Calling all East Enders

Did you grow up in the Vancouver neighbourhoods now known as Strathcona and Grandview Woodland?

Did you come from a family that once lived in here?

Did you go to Lord Strathcona School, Lord Seymour School or Britannia?

Do you or does anyone you know have pictures of the old East End, particularly of its old houses and lost streetscapes?

Are you interested in preserving the history and heritage of Vancouver's oldest neighbourhood and the people who lived here?

Would you be interested in sharing a scan of these for the East End Neighbourhood History Mapping Project and Web Site?

Over the past ten years I have researched the history of over 750 houses in Vancouver and the stories of the people who lived in them. To date, just under half of these houses have been in the old East End. I have actually plotted them all out on an old fire insurance map and there are a fair number of lots that I have coloured in yellow to show the ones I researched so far that are now forming larger blocks of colour.

My long-term goal is connect all these dots through a sponsorship-funded neighbourhood-based project--one that would resurrect the old East End, not just what they call Strathcona these days, but one that would include all buildings from about Carrall Street to McLean Drive and from the Burrard Inlet to the old shoreline of False Creek south to Grant. This would cover all of District Lots 196, 181 and 182, possibly 183.

All data would go on an interactive web site and would resurrect, in virtual reality anyway, all the neighbourhood lost to industrial expansion north of Hastings Street, including old Japantown, as well as Hogan's Alley and other sections of what we now call Strathcona that were demolished in the 1960s and 1970s for highway development and project housing.

How It Would Work:

A website user would be able to click on a map of the East End to choose an area or block a user was interested in:

Then select a lot or address on that page, click that and up would pop the first available archival photo showing the house built on that lot.

The user would then be able to scroll through all the information available on the house, such as when and by whom it was built, how much it cost, etc., and find out who lived in the house over the years, where they came from, where they worked, etc. Basically everything that I would include in my house histories would be available online. Where available, links would be embedded throughout allowing users to see old photos of the interior of the house, pictures of the people who lived there, archival photos of their workplaces, and so on.

Who Would Benefit from the Web Site?

Through this project, current and past residents could connect or reconnect with the neighbourhood. High school students writing term papers, doctorate students writing their theses, researchers, genealogists, historic fiction and fiction writers would be able to find practically everything they would need for their projects. All the data locked away in increasingly fragile archival material would be immediately accessible to users working on their home computers. Hopefully the web site project would encourage people to look at the East End, and other historic neighbourhoods differently, and respect the unique architecture and environment and remaining historical architecture, encouraging investors to preserve, rehabilitate and restore old buildings, not tear them down.

Filling In The Gaps:
Another goal of the project is to fill in the gaps of data concerning certain historic communities living in the East End, in particular the Japanese and Chinese, and to a lesser extent Russians and Italians. If you look at the old city directories from the early 1900s right up to the 1950s very often you will find that people of Chinese or Japanese heritage were listed just as that, "Japanese" or "Chinese" or worse, "Orientals". Italians and Russians were often listed the same way, or listed as "Foreigners". Entire generations of East End residents have been wiped from the history books in this way.

I hope that by reaching out to the various historic communities that made up the East End in the past that not only important family photos can be saved and used but that important information about past residents who were not properly listed will be forthcoming.

What I Am Doing Now:

Right now I am working on a number of things for the project:

· Sourcing a web site host for the project. This will likely be a university, either SFU or UBC.

· Looking at funding options. As stated above, I am leaning strongly toward funding through sponsorship.

· Getting the word out.

· Soliciting copies of, and the permission to use, photos of the East End, the neighbourhood's old houses, churches, businesses, lost streetscapes, past residents, etcetera, for the website.

If you can help by supplying scanned copies of your old East End-related photos or would allow me to scan them, please e-mail me at househistorian@yahoo.ca.

If you know of other former East Enders who might be able to help in the same way, please let them know about the project and encourage them to get involved. Thank you! Above are samples of photos to be used for the project that have been donated.


Thanks to Lucille Mars, Gary McDonald, Emidio de Julius, Graham Elvidge, and Bettina Shuen for the use of these photos.

History Walking Tours in Vancouver's Old East End

Some months back I was approached by Heritage Vancouver Society, to do a history walking tour of my neighbourhood, Vancouver's old East End, now known as Strathcona. Though I have researched hundreds of houses in the neighbourhood and have a background in tourism, at first I resisted. There were already a number of people and organizations offering tours in the neighbourhood: John Atkin, author of a number of great books, including Strathcona: Vancouver's First Neighbourhood, the UBC Department of Urban Geography, the Architectural Insitute of BC, the BC Jewish Museum and Archives, and even the Vancouver Police Museum. Ultimately, I realized that all of these people and groups have a different focus, and each of them show and talk about different aspects of this fascinating neighbourhood.

My route, first offered on August 15th to an oversold crowd of 44 people is the culmination of years of researching over 250 homes in the East End. Although architecture is a minor theme in the tour, my focus is more on the social history—the ebb and flow of different waves of immigrants who established themselves here before moving on to other parts of the city. Most people know about Little Italy, Hogan’s Alley, the East End’s early Jewish Community, and Japantown, but did you know that there were whole blocks of Newfoundlanders and a sizable Syrian colony here as well in the early 1900s?

The tour touches on the impact and influences of portside industries (BC Sugar, shipyards, etc.) prohibition, (the proliferation of bootlegging), the Oriental Exclusion Act (bachelor rooming houses, etc.), the Japanese Canadian internment, as well as the City Planning Department’s attempts to wipe out “urban blight”. It also gives participants the chance to see the locations of the previous homes of well-known East End residents, like pioneer female aviator Tosca Trasolini, premier Dave Barrett, champion boxers Jimmy McLarnin and Felice Di Palma (Di Palma boxed under the name Phil Palmer), Rabbi Nathan Meyer Pastinsky, award-winning authors Paul Yee and Wayson Choy, Ross and Nora Hendrix (Jimi’s grandparents), community activists Mary Lee Chan and Shirley Chan, and BC Supreme Court Judge, community leader Angelo Branca, and k.d. lang.

Even with 250 houses under my belt there is still so much I don't know and want to know about my neighbourhood. In an attempt to better prepare for a second set of tours offered on September 5th to two smaller groups I looked up some houses on a street I was researching in the census records and stumbled on a second house with a Hendrix family connection. Ross and Nora Hendrix don't actually appear in the directory listings for the year the census was taken so no one knew about this Hendrix house before. I introduced the house as a special surprise treat at the end of my tour.

I happen to know the owners of the house, and when I e-mailed them to let them know the exciting news, they were of course delighted, but more importantly, they told me another important pice of history associated with the house. The same house that the Hendrix family lived in earlier in the century was home to Charles Yip Quong and Nellie Towers, the first mixed Chinese/Caucasian married couple in Vancouver. Apparently Nellie was a well-known and much loved midwife in the neighbourhood. Here is a link to a Parks Canada page on Nellie Yip Quong.
http://www.pc.gc.ca/culture/ppa-ahp/itm3-/page02_e.asp

So there you have it. Piece by piece, this neighbourhood's lost history gets revealed and shared by happenstance and amazing coincidences. And I am sure that there is so much more to discover.

For information about my upcoming History Walks in Vancouver click this link.

Private tours are also available in English, Japanese and Italian for groups of 5 people or more, or a minimum cost of $100 per tour for groups of smaller size. For more information on my History Walks or to book a tour, e-mail me at historywalks@gmail.com.

Cost $20

Thanks to Lucille Mars, Gary McDonald, Emidio De Julius, and Norah McLaren respectively for the first, second, third and fifth photos above. The fourth photo is City of Vancouver Archives Photo Port N3.1 showing two portraits of Hogan's Alley resident Field William Spotts.