Late last week my husband and I met up with a group of bloggers and twitterers at the Vancouver Police Museum for an open house of the premises and the highlight, a two hour: Sins of the City Walking Tour through what I now know to be the oldest parts of the city.
I’ve been reading true crime novels since I was too young to read crime novels, some of my favourites are by retired FBI Profiler John Douglas, I can quote the likes of David Berkowitz (aka Son of Sam) and Charles Manson and tell you things about Aileen Wuornos that aren’t in the Hollywood-ized Monster, Ed Gein is another serial killer whom I enjoy separating the fact and the fiction on. This is something I have always been interested in, I would have loved to have been a forensic scientist or profiler myself I dreamt about it long before I could live vicariously through the cast of the original CSI, but I’ve never been strong in math or science, I have some of the natural skills required for the career but science and math can pretty much kiss my ass.
Until earlier this year I didn’t even know we had a Police Museum even with this intense interest in the more macabre side of life and death, so when Chris Mathieson the Executive Director of the Museum sent out an invitation on Twitter I rushed to sign up and also followed The Police Museum’s twitter stream. I didn’t really have any idea what to expect but when I got to the Off the ‘Cuff blog also run by Chris and saw the tour was not only called Sins of the City but we were going to be exposed to a newly revised Sins of the City Tour, I became even more excited because they had me at Sin(s). By this time I had already scoured the website and found the photo group on flickr and was delighted to find the museum even has a morgue!
Vancouver is a city faced with many serious problems that more than a few people would say are being pushed under the carpet, with the Olympics only months away and there being less and less talk focused on what is going to be done about the Downtown East Side it also seemed like a really good time to take a tour such as this that boasts information and true stories on and not limited to:
- Bootleggers, prohibition, and the often quirky evolution of liquor laws (and their enforcement) in the city
- The development of the early drug trade and the surprising Vancouver origins of Canada’s narcotic laws
- Racial and labour tension boiling over into demonstrations, riots and murder
- The evolution of the sex trade, from brothels to streetwalkers
- The city’s considerable predilection to gambling
You can still go from swanky rich shopping stores to junky cracked out homeless, suffering, and ignored individuals in less than a block here. I don’t have a solution, I just know that educating yourself as much as you can on something at least gives you a voice people will listen too if and when you choose to use it.
Even when guests have been in the city I’ve never taken a city tour in any form and I would take this one again it was quite simply superb. Aside from this tour offering up many stories and dispelling many myths the loads of information from the birth of Vancouver, you are even taken to the very first place a building ever stood, a ground zero of sorts from which the city grew out, you are right in the thick of it, where the good the bad and the ugly all took place, still pretty creepy regardless of what it appears as now.
Not only was Chris extremely informative, his delivery and level of enthusiasm was particularly refreshing. Chris appears to take pride in his knowledge and just wants to share it with you and share he will, there was nothing that stumped him. He knows Vancouver’s history of VICE, and then some.
Other attendees, Stacie Biehler, John Biehler, Ian A. Martin and Jon Jennings all have photos up on Flickr, there are some great shots of some of the confiscated weapons on John’s stream, and just more of the same old same old on my Flickr sin set.
