I am very sorry to learn of the death of Bob McDonald on June 19 at the age of 76. Vancouver has lost one of its preeminent historians.

Bob's book on the city's early years, Making Vancouver, 1863-1913 (UBC Press, 1996), is a subtle and groundbreaking study which I return to again and again for my own work. A longtime professor of history at UBC, he was past president of the Vancouver Historical Society and a fixture at its monthly meetings, which is where I used to run into...

Speaking of Vancouver in the Fifties, as I was last time, I was struck recently by this photograph from the archives (Vancouver Public Library 81817). It shows the city's West End looking north across Burrard Inlet to the mountains. You can see that there are pretty well no tall buildings west of Burrard Street, which is the main thoroughfare running north from the bridge.

The...

One of my favourite books about Vancouver is Eva Hoffman's 1989 memoir Lost in Translation. Hoffman writes about her life growing up in Poland and emigrating to Canada with her parents and sister when she was just entering her teens at the end of the 1950s. The family settled in Vancouver and judging from her book Eva hated everything about the city, which she called "a bit of nowhere."

With the bracing certainty of adolescence, she dismissed the people as shallow and...

On a recent sunny afternoon we completed our amble south along the Arbutus Greenway from the heart of Kerrisdale to the Fraser River. (See Part One and Part Two.)

I have to admit that there is not much to interest the strolling civic historian in this...

Today's New York Times has an article about the Nanaimo Bar, that custardy treat that according to the Times all of us up here north of the border just can't get enough of. (Does that make me less of a Canadian? I have never liked them, too sweet.) There is even a recipe.

The origin of the bars has always been hard to pin down. The Times puts it in the 1950s and suggests that they were...