paper moved out, locals still call that building the Old Sun Tower.
In 1925, a Vancouver branch of the Ku Klux Klan, the racist organization that had originated in the Southern U.S., used the Tait Mansion in Shaughnessy as its headquarters. Rent was $150 a month. Today, that building is the children’s hospice, Canuck Place.
In 1934, a 20-year-old named Foncie Pulice set up a camera on the sidewalk on Granville Street in downtown Vancouver and began taking pictures of passersby. He would continue doing that for 45 years. It is said Foncie may have taken pictures of more people — millions — than anyone else in the world.
On Nov. 6, 1945, Vancouver city council cancelled an order that had established separate swimming days at Crystal Pool for non-white people. The pool, the Province reported, “is now open to everyone, all the time, regardless of race, creed, or colour.”
In 1930, more than 200 skeletons were found in Vancouver’s Marpole Midden.
Much of Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano — counted by many as one of the great books of modern literature — was written when Lowry lived in a squatter’s shack at Dollarton, on the north shore of Burrard Inlet. He moved there in 1940.
On Oct. 11, 1939, Vancouver’s first public aquarium opened. Manager was an American named Ivar Haglund, who later moved to Seattle and opened a restaurant called Ivar’s Acres of Clams.
In 1933, on June 9, Vancouver city council voted to allow men to go topless on city beaches.
In 1925, movie superstar Rudolph Valentino judged a tango competition in Vancouver.
In 1931, on July 3, Canada’s first baseball game played under lights took place at Athletic Park in Vancouver.
In 1941, there was a semi-professional football team in Vancouver called the Vancouver Grizzlies.
In 1927, on Oct. 17, the business magazine Journal of Commerce ran an editorial against the building of skyscrapers in Vancouver.
In 1926, the Joe Fortes Memorial Drinking Fountain was placed in Alexandra Park, much of the cost being raised from pennies donated by local schoolchildren, hundreds of whom had been taught to swim by Joe.
On Jan. 2, 1963 the Ubyssey, the student newspaper at the University of B.C., was named the best college newspaper in Canada. In 1955, a local minister had denounced it as the “vilest rag” you can imagine. They used that phrase as their motto for a time.
In 1938, 19-year-old Annabelle Mundigel became the first person to swim from Vancouver to Bowen Island. Not until years later did she reveal that she had slipped out of her bathing suit shortly after starting, handed it to her mother in a following boat, and swam the rest of the way clad only in lard. Yards from the island, she put the suit back on.
In 1925, on Jan. 8, a man was attacked by a shark in the First Narrows.