The Duck and I made our way to the Vancouver Museum last night for the launch of L.D.: Mayor Louis Taylor and the Rise of Vancouver, a historical biography on Vancouver's longest-serving mayor. The book is written by Daniel Francis, a bright and lively historian who I always think of as Uncle Dan, since that is what he is called by his nephew, Chad Brealey, who I fish with and who is the executive director of the Haig-Brown Institute.
Uncle Dan wore a red tie, in honour of L.D., and read from the beginning and ending of his book. I bought a copy and had it signed and am looking forward to reading it since it provides a view of Vancouver not sanctioned by the board of trade and tourism. Last night I leafed through its pages and found many photos of Vancouver from the years of L.D.'s time, the 1910s through the 1930s. So much of the city has been remade in the years since those photos and they served to illustrate something I have felt since moving to Vancouver: the city erases its past at every opportunity.
So perhaps it is no coincidence that Dan Francis' other books include The Imaginary Indian and Imagining Ourselves. For Vancouver is nothing if not an imagined place, an oasis of a city where a city should not be, situated on a slip of unstable and reclaimed land, bordered by mountains and the ocean, cornered so that it can only expand to the southeast.
Posted by James Sherrett at April 7, 2004 12:29 PM