EXCERPTS FROM AT HOME WITH HISTORY: THE UNTOLD SECRETS OF GREATER VANCOUVER'S HERITAGE HOUSES

51 East Pender Street, Vancouver
Bob Rennie, Vancouver's Condo King, walked into the bowels of the building and stood outside a boarded up door. He lifted the top bar easily, but had a bit more trouble with the bottom one. Looking around, he found a shovel to lever it off and yanked the door open. He rolled up his expensive shirt sleeves and climbed up the six flights of stairs, past rat traps, broken windows, and old stoves. Rennie paid a million dollars for the Wing Sang building-the oldest in Chinatown-and that was just for the battered walls, the shaky staircase, and a hundred-plus years of history. He bought it sight unseen in 2004 and didn't go inside for the first six months.
Yip Sang, a successful Chinese businessmen built the Victorian Italianate structure in 1889 to house his three wives and 23 children. Henry Yip was born in 1917 on the fourth floor of the building. He was only 10 when his grandfather died, but as the son of Kew Mow, number three son of first wife, he remembers Yip Sang as a disciplinarian. "He used to sit beside a pot belly stove next to the doorway at the front of the building smoking his pipe and watching everybody go in and out." As the only one with a key, Yip Sang would lock out family members still not home by 10:00 p.m.
From Chapter 11: East and West
Photo courtesy of Henry Yip

446 Union Street, Vancouver
Maria Piovesan raced through the house searching for her daughter. "The police are coming Gilda, I have to go," she whispered in Italian. The older woman shot out the back reluctantly leaving the twelve-year-old to answer the front door. Two burly detectives stood there, and one asked the child if her mother was at home. "She just went out," answered Gilda. "Then you'll have to show us through the house," he said. The detectives followed Gilda into the kitchen, opened a cupboard door and then had a look in the sitting room. Finally, their boots echoed on the fir floors and up the stairs to the four bedrooms above. The detective pointed to the master bedroom. "You wouldn't have anything in here would you?" he asked her. Gilda paled and shook her long dark braids. "No," she said. The policemen glanced around once more, then, climbed down the stairs and left.
Had the policemen looked a little closer, they would have found liquor stored in Maria and Adam Piovesan's bedroom closet. At 446 Union Street, and in many houses in the East End of the 1930s, bootlegging was often the only way to sustain life through the tough years of the Depression.
From Chapter 1: Strathcona: Vancouver's East End.

343 Prior Street, Vancouver
Judge Angelo Branca was one of the Italian east-side success stories. Born in 1903 to Filippo and Teresa Branca, he grew up at 343 Prior Street with a sister Anne and brothers John and Joseph. Filippo ran the grocery store on Main Street and he and Peter Tosi and Sam Minichiello were the three biggest importers of California grapes in the area. Raymond Culos, whose grandfather was Sam Minichiello, says, the joke in the neighbourhood was that wine was a family affair. Filippo would sell the grapes to the bootleggers, his son John, a detective with the dry-squad, would arrest them, and his other son Angelo would get them off in court.
From Chapter 1: Strathcona: Vancouver's East End.

303 Queens Avenue, New Westminster
A reporter with the Ledger toured the 1891 Rand House the year it was built and wrote, "With the exception of Dunsmuir Castle, the proud home of the Dunsmuir family at Victoria, there is not a more splendidly appointed home in British Columbian than that of Mr. Arthur Rand."
James Galbraith, who was president of his family's mill working business, bought the Rand House and its huge corner lot in 1925 and proceeded to tear it down. The second house is a rambling place with large bay windows and a stone foundation. The house changed hands several times over the next few decades and sold to Randy Bachman in the mid-70s the famous rock star of the Guess Who and Bachman Turner Overdrive. In Bachman's biography, he talks about the family driving out to New Westminster. "These houses were incredible. We would drive down Queen's Avenue and ogle the beautiful, spacious houses until one day we spotted a "For Sale" sign on a corner lot house at 303 Queens Avenue. We bought it for $79,000. It was like the Leave it to Beaver dream house, only bigger."
From Chapter 7: New Westminster
Photo courtesy of Marcia Horricks

West 10th Avenue, Vancouver
In 1973, the Davis family started buying and restoring Queen-Anne and Edwardian heritage houses on the100-block West 10th. All told, they saved 10 houses built between 1891 and 1910. Others on the street bought speculative property in the hopes of seeing it transform into lucrative apartment buildings and were less than enthusiastic about the renovations. "We were seen to be the lunatic fringe," says John Davis.
An oddity of 10th Avenue is that the two Edwardians at 148 and 150 actually touch each other. Davis says a neighbour and descendant of one of the original families told him it was the result of a feud. "Two women came from England and had the house at 150 built right on the property line. That infuriated the owner-Fred Welsh-of the property at 148 and he built his house the next year right up against their house in order to block the view out of the bay window on the side of 150."
Welsh was a partner in Swartz Bros, a wholesale fruit and vegetable firm. He lived at 140 and rented out 150 and 144. Joyce Sykes a former resident of what she called the "cottage" at 144, remembers the "strawberry teas" held in the garden of 140. "Society ladies from all over Vancouver came, it was quite out of sync with the neighbourhood where many families were on welfare. I recall ladies in long flowery dresses and carrying frilly parasols. They even kept their long white gloves on while they drank tea." When Davis bought the house, members of the Zen Centre of Vancouver lived there.
From Chapter 8: Mount Pleasant
Photo courtesy of John Davis

142 East 22nd Avenue, Vancouver
Just off Main Street, the little house at 142 East 22nd Avenue looks innocent enough, but it was the scene of one of Vancouver's grisliest murders. On December 9, 1965 the house had a bright Santa Claus painted on the front window. But just as Osborne and Dorothy Kosberg and their children Barry, 15, Marianne, 13, Gayle, 11, and Vincent 2, were thinking of Christmas, their oldest brother was planning their violent murders. Thomas, 17, had a history of mental illness, but no one could see him plotting a murder, let alone drugging his family and hacking them to bits with a double-bladed axe.
From Chapter 9: Murder