Throwback: Cheap Eats, the Lions Gate Bridge and Fall in Vancouver

For Vancouver magazine’s 50th year, we’re taking a look back through the archives and sharing a few classic covers each month.

October 2007

Despite what’s on the cover, there’s more to the inside pages than a stack of pastrami. From combat training for the big screen to sexual therapy, with prison education and a documentary filmmaker’s opinion of unsavoury police entrapment in between, our October 2007 issue could be summarized as action-packed. But more important was the chronicled rise of the gig-based economy by everyday workers in the back pages. “It was as if we were off to join a cult,” wrote Timothy Taylor. Some 10 years later we’re still documenting that shift.—Christine Beyleveldt

October 1997

Among the chief concerns of the day was the Lions Gate Bridge solution. As guest editor Douglas Coupland put it then: “One of these days a Volvo full of nuns and puppies is going to fall right through what remains of the driving surface.” We got our act together and rehabilitated the bridge at the turn of the millennium, although the more radical ideas, including a double-decker bridge and a gondola crossing, were scrapped.

October 1989

Vancouver prides itself on being one of the greenest and most beautiful cities on earth today. So it hit a nerve when writer Sean Rossiter chastised the city’s shoddy waste management efforts all those years ago and called out the real reason Stanley Park hadn’t fallen to developers (it was created as a military reserve). We didn’t even have a recycling program yet!

October 1975

Before the days of the smart phone or, heck, even the internet, there were 28 great things to do in the fall rather than two (pumpkin spice lattes and Netflix). Vancouver’s Oktoberfest, for one, with its boozy weekends, was “a much louder and wilder affair” than its Munich namesake, we’re told.

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