111 Places in Vancouver book authors discuss how they put it together
Credit to Author: Stuart Derdeyn| Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2019 18:03:48 +0000
111 Place in Vancouver That You Must Not Miss
Dave Doroghy and Graeme Menzies | Emons
$26.90, 233 pages
The 111 Places guide book series from German publishing house Emons has over 100 editions. The latest in the North American series is dedicated to Vancouver. It seems somewhat surprising that Milwaukee and Da Bronx had editions in the series before the West Coast Canadian urban centre which regularly makes the Economist Liveability Index list of the world’s top 10 most liveable cities.
But the right authors needed to come together to get a project done.
Dave Doroghy was born and raised in Vancouver and has worked with everyone from the NBA Grizzlies to the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. Graeme Menzies is an international marketing and communications professional who rates Vancouver as the prettiest city he’s ever lived in. The idea of working together goes back a few years, when the two writers got to know each other when mutual projects crossed over during the Olympics. Menzies knew the woman who was heading up the North American version of the 111 Places series. When she inquired about him doing a Vancouver version, he suggested Doroghy be on board.
The resulting book is sure to be of interest to both tourists and locals as it covers a wide, somewhat bizarre, selection of sites to see. Doroghy and Menzies chatted about the book selections and how fun putting the eclectic collection together proved to be.
Q: Honestly, it was pretty interesting to see the 1700 block of Dunbar listed as the first item in the book. “Turn-of-the-century time capsule homes” is the subhead. I’m wondering if they are even still standing since this book went to press?
Doroghy: I admit to you that it is the block where I live, and when Emons asked me if there were any really cool, definitive neighbourhoods I thought ‘I walk out the door into one every morning.’ If you’ve lived here as long as I have, you keep seeing all these oddities every day, and the publisher wanted the books to be full of stuff that is of interest to both visitors and locals.”
Q: You certainly included some of those landscape fixtures residents take for granted, from the big sulphur pile on the North Shore and the blue whale skeleton at the Beaty Diversity Museum to the Coupe De Villa, the half-buried Cadillac sedan at 3056 W. 6th Ave. How did you split up the selections?
Menzies: I kind of approached all those obvious features with a Jerry Seinfeld approach of “what’s the deal with” about everything from the Toys’ R Us sign to others that are kind of head-scratchers. We pretty much wound up with about an equal number of contributions each. The hardest part was pairing it down to 111.
Graeme Menzies (left) and Dave Doroghy are the authors of 111 Places in Vancouver That You Must Not Miss. Photo: Michael Finnegan
Q: Speaking of which, what’s the deal with 111. Was 100 or 110 just not quite enough?
Menzies: Apparently, 11 is a lucky number in Cologne, so that became a part of the idea behind the series. It’s been incredibly successful in the European market.
Q: It certainly reads differently from the standard guidebook, so I can see why it would be popular with travellers and residents alike. But did you really need to include the twin urinals at the Heritage Hall at 3102 Main St?
Doroghy: Emons has an idea of what they want and they are quirky and interesting and were pretty steadfast about wanting a urinal because they had them in the book on Paris, on Vienna and the others. I’ve lived here my whole life and couldn’t think of a single one that stood out as, well, interesting. Then I was invited to an event at the Heritage Hall at my friend Steve’s wedding, and there was this twin urinal which is pretty unusual. I had a good SLR camera on me, so I snapped the shot.
Q: One of the most interesting items to me was #52: Houdini’s Great Escape, where you recognize the brass commemoration plaque at 137 West Pender. That was where escape artist Harry Houdini performed a stunt to promote his local show by hanging off The Vancouver Sun newspaper building. The building is long gone, and I wonder how many other items are in memory only?
Menzies: Well, that’s a thing with any city and particularly one that has seen as much change as Vancouver has since 1923. One of the things about the conditions set down by the publisher is no archival photos, so we took all the pictures fresh for the book including the outside of the Pendera Building where the Sun offices once were. I have tweeted out some of the many Houdini photos taken on the day he did the stunt so people can see it for themselves.