{"id":24069,"date":"2014-02-04T10:00:40","date_gmt":"2014-02-04T18:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/vancouver\/?p=24069"},"modified":"2014-02-03T22:18:14","modified_gmt":"2014-02-04T06:18:14","slug":"lani-russwurms-awesome-vancouver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/vancouver\/2014\/02\/04\/lani-russwurms-awesome-vancouver\/","title":{"rendered":"Lani Russwurm’s Awesome Vancouver"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"EveryPlace_VAN-600\"<\/p>\n

When Lani Russwurm jumped online in 2008 he was one of the first to write about history in his blog\u00a0Past Tense<\/a>.\u00a0Vancouver is Awesome, and last year he published\u00a0Vancouver was Awesome: a curious pictorial history<\/i>, a hugely popular local history book which has sat on the best seller list for the past several weeks.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did my Masters degree at SFU on a local subject,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019d find out all these interesting things that were not directly related to my thesis, but I collected them anyway and after I was done I had all this material that I wanted to share, so I started blogging.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are a lot of great stories in\u00a0Vancouver was Awesome<\/i>, but one that caught my attention was a photo of 500 Alexander Street, a one-time brothel built and owned by Dolly Darlington in 1912. For years it was the headquarters for the British Seaman\u2019s Mission and today it\u2019s run by the\u00a0Atira Women’s Resource Society\u00a0<\/a>as housing for at-risk teens.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
What I learned from Lani is that back in the 1950s, the building also played a role in Vancouver\u2019s drug history as the mailing address for Al Hubbard, an eccentric American millionaire with a penchant for LSD. Hubbard, writes Lani, became the biggest North American supplier of LSD through his Uranium Corporation. Hubbard apparently turned a number of people onto LSD including Aldous Huxley, the head of Vancouver\u2019s Holy Rosary Cathedral, \u00a0and then partnered up with Ross MacLean, a high profile psychiatrist who for a time owned Casa Mia<\/a>\u00a0and ran the Hollywood Hospital in New Westminster.<\/dt>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

There\u2019s a great picture of Harry Gardiner \u201cThe Human Fly\u201d climbing the Sun Tower in 1918, and a photo of a 17-year-old Yvonne de Carlo with a boxing kangaroo. Lani tells the story of Percy Williams, a skinny little guy, who for 11 years, was the fastest man alive; and the story of George Paris, a one-time heavyweight boxing champion of Western Canada, personal trainer to Jack Johnson, boxing trainer for the Vancouver Police Department and \u00a0a jazz musician at the Patricia Hotel.<\/p>\n

When he\u2019s not blogging or writing books, Lani lives on the edge of Chinatown with his daughter Sophia and works at a DTES hotel for Atira.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Eve Lazarus<\/strong>\u00a0is a writer with a passion for history and heritage houses. She is the author of Sensational Victoria<\/a>: Bright Lights, Red Lights, Murders, Ghosts & Gardens; and At Home with History<\/a>: the Secrets of Greater Vancouver\u2019s Heritage Houses. Her next book\u00a0Sensational Vancouver<\/strong>\u00a0will be published next spring. Eve blogs obsessively about buildings and their genealogies at\u00a0evelazarus.com\/blog\/<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Lani Russwurm jumped online in 2008 he was one of the first to write about history in his blog\u00a0Past Tense.\u00a0Vancouver is Awesome, and last year he published\u00a0Vancouver was Awesome: a curious pictorial history, a hugely popular local history book which has sat on the best seller list for the past several weeks. \u201cI didContinue reading “Lani Russwurm’s Awesome Vancouver”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6057,"featured_media":24117,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11232,11233],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-history"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLani Russwurm's Awesome Vancouver - 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