By Eve Lazarus
The Untold Secrets of Greater Vancouver’s Heritage Homes
At Home with History is a collection of real life stories that bring to life the glamorous and not-so-glamorous social histories of selected heritage homes in Greater Vancouver—stories of brothels and bootleggers, secret rooms, and Shakespearean-style murders. An Italian family survives the depression by selling booze and sandwiches from their eastside home. A Shaughnessy mansion headquarters the Ku Klux Klan and then a children’s hospice. A secret radio room is uncovered during renovations. Every home has a social history and a genealogy that tells a tremendous amount about the history of the times and offers up a sense of place. Current home-owners are only temporary custodians, part of the chain in the ongoing narrative of the house. People change, styles change, colours change, cars change, but through it all, the house remains a central fixture and the structure for the stories in At Home with History.
Eve Lazarus is a business reporter and freelance writer with a passion for history and old houses. She is the author of At Home with History: The Untold Secrets of Greater Vancouver’s Heritage Homes (Anvil), The Life & Art of Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman and LeRoy Jensen, co-written with Claudia Cornwall, and Wendy Newbold Patterson (Mother Tongue) and Frommer’s Vancouver with Kids and blogs obsessively about houses and their genealogies at www.blog.evelazarus.com
