History
Twenty-Five Minutes on Inlet Drive
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
Topic
Places
The streets, buildings, and landmarks that hold Burnaby's memory.
History
Four and a Half Minutes at Station Square
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
Places
The Company Town on the Inlet
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
Culture
The Wooden Wall Inside the Rec Centre
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
People
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.
Brenda · 5 min read
Places
The Station That Wandered
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
History
Keys to the Centre
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
Places
Where the Bark Gets Peeled
A single English industrial name, Barnet Mill, sits over an older Squamish name that describes a yearly act of the living world: the arbutus shedding its bark on the rocky shore of Burrard Inlet.
Brenda · 5 min read
History
The Point Beneath the Museum
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
Places
Nikkei Place: The Garden Built for Healing
The architect who designed the building was interned as a child. The land was purchased with redress money. The opening date was chosen to mark the anniversary of an apology. Inside are 670 recorded voices and 52,500 photographs from a community that lost everything and built this anyway.
Artom Butenko · 9 min read
Places
The Octagon on Canada Way: Inside Burnaby's Ismaili Centre
In 1985, the Aga Khan and the Prime Minister opened a building shaped like a prayer. Bruno Freschi designed it around a single geometric form — the octagon, "where the centre is everywhere, and everyone is in the centre." Thirteen years earlier, President Idi Amin had expelled the community that would fill it.
Artom Butenko · 6 min read
Places
A Bungalow with No Bedrooms: The Disguised Tunnel Shaft on Frances Street
3911 Frances Street has hedges, a mature tree, wrought-iron fencing, and no one living inside. Sixty-two metres below, a freight railway tunnel moves forty million tonnes of export cargo a year. The house is a ventilation fan disguised as a home.
Artom Butenko · 4 min read
Places
What Remains of Expo 86 in Burnaby
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
Places
Hidden Green: the Stories Buried Beneath Burnaby Parks
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
Places
Everything Changes on Hastings Street
A walking tour of Hastings Street, where stumps were blasted, fortunes lost, and the neon still swings
Artom Butenko · 14 min read
Places
The School That Stayed: Gilmore Community, The Silent Witness
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
Places
What the Burnaby Mountain Holds: SFU in Winter
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
Places
Boundary Road: The Street That Marks Where the Great Fire Stopped
Boundary Road marks where Burnaby begins and Vancouver ends. But in 1886, it marked something else: the line where the Great Fire burned itself out.
Artom Butenko · 5 min read