Topic
How Burnaby came to be — the people, decisions, and accidents that shaped the city.
For twenty-four years the same fierce socialist represented Burnaby in the provincial legislature. He is remembered, if at all, as the father of a man who nearly became premier. His own monument is quieter: a fourteen-storey tower in Edmonds, still full of people who need a cheap place to grow old.
Artom Butenko · 6 min read
The trail Dugald Patterson cleared across his homestead became an avenue; the wooden tram platform he built became a SkyTrain station. The man himself left far less behind than the places that carry his name.
Artom Butenko · 5 min read
On 24 July 2007, an excavator bucket on Inlet Drive punctured a crude-oil pipeline that had been in the ground since 1953. The cause traced back to a drawing made in 1957.
Artom Butenko · 6 min read
On 23 April 1988, minutes into the grand opening of a new Save-On-Foods at Station Square, a section of rooftop parking deck fell into the produce department. Nobody died, and the reasons why still shape how buildings get approved in British Columbia.
Artom Butenko · 6 min read
On the shore off Barnet Road, a few poured-concrete piers are all that is left of a mill town that had its own school, post office and telephone exchange — a settlement of some 350 workers that voted to strike in 1931 and never reopened.
Artom Butenko · 5 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 small wooden tram shelter built in 1911 is the only piece of Burnaby's interurban railway still standing. It has moved twice by truck, and the engineer it was named for has all but vanished from the record.
Artom Butenko · 4 min read
On 22 June 1956, a contractor handed Reeve Charles MacSorley the keys to a new municipal hall at 4949 Canada Way, near Deer Lake. The site had been chosen two years earlier by a simple rule: put the seat of government where neither half of Burnaby could complain it favoured the other.
Artom Butenko · 5 min read
In 1893, an English dairy worker who had crossed the country on the first transcontinental train bought fourteen acres of logged-over land in East Burnaby and planted an orchard. He raised eleven children in the house he built by hand, sold strawberries to Vancouver hotels, and sat on the council of a municipality barely older than his youngest child. The house still stands.
Artom Butenko · 6 min read
Convicted of seditious conspiracy after the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, William Pritchard served a year in Stony Mountain Penitentiary, settled on Capitol Hill in 1922, and was elected Reeve of Burnaby in time to watch the municipality go bankrupt and lose its elected council to a provincial commissioner.
Artom Butenko · 6 min read
A single stone projectile point, pulled from a midden in 1894 on the slope where the Burnaby Village Museum now sits, carries a date the museum gives as somewhere between 1,000 and 2,630 years old.
Artom Butenko · 4 min read
The Brunette River drains the east end of Burnaby Lake into the Fraser, and at that junction stood villages whose names some Burnaby residents have never read once.
Artom Butenko · 5 min read
On July 8, 1948, Andy Digney opened a quarter-mile oval with grandstands for 4,500. Men bought 1930s cars, welded the doors shut, and raced. By 1958 the track was gone. Towers stand on the site now.
Artom Butenko · 6 min read
Edmonds: a Dublin speculator who built a tramway to inflate his own land prices. Gilmore: a bureaucratic typo that replaced a politician's real name forever. Metrotown: a term borrowed from a Baltimore urban planning report. Sperling: it was Pole Line Road until someone renamed it after the electricity company's manager. Every name is an act of power somebody forgot to explain.
Artom Butenko · 7 min read
In 1946, five hundred houses went up in North Burnaby in eighteen months. Ninety per cent of the first residents were veterans who had come home from the war and needed somewhere to live. The brochure called it "the largest single veteran housing project in Canada." Now the province says the lots are too big for one family.
Artom Butenko · 6 min read
In the 1890s, Chinese farmers leased land nobody else wanted and turned cranberry marshes into the most productive vegetable farms in the region. By 1921, they supplied ninety per cent of British Columbia's vegetables. They were barred from voting, owning property, and holding municipal jobs. Twenty-seven of their farms may still be operating.
Artom Butenko · 7 min read
For eighty years, a 185-acre prison farm stood beside Deer Lake. Inmates grew vegetables, milked cows, and were hanged in an abandoned elevator shaft. A doctor gave them new faces. A punk bassist served time in the cells. When the last inmates left in 1991, the city tore everything down and sold townhomes on the land. The bricks from the cellblocks line the new walkways.
Artom Butenko · 8 min read
Ocean View Burial Park was established in 1918 as Burnaby's first non-sectarian cemetery, receiving its first interments the following year. In 1929, it created a section for "any person of colour." Buried there: the first Chinese-born Canadian, a court interpreter who fought for rights he was never granted in life. Nearby, in a pauper's grave: the only Canadian-born world heavyweight boxing champion, five-foot-seven and ordained.
Artom Butenko · 7 min read
During the First World War, 460 workers assembled submarine hulls for the Russian Imperial Navy on a Burnaby beach. The official story was barges. Guards patrolled behind barbed wire. Three hulls were finished before the Revolution ended the contract in 1917.
Artom Butenko · 5 min read
Canada's most influential punk scene wasn't born in gritty urban streets—it emerged from the split-level basements of Burnaby Mountain. How childhood friendships in a bedroom community produced D.O.A., The Subhumans, and the country's first indoor skatepark.
Artom Butenko · 17 min read
Forty years ago, a world's fair transformed Vancouver. But its true legacy isn't the pavilions or the fireworks. It's the concrete pillars carrying trains above Burnaby's streets every day. It's the route you may have taken this morning.
Artom Butenko · 10 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
A walking tour of Hastings Street, where stumps were blasted, fortunes lost, and the neon still swings
Artom Butenko · 14 min read
Black History in Burnaby: What the Archives Don't Tell Us — and What the Community Is Building Now
Brenda · 8 min read
In 1859, Colonel Richard Moody named a lake after his private secretary. Who was Robert Burnaby, and why does his name still echo across this city?
Artom Butenko · 6 min read
On September 22, 1892, a scattered collection of farms and logging camps voted to become something more. What changed when Burnaby broke away from New Westminster?
Artom Butenko · 8 min read