Brass eagle and rusty snare
Cordova and Abbott Vancouver
Dear Photograph,
Vancouver Canucks forward Alex Burrows makes his way to the ice at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville. The original photograph was taken two years ago, while we shot this during a road trip on April 15th, 2013.
-Vancouver Canucks
*Submit your #DearCanucks photo to the Canucks by a tweet it or post it on Instagram using the hashtag #DearCanucks.*
Lovely spring Strathcona stroll earlier. #latergram #vancouver #pretty #springstagram
311 Cordova Street, 1892
A man in a wheelbarrow is pushed by the loser of a bet regarding the United States presidential election.
Source: Photo by Bailey Bros., City of Vancouver Archives #Str P82
I love how the dog is all ‘I DID NOT AGREE TO THIS HUMILIATION’
In #Vancouver, spring always looks this pretty, even thru THIS FILTHY a bus window. #springstagram
Guess who’s back!
(Source: haunology)
Imperial Opera House, Friday 27 September 1889
Artifact HistoryProbably belonged to James Codville (see H993.33.1) as the program came from his son’s papers. James Codville may have attended the performance of J. W. Bengough, ‘Canada’s unrivalled caricaturist and entertainer’ from Toronto and editor of “Grip” ( a humorous magazine), staged at Imperial Opera House on Sept. 27th, 1889.
The Imperial Opera House was on Pender Street at Beatty.
Source: Museum of Vancouver #H993.33.7
Fun things to do in Vancouver, 1880s-style.
Ada Bricktop Smith, 1920
Ada “Bricktop” Smith was a singer and dancer from Chicago who spent 1919 and 1920 in Vancouver with the house band at the Patricia Café. Although not a familiar name today, Bricktop is notable for a number of reasons, the least of which is her singing ability.
Bricktop (so named because of her red hair) was already well known on the club circuits, but it wasn’t until she got to France a few years after her Vancouver stint that she hit the big time. Cole Porter saw her perform one of his songs and immediately became a fan. She taught his friends how to dance the Charleston and the Black Bottom and he in turn helped her get set up with her own club, Chez Bricktop, the hottest club in jazz age Europe.
Bricktop was the doyenne of Paris’s café society and of the ex-pat American “lost generation.“ Langston Hughes worked at Chez Bricktop, and she once threw a drunk John Steinbeck out, for which he later apologized by sending over a taxi filled with roses. Cole Porter’s classic Miss Otis Regrets was written for her, as was Django Reinhardt’s Bricktop. TS Elliot wrote a poem about her and F Scott Fitzgerald insisted ”my greatest claim to fame is that I discovered Bricktop before Cole Porter.” She also mentored and had a fling with Josephine Baker, and before going to Europe helped Duke Ellington get his first club gig in Harlem.
But before all that, Bricktop was singing at Hastings and Dunlevy at “the finest cabaret and cafe in the entire northwest,” in the words of the Chicago Defender, an African American newspaper that served as a social networking tool for vaudevillians, musicians, railway porters, and others on the road.
On 14 February 1920, the paper published an update that Bricktop had sent from Vancouver. She was doing fine, she said, but had had “the misfortune of breaking one of her limbs on Christmas Eve after a lengthy visit to someone’s cellar, but the break is mending rapidly and she will soon again be able to strut her stuff with her usual vim and pep.” The version she gives in her autobiography is that her leg was broken in a barroom brawl that erupted among the Scandinavian loggers who frequented the Patricia. She also told the Defender that her mother would be spending the summer with her in Vancouver and that letters could be sent to 848 East Georgia Street.
Source: Ada Bricktop Smith in Vancouver, 1920, from Bricktop by Bricktop with James Haskins (Atheneum, 1983), via RiverwalkJazz.org
Damn, girl, you be lookin FIIINE. #springstagram #vancouver
Motorcycle, 1970s
Source: Photo by Al Ingram, City of Vancouver Archives #800-3297
Matchy matchy!
Andy Dixon
Olympia, After Manet
2013
andydixon.net
This guy is a MASSIVE talent. Just look at this bright beauty.
Woman and swan, 1950s
Source: Vancouver Public Library #41035
Vancouver then/now: On the left, what appears to be a parking lot in front of the old courthouse (that has since become the Vancouver Art Gallery) is now home to a fountain plaza that’s hosted many a 4/20 Day smoke-in, and, not too long ago, Occupy Vancouver.
Archives of the Planet, Saturday 22 May 1926
Albert Kahn was a stinking rich French photographer when he discovered colour photography not long after the Lumière brothers made their patented autochrome process — the first user-friendly colour film process — commercially available in 1907. Between 1909 and 1931 when he lost his fortune, Kahn sent photographers around the world to create a documentary record of and for the peoples of the world. He was an idealist and internationalist, and conceived of this “Archives of the Planet” project “to promote cross-cultural peace and understanding.”
Curiously, considering Kahn’s mandate for the project, the photographer he sent to Vancouver in 1926, Frédéric Gadmer, focused on capturing land- and streetscapes rather than people, hence the empty Georgia Street scene above showing the second Hotel Vancouver. If you look closely, however, there are some faint blurs that are likely pedestrian victims of a long exposure.
Autochrome photos have a painterly quality that make them resemble hand-tinted images often used on much earlier post cards, so a colour photo from the 1920s might not appear so novel. Nevertheless, this photo is probably among the first ones of Vancouver actually taken in colour.
Kahn’s archive grew to 72,000 autochrome plates (in addition to 180,000 metres of black and white film) from all over the globe. His project has only received significant attention in recent years, but some now consider his autochromes ”the most important collection of early colour photographs in the world.”
Most of the colour pics from the Archives of the Planet project are held at the Albert-Kahn Musée et Jardins, and you can view more on their site, including a couple more of Vancouver.
Source: Photo by Frédéric Gadmer, via The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet by David Okuefuna (Princeton University Press, 2008)