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Nicholson Road is an ongoing photo project aimed at sharing and celebrating the different communities in Metro Vancouver. Each week Vancouver Is Awesome will be featuring an image from the previous week, shot in one of the many 'hoods around town in order to draw your attention a little bit outside of the hyper-focus that we usually have on the City of Vancouver. |
You know that Gastown Gamble show about Save On Meats airing on The Oprah Network, right? Did you know it wasn't the only show from our fine metropolitan region created for the network? The community of Aldergrove way out at the eastern edge of the Township of Langley starred in OWN's Million Dollar Neighbourhood. The show aimed to encourage the residents of Aldergrove to stop overspending, and provide them with challenges and rewards to overcome all sorts of financial issues - often of a very personal nature. (If you watch the show, just play along when they show Heritage Hall as the downtown bank for the community. It makes for good tv, ok?)
Besides all the attention received from that show, Aldergrove has a few other things working for it, like the Twilight Drive-in, Metro Vancouver's only drive-in movie theatre (which is also home to a weekly swap-meet Sundays from 7am-4pm); the Greater Vancouver Zoo, the largest zoo in British Columbia; and of course a little history too, like the Alder Grove Telephone Museum & Community Archives.
Originally built as a pre-fab structure in 1917 to house the telephone equipment and switchboards, the building was relocated from it's original site on Fraser Highway and continues to undergo restoration (since telephone exchanges work a little differently these days, the building was repurposed into a museum/archives). Today, the museum displays historical photos and artifacts along with some awesome old-school telephones, insulators, telegraph equipment, and even an operational switchboard. Now I'm just waiting for rotary phones and party lines to come back into vogue!
Archives of the Nicholson Road project can be found HERE.
