Browsing “Vancouver Was Awesome Series”

A Vancouver time travelogue brought to you by Past Tense.

The first exclusive neighbourhood in Vancouver was on the CPR land acquired from the Three Greenhorns, on the bluffs overlooking Coal Harbour and nicknamed Blue Blood Alley. Some sources say Blue Blood Alley refers to West Georgia Street, while others say it was Seaton Street (now Hastings west of Burrard), but it may have been the general area. Note the killer view, including the squatter shacks on Deadman’s Island.

When the rest of the West End was cleared and developed as a residential neighbourhood, it was similarly well-heeled. Eventually less well-to-do folks, even renters, began seeping into the area, and the uppercrust decided it was time to go.

The CPR opened up Shaughnessy Heights in 1909 with the intention of it developing as the new prestigious neighbourhood. Lots were offered for a mere $50 down, but only on the condition that the buyer spend at least $6000 to develop their property. During the Depression, many people lost their homes and the area was derisively called “Poverty Hill” and “Mortage Heights.” TheGlen Brae, or Tait Mansion, was being rented out as a kindergarten for $75 per month.

Later in the 1930s, the British Properties in West Vancouver was developed as the next posh neighbourhood. This time the development was financed by the Guinness beer family, not the CPR, which included construction of the Lion’s Gate Bridge to make it accessible. Earlier attempts to build a crossing at the First Narrows were thwarted by a city council wanting to preserve the integrity of Stanley Park, but during the economic crisis, the City was in no position to turn down such a major financial investment and job creation project.

As for the West End, most of the mansions there were converted to apartments or rooming houses, and were then torn down mid-century to make way for the densely populated West End we know today. A handful remain, includingRoedde House, Gabriola Mansion, and Abbott House, the only survivor of Blue Blood Alley.

Source: View from 1287 Robson Street, ca. 1902, City of Vancouver Archives#Van Sc P123.1

A Vancouver time travelogue brought to you by Past Tense.

Beavers are fascinating creatures, but they do not make the most cooperative zoo animals. Beaver Lake in Stanley Park got its name because beavers were spotted there in 1907, but they didn’t stick around. When the area was being beautified in 1911, someone at the Parks Board figured Beaver Lake should, naturally, contain beavers, so a pen was built to house the creatures for public viewing. The beavers simply chewed through the wire enclosure.

A new beaver pond was constructed as a zoo attraction in 1972, with heavy gauge wire mesh covering the bottom to contain the industrious rodents. After the road beside the pond collapsed under the weight of a service vehicle, zoo staff discovered that the beavers had chewed through the wire and tunneled beneath the road so they could cut down saplings from the woods and bring them back into the pond. The tunnel was sealed up, but a short while later, staff noticed the miniature train tracks were starting to sag. The beavers had built a new tunnel. Finally, the beaver pond was drained and the bottom covered with concrete.

Source: Photo by Harry R Stenton, 1920s, City of Vancouver Archives #Misc P56. Story from Richard M Steele, The Stanley Park Explorer (Whitecap Books, 1985).

A Vancouver time travelogue brought to you by Past Tense.

Bill Miner was the last of the great train robbers and is said to be Canada’s first. He began his criminal career in the 1860s when he reportedly coined the term “Hands up!” while robbing stagecoaches. By the time he moved to BC in 1903, he was a seasoned sixty year-old train robber. The following year a train was robbed near Mission, allegedly by Miner and his gang. But the job that landed him in the BC Penitentiary was a botched 1906 train robbery near Kamloops. After serving less than a year of his life sentence, Bill Miner and two accomplices tunneled their way to freedom.

Miner became a folk hero because, as the newspapers of the day liked to point out, he was a real-life Robin Hood. Under the alias George Edwards, Miner had made many friends in the short time he lived in BC, and everyone who knew him attested to his generosity and kindness. The many anecdotes about him include claims that it was not unusual for him to pay off someone’s mortgage or, as a trained shoemaker, to cobble shoes and give them to poor children. His good manners earned him the nickname the “Gentleman Bandit” and in the many heists he was involved in, Bill Miner never killed anyone.

When a Vancouver to Seattle train was robbed and one of the trainmen was bashed in the head in 1908, Miner wrote an indignant letter to the Vancouver World denying rumours that it was his work. Despite his fugitive status, he considered himself on a sort of parole, he said, and had come to realize that “you can get money here [in Seattle] without taking any risks. Business is business and I want to be left alone.” Besides, there was no one there “that I would go into cahoots with in a hold-up anyway.” Miner insisted that he had never in his life “bashed a man’s head to get the cash.”

Another time he explained that he did not “consider it a crime to lift money from rich corporations. It is not a crime, it is not a sin, it is neither immoral nor wrong. On the contrary … I have done what I have done and can look God and man in the face unashamed.”

Miner’s stint as a businessman “on parole” didn’t last long before he relapsed into his robbing ways. He never returned to Canada but landed in a Georgia prison, forty-two years after his first conviction, where he died of natural causes in 1913.

Source: Tacoma Times, 7 March 1911

A Vancouver time travelogue brought to you by Past Tense.

The Tiny Dog Store was a clothing and footwear store that opened in 1895 at 70 West Cordova Street. The name comes from “the smallest dog that ever saw the light of day, measuring but three inches.” The stuffed little dog could be viewed by visiting the store.

Owner Muskett Grossman had a definite flair for publicity. This 1904 photo shows two goats on Hastings Street pulling a wagon advertising a footwear sale. “Have you seen them?” it says. “Seen what? Why! The tan shoes worth 5.50 for 2.25.” In another ad, Grossman explains how he kept his prices so low:

Say, Muskett! You can’t give car fare out of your small profits, how do you sell so cheap? You see, these other merchants have large corner stores, have two salesmen to pay, and over $100 per month rent. I only pay $40, and do my own work. I see, Muskett, you are a worker, a WORKINGMAN’S FRIEND, the man we want in these hard times. We will all give you a call at the TINY DOG STORE.

Like many Vancouver retailers at the time, part of Tiny Dog’s business was outfitting prospectors on their way to the Klondike goldfields. “The Best and Cheapest House in Town for Klondike Outfits! Loggers’, Miners’ and Sailors’ Supplies. Everything you want!” screamed an ad in the St James Newsletter.

Source: City of Vancouver Archives #371-1316

A Vancouver time travelogue brought to you by Past Tense.

Ada “Bricktop” Smith was a singer and dancer from Chicago who spent 1919 and 1920 in Vancouver with the house band at the Patricia Café. Although not a familiar name today, Bricktop is notable for a number of reasons, the least of which is her singing ability.

Bricktop (so named because of her red hair) was already well known through the club circuits, but it wasn’t until she got to France a few years after her Vancouver stint that she hit the big time. Cole Porter saw her perform one of his songs and immediately became a fan. She taught his friends how to dance the Charleston and the Black Bottom and he in turn helped her get set up with her own club, Chez Bricktop, the hottest club in jazz age Europe.

Bricktop was the doyenne of Paris’s café society and of the ex-pat American “lost generation.“ Langston Hughes worked at Chez Bricktop, and she once threw a drunk John Steinbeck out, for which he later apologized by sending over a taxi filled with roses. Cole Porter’s classic Miss Otis Regrets was written for her, as was Django Reinhardt’s Bricktop. TS Elliot wrote a poem about her and F Scott Fitzgerald insisted ”my greatest claim to fame is that I discovered Bricktop before Cole Porter.” She also mentored and had a fling with Josephine Baker, and before going to Europe helped Duke Ellington get his first club gig in Harlem.

But before all that, Bricktop was singing at Hastings and Dunlevy at “the finest cabaret and cafe in the entire northwest,” in the words of the Chicago Defender, an African American newspaper that served as a social networking tool for vaudevillians, musicians, railway porters, and others on the road.

On 14 February 1920, the paper published an update that Bricktop had sent from Vancouver. She was doing fine, she said, but had had “the misfortune of breaking one of her limbs on Christmas Eve after a lengthy visit to someone’s cellar, but the break is mending rapidly and she will soon again be able to strut her stuff with her usual vim and pep.” The version she gives in her autobiography is that her leg was broken in a barroom brawl that erupted among the Scandinavian loggers who frequented the Patricia. She also told the Defender that her mother would be spending the summer with her in Vancouver and that letters could be sent to 848 East Georgia Street.

Source: Ada Bricktop Smith in Vancouver, 1920, from Bricktop by Bricktop with James Haskins (Atheneum, 1983), via RiverwalkJazz.org

A Vancouver time travelogue brought to you by Past Tense.

When the BC government decided to install a fountain at the court house (today’s VAG), the premier insisted that the work be kept secret until its official unveiling. Contractors were told to paint the hoarding hiding the fountain green and white (the colours of the ruling Socred Party), but Mayor Rathie had a different idea. He decided to issue permits to art students to paint the hoarding panels and give the three best pieces cash prizes.

The Big Paint-In kicked off with a jurisdictional battle between the City and Province over the plywood fence and a minor tussle between an artist and a contractor. The City won the day and pretty soon more hoarding was added to create enough space for all the artists who signed up. The streets had to be shut down to accommodate the throng of spectators who came by to witness the fence being brought to life.

By all accounts, the whole spectacle was overwhelmingly positive and an antidote for whatever they called “No Fun City” in the 1960s.Sun columnist Jack Wasserman gave his take on the unexpected success of the Paint-In:

The stunt has burgeoned into one of the brightest episodes in our town’s recent history. The response has been spontaneous, youthful and exciting … Everybody has approached the scheme with a single unabashed aim – to have a little fun. It’s the kind of thing one takes for granted in San Francisco. Most attempts to promote similar ventures in our town are usually submerged in serious-minded under organization. For a change it was all very San Vancouver …

The crowds that clustered around the young artists all day long illustrated a lesson that is often lost on the planners and architects. It has to do with the heartbeat of a city, and the places where you find the action.

In our town the action is on Robson street, out around First and Commercial, or Nanaimo and Hastings, and a few other neighbourhoods that are so beat up the bureaucrats keep filing them away for future action. Nobody really cares what anybody does to the store fronts so the design panels and zoning commissioners don’t make too much of an issue of garish cafes and awful neon signs. Nobody, that is, except the people, who don’t really understand all the technicalities, but they know they can breathe in that atmosphere and they happily do.

After the success of the Paint-In, Calgary, Victoria, and other cities soon followed suit. As for the secret fountain, its December unveiling was upstaged by a major downpour and a prankster had dumped soap in the water causing it to spew suds all over the place.

Source: Photo by Leslie F Sheraton, City of Vancouver Archives #2009-001.171