Seeking to extend their colonial holdings in the early 1800s, the major European powers considered the notion of dispatching expeditions through the forbidden Sahara Desert to Timbuktu, the legendary lost city of gold in the heart of Africa. Rumors of the vast wealth of Timbuktu had been circulating ever since 1324, when Mansa Musa (“Emperor…
When your address is Hollywood and you’d like some murals in your synagogue, who are you going to call? L.A.’s Wilshire Boulevard Temple is a magnificent structure, both inside and out. Modeled roughly after the Great Synagogue of Florence, its features seem by turns pure Byzantium and pure Hollywood. Large as a cathedral, it boasts…
In Place d’Armes, an historic square in Montreal’s Old City, two opposing shrines — a loftily-domed church and a classically-pillared bank — face off against each other, potent symbols of the durable dialectic between religion and commerce that has helped shape this dynamic French-and-English-speaking city founded on an island in the St. Lawrence more than 350…
A special summer of activities highlighting Montreal’s historic Jewish community kicks off June 15 (2000) when a musical version of Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz premieres at the Saidye Bronfman Centre in this famously bilingual city. As it happens, the musical is also bilingual: it’s in Yiddish, with simultaneous English translation available for…
James Harris, a 19th-century dairy farmer, brought renown to the southwestern Ontario town of Ingersoll by exhibiting a mammoth piece of locally-produced cheese at world’s fairs in the United States and England. Today, the elegant house that Harris built in 1867 still brings a modest renown to Ingersoll, in its modern incarnation at the heart…
Boasting numerous gems of Georgian architecture, this hilly, former spa town, set in the Peak District of the English Midlands, has been recognized since Roman times for its warm mineral springs — as musicians who venture into the orchestra pit of the Buxton Opera House know only too well. Alec Guiness, Laurence Olivier, Anna Pavlova…
The largest urban park in Canada and the third largest in North America, Vancouver’s Stanley Park is still “half savage and half domestic” as writer James Morris noted a century ago. The historic park offers visitors a compelling mix of dense natural woodlands and well-pruned flower gardens, fierce aboriginal totem poles and a genteel Victorian-style…
Twice a day for nine days each August, 100 propane-fueled hot air balloons rise from 10 sites around the town of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec, and drift lazily over the outlying vineyards, apple orchards and fields of maize. At six in the morning and again at six in the evening, weather permitting, a single balloon-meister gives the…
About the time Alberta-born Doug Webber moved to Churchill, Man., with his family in the early Sixties, the remote Hudson Bay community had a population of about 7,500 residents, many of them attached to the NASA space port and the Canadian and American military bases there that have since closed down. “Those were the days…
Situated on a dramatic windswept cliff overlooking Vancouver’s Georgia Strait and the snow-capped peaks of the Coast Mountains, the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology pays homage to the art of the Northwest Coast First Nations in several important and pioneering ways. The museum, which opened in 1976, was designed by internationally renowned Canadian…
