Contributing Writer
Contributing writer covering Burnaby's places and institutions.
In 1982 two Burnaby teenagers wrote a computer game about evolution, and a ten-year-old tester talked them into adding a beaver. The company they built around that game became EA Canada, and the reason the FIFA series was made in Burnaby.
Ilarion Bohatyrov · 6 min read
Behind a plain door at the Harry Jerome Sports Centre is a wooden track banked at 47 degrees — a near-vertical wall you can walk up to and touch. It is the only indoor velodrome west of Ontario, and almost nobody driving past knows it is there.
Ilarion Bohatyrov · 4 min read
He was the first architect to live and work in Burnaby, and he wrote two books that trained the profession in England. His finest houses still stand around Deer Lake, one of them serving dinner most nights of the week. His own name has slipped almost entirely off them.
Ilarion Bohatyrov · 5 min read
A beaver pond that became a real estate joke. A garbage dump where children now dig for treasure. A cenotaph built by the veteran it honours. Four Burnaby parks hiding stories that never made it onto plaques.
Ilarion Bohatyrov · 11 min read
Burnaby's oldest surviving brick school has seen it all — from a tent in the forest to the towers on the horizon
Ilarion Bohatyrov · 8 min read
Arthur Erickson's mountaintop campus becomes something else in January—a stark landscape of shadows and ice that Hollywood keeps casting as the future.
Ilarion Bohatyrov · 6 min read
Before the glass towers and the regional library system, there were small rooms, donated books, and volunteers who believed a city needs more than roads and schools—it needs stories.
Ilarion Bohatyrov · 7 min read