Vancouver Exposed. Eve Lazarus

school owner Maxine MacGilvray, the English Bay Pier, the Hippocampus fish and chip shop and the distinctive Stuart Building. The neighbourhood is still home to the century-old Polar Bear Swim, a long-forgotten cemetery and several of Vancouver’s buried houses.

      In the section of the book that encompasses the city west of Main Street, there are ghost signs on buildings to remind us of businesses past, and there are the houses of Downtown South, that mostly exist only in memory. There is an exotic museum that is now a record store, a former bootlegging joint turned restaurant and a sheet-metal rocket ship.

      In the section about what lies east of Main Street there’s Chuck Currie’s red-and-white polka-dotted house, an infant memorial garden, an axe murder, the annual summer spectacle of the Pacific National Exhibition and the Japanese internment camps at Hastings Park.

      The North Vancouver section features a murder in a convent and a monument to remember the atrocities of the residential school system. Just across Burrard Inlet from downtown Vancouver, Canada’s oldest nudist camp, an annual belly flop competition and an inn that has served as a resort, a brothel and an illegal gambling establishment are all fair game.

      Got your own story about Vancouver’s hidden history, or something to add? Post a comment on my blog, or get in touch at [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you!