Browsing “Vancouver Was Awesome Series”

A Vancouver time travelogue brought to you by Past Tense.

Built with money from the Guinness beer family, the Lions Gate Bridge opened to motor traffic 74 years ago today. The bridge was part of a scheme concocted by Albert Taylor in the 1920s to develop West Vancouver, which, without a second crossing across Burrard Inlet, was pretty remote. Taylor’s plan was opposed by the CPR, who didn’t want West Van to compete with its own upper crusty neighbourhood, Shaughnessy Heights.

The bridge was initially turned down by a city hall that wanted to keep development out of Stanley Park. Once the Great Depression was in full swing and Vancouver teetered on the brink of bankruptcy however, the City was desperate for investment and jobs and had a change of heart.

For more on the history of the bridge, see Inside Vancouver or watch this video from the North Van Museum.

Source: Photo by James Crookall (1939), City of Vancouver Archives #260-995

A Vancouver time travelogue brought to you by Past Tense.

Loggers built makeshift trails like this for skidding logs to sawmills down on the waterfront. The term “skid road” and its corrupted form, “skid row,” became widely used mid-twentieth century to refer to the down-and-out part of town such as the Downtown Eastside, where many retired loggers lived.

Source: City of Vancouver Archives #Log P5

A Vancouver time travelogue brought to you by Past Tense.

Inspired by a 1935 Popular Mechanics article, 17 year-old Van Tech student Robert Wong sent away for instructions to build a Pietenpol Air Camper, a single-seat airplane made out of plywood, metal, and fabric and powered by an automobile engine. Robert was an aspiring aviator and planned to use the DIY plane to accumulate enough flying hours to qualify for his commercial pilot’s licence.

With help from his 14 year-old brother Tommy, Robert built the 17 foot-long plane in sections in the small apartment they shared with ten other family members at 124 Market Alley. The completed sections were too large for the apartment and had to be kept in the hallway. To power the plane, the boys bought an old Model “T” engine from an auto wrecker for $25. The boys enlisted their mother and her friends to sew the fabric onto the wings.

After a year of toiling, the Wong brothers hauled their aircraft down to the Boeing plant on West Georgia Street where they assembled the sections. RCAF Flight-Lieutenant Johnson deemed the plane structurally sound and gave it a CF-BAA designation. The next step was to truck it to the airport on Sea Island. The boys christened their masterpiece “Sky Scout” and took it on its inaugural flight in 1937. Sky Scout cost only $2/hr to fly and remained operational until 1945.

After graduating from high school, the Wong brothers sold Sky Scout and moved to Ontario. After the war, they opened a flight training school on Toronto Island, the largest such school in Canada at the time.

Source: Larry Wong, “Tommy Wong,” The Chinese Canadian Military Museum  

A Vancouver time travelogue brought to you by Past Tense.

Rocky was a well known dog-about-town in 1920s Vancouver. The massive 182 pound Great Dane toured the Granville Cafe circuit every night before returning to his home with Mrs Gulliver at 311 Smythe Street. Bert Mahoney, proprietor of the Granville Lunch, explained:

The Bum, we call him, comes to the entrance every night between 8 and 9 o’clock. He has hardly missed a night in the last 13 months. He won’t come in — just stands there looking through the glass and waits until we take out a tin of meat scraps to feed him. We dump the scraps on the pavement and he gulps down every bite of them. Then, without a smile, a wag of his tail or a “thank you” of any kind, he turns tail and moves off to the Capitol restaurant and the White Lunch, which he plays every night.

The Sun likened him to the Industrial Workers of the World, or the “I Won’t Works of the World,” because Rocky seemed to “believe the world owes him a living.” But as it turned out, Rocky’s pedigree was thoroughly bourgeois. He was a purebred who had won dog shows and his father belonged to Montreal’s Chief of Police. Rocky also reportedly worked guarding a liquor store and sometimes got paid gigs as a thespian, including a role as a bloodhound in a production of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” that played at the Empress and Orpheum theatres.

Source: Vancouver Sun

A Vancouver time travelogue brought to you by Past Tense.

Native men worked as longshoremen on Burrard Inlet since before Vancouver was incorporated. In many cases, several generations of men from the same family worked on the docks beginning as young as thirteen or fourteen years old. Members of several of the families that lived in Stanley Park earned money through longshoring, including William Nahanee, pictured in front holding a bag in this 1889 photo. Numerous indigenous leaders worked as longshoremen, including Andy Paull, Chief Dan George, Chief Simon Baker, and Chief Joe Capilano, who used money earned on the waterfront to finance a trip to London to lobby the King for the rights of BC’s First Nations in 1906.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, specialization on the waterfront roughly followed racial lines, and the work gangs comprised primarily of indigenous men became known for their skill and efficiency in handling lumber. They were also the first to organize a longshoremen’s union in 1906, Local 526 of the militant Industrial Workers of the World, informally known as the “Bows and Arrows.” Although Local 526 lasted less than a year, other “Bows and Arrows” unions followed until all longshoremen became part of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union after WWII.

Source: William Nahanee and a group of longshoremen on the dock of Moodyville Sawmill by Charles S Bailey, 1889, City of Vancouver Archives #Mi P2

A Vancouver time travelogue brought to you by Past Tense.

Back in 1918-1919, Canadian and other allied forces were getting a head start on the Cold War by battling the Reds in Siberia. They withdrew in 1919 and brought back this enormous bear as a souvenir for the Stanley Park zoo. Naturally it was named Trotsky, and for 20 years the good-natured beast charmed park visitors as the zoo’s most popular attraction. At 520+ pounds, the great Russian bear was thought to be the largest in captivity. As a sign of his popularity, Trotsky’s death in 1939 made the New York Times.

Source: City of Vancouver Archives #371-2843.1