Featured: Alter Markt, facing southwest to the former Schloss Blieskastel at upper-centre: Blieskastel, Saarland, Germany (X70).
David Oppenheimer: ✵ 1 January 1834 – 31 December 1897 ✟
As a child of the city, I learned the name of Vancouver’s 2nd mayor, David Oppenheimer, who served in the top post from 1887 to 1891. Escaping the violent revolutions spreading through Europe, David Oppenheimer and his brothers had long been immigrants from Germany, and after time in New Orleans and California, they arrived in what is now southwestern British Columbia and developed business success with their supply stores during the Gold Rush, and with wholesale trade and real estate in the newly incorporated city of Vancouver, where the national railway established its western terminus one year later in 1887. The Oppenheimers stamped their civic legacy not only with the location of the railway terminus, but also with an expansive infrastructure program including a new grand city park, fire department, extensive roadworks, a city-wide electricity grid, streetcar public transport network, and a city cemetery. On 11 April 2008, the Government of Canada’s Historic Sites and Monuments Board designated David Oppenheimer as a National Historic Person.
There’s little doubt the Oppenheimers spent plenty of time in what are now Vancouver’s Chinatown and Strathcona with their business interests and connections to the city’s Jewish community. These are neighbourhoods, respectively, where my parents sought closer ties with the Chinese-Canadian community, and where they bought a new house to raise their family. Decades later, I’ve flown out from Vancouver, and I’ve been on the train from Frankfurt to southwest Germany’s Saarbrücken for its proximity to the Völklingen Ironworks world heritage site. I also recently learned David Oppenheimer was from the area and born in the city of Blieskastel. I arrange to meet with a representative of Stadtarchiv Blieskastel (city archive), and I make my way to Blieskastel to see what I can learn about the Oppenheimer family.
Seems like yesterday: ten years have disappeared in a flash. And yet, a hint of grief is as fresh, now as it was then.
Before dawn, I swear I heard his voice calling out to me. The official pronouncement: 610am, 9 August 2014. Ken Lee, dead at 82. I was afraid I had already forgotten his voice.
Northern summer will always have an air of finality, tainted by memories of frailty and inevitability: entropy at its absolute finest.
One day, I’m on the well-travelled stretch between Mannheim and Cologne, fiddling between an online ticket for an express train and an online (Deutschland-) ticket for the next regional train.
The next day, I’m in a Vancouver cemetery on a late Friday afternoon. I see only two to three other visitors out here. It is almost mid-August. Sun’s out, it’s almost 30C. Somewhere outside of this green patch of stone, metal, and flowers, life thrives and goes on. For me, I’ve come back to get “stuck”; I might as well be 8000 km away, back on the other side of the planet.
Up on the 10th floor is/was the palliative ward where Dad spent his final 2 weeks.
Ocean View Cemetery.
“Hey, Mom and Dad: it’s me …”
I made the photos above with an iPhone15 on 9 Aug 2024. This post composed with Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.
Within New Westminster’s Sapperton residential area at 319 Governors Court is the Gatehouse building of the former British Columbia Penitentiary (1878-1980); happily, the site is now home to a pub with patio. At the right edge of the picture below, the massive tower under construction is for the new Pattullo Bridge.
In front of the gatehouse is this 1927 Govt. of Canada 🇨🇦commemorative cairn in honour of the Royal Engineers (“Sappers”).
Monument plaque; inscription below.
“In 1859 military considerations induced Colonel Richard Moody* to select the site of New Westminster as capital of the new colony of British Columbia. Jointly developed until 1863 by civilians and the Royal Engineers, whose campground was here, the town, dominated by its Canadian^ middle-class, tried to challenge Victoria’s commercial and political power. Hopes rose when New Westminster became the seat of government after the colony’s union with Vancouver Island in 1866, but fell with the removal of the capital to Victoria in 1868. Consequently, union with Canada was advocated to solve the town’s fiscal problems.”
* after whom city of Port Moody is named
^ white British Empire colonists
I made all images above with an iPhone15 on 17 April 2024. Composed entirely within Jetpack for iOS, this post appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-sjR.
As a boy whose early memories include the family’s small black-and-white television from the 1970s, I remember the tv show “Ironside.” Canadian-born Raymond Burr played the titular character of Robert Ironside, special consultant for the San Francisco police department. Years later in the mid- to late-1980s, Burr returned as Perry Mason, the lead from the 1960s weekly tv-drama revived as a popular series of made-for-tv movies. He died in 1993, buried with members of his family in Fraser Cemetery, at home in New Westminster, B.C.
Burr family grave at lower-centre – 9 Apr 2024 (iP15).
Raymond Burr (lower-right), with sister Geraldine, father William, and mother Minerva – 9 Apr 2024 (iP15).
In 1858, the British established New Westminster as first- and capital-city of the new colony of British Columbia. Fraser Cemetery accepted its first burials in 1869.
I made all images above with an iPhone15 on 9 April 2024. Composed entirely within Jetpack for iOS, this post appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-sjD.
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