Reddit reviews The Chuck Davis History of Metropolitan Vancouver

I mostly picked up info from books when doing a Google Earth overlay showing Vancouver's original coastline, but lots of Wikipedia articles have been getting better recently. The Vancouver Archives have a lot of cool stuff, and just google searches for the history of specific items bring up articles of interest.

EDIT - I need to hunt around for a book on Vancouver's history that I had in the seventies, The Vancouver Book by Chuck Davis. It had some amazing stuff, like the tunnels in Chinatown that were used for illicit purposes, wartime stuff like where the searchlight and gun emplacements were (many still visible but few know what they are), a great story about a ship being shot and sunk (sorta) accidently by one of the gun crews.

Think I'll pick up this one too, it looks good.

Fellow Vancouver enthusiast and local of 8 years here, I can't recommend this book highly enough: The Chuck Davis History of Metropolitan Vancouver. I think it's somewhat rare these days, so good luck finding a copy at a reasonable price! It's an absolute treasure of a book, one of my all-time favourites. It's essentially the author's life's work - funny, poignant, exhaustively comprehensive and full of obscure human interest stories. I can also recommend Vancouver Special by Charles Demers, a local comedian and longtime Vancouver resident. Derek Hayes' historical atlases are quite good as well.