People

The Rebel Who Built Houses

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.

The Pioneer on the Station Sign

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.

Burnaby Joe, and the Ones Actually Born Here

Joe Sakic turns 57 on July 7, born in Burnaby to Croatian immigrants who spoke no English at home. He is the anchor of a small, verifiable list of people who actually started here — and a correction to two names the city keeps claiming by mistake.

The Architect Everyone Forgot

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.

Frank E. Buck and the Eagles Estate Garden

The man who laid out the University of British Columbia's grounds also drew the plan for a small terraced garden on the Deer Lake slopes. Thousands walk his larger work without learning his name; in Burnaby, the smaller work survives as roughly 0.6 hectares of plantings above the water.

The Loves of Cumberland Road

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.

From Stony Mountain to City Hall

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.

Ian James Corlett: The Man Who Made a Cartoon About His Street

He voiced Goku, left over a pay dispute, and went home to Burnaby to create a cartoon about growing up on Royal Oak Avenue. The piano store became a keyboard shop. The house became a drawing. The city became sixty-five episodes of a show that YTV aired for three years and then forgot.

The Disappearing Burnaby Project

Kapoor Singh Siddoo and the Forty-Five Acres He Wasn't Allowed to Buy

In 1938, a South Asian lumberman needed a white agent to purchase land on his behalf. He built a sawmill on Burrard Inlet, employed hundreds, survived a catastrophic fire, and spent years fighting for the right to vote. His property is now Barnet Marine Park.

The Butterfly Painter of Capitol Hill: a story of Jack Shadbolt

For 48 years, Canada's most celebrated modern painter worked from a skylit studio on a Burnaby mountainside, transforming wartime trauma into butterflies and leaving behind the community arts centre that bears his name.

Grace Ceperley, the Heiress Who Chose Gardens Over Parties

Her will funded Stanley Park's most beloved playground. Her house became Burnaby's first art gallery. In her lifetime, she rarely spoke in public.

William Stride: Burnaby's First Reeve and the Work of Starting a Municipality

In 1892, the new city needed someone to lead it. The man they chose was a farmer, a community builder, and a believer in what this place could become.