Vanquished Vancouver

Despite never having a “Vancouver proper” postal code my whole life (unless you count fetal development), I’ve always considered Vancouver and not wherever I was currently situated my home.

It’s not surprising, really. A large part of my childhood was spent there. I went to school in Vancouver for the first and second grades, despite living in Surrey. Every Friday night until I was six was spent at Science World, with a stop at the McDonalds at Main and Terminal so I could ride the Merry-Go-Round in the Playplace.

I enjoyed the PNE less for the rides and more for the fact that my mom would drive around to the houses she grew up in north of Hastings. Then we’d trudge from the car, parked in front of her high school friend’s house on Franklin near Nanaimo, all the way to the fair grounds, and she would point out the houses that were the same, who had lived where, how upset they’d be over the state of the rose garden, the houses that had been rebuilt, and any number of factoids about the area.

I love the landscape of Vancouver: its old narrow houses and notoriously un-open space floor plans, brick walk-ups downtown with once-grand, now-motheaten carpeted entrances, and even the Vancouver specials in the south. Part of why I’m terrified to leave in September is because in the two years I’ll be gone, I’m not entirely sure if I’ll be coming back to the Vancouver I knew.

When the Vancouver Police Museum offered me and a friend admittance to their “Sins of the City” walking tour of the DTES, I jumped at the opportunity. The tour was unique in that it told a different history than the one we usually get. A lot of the first settlers came here for the gold rush, and yes, many of us know that Gastown was Vancouver’s first real area to develop, and it happened because “Gassy Jack” opened a saloon; but you probably didn’t realize the Vancouver Police Department (a version thereof at least) began because of the amount of drunks causing trouble. In a historical context, the Granville Strip reads less as a wart on our city and more as a weekly pioneer days celebration.

Vancouver, it turns out, had quite the string of corrupt politicians and higher-ups in the police force. Making it big was all about who you knew and how much you could pay them. Busts might have happened, and businesses may have shut down, but eventually they’d pop up elsewhere. Not quite the “we’re just tryin’ to have a little advisory committee, for fuck sakes” city we all love.

While a lot of the tour was spent marvelling at the facades of decades-old buildings, trying to envision a tapestry of the seedy exchanges that occurred within, many times our group found ourselves looking at a 70s-90s built building where the sin den in question once sat, which is unsurprising. In a city predicated on vice, gambling and hedonism, it makes sense that we’re always trying to move on to the next big thing, find the next cash cow, no matter what gets burned in the process.

The DTES is hardly the only area currently affected by the push to build and redevelop in Vancouver. It’s more obvious, given that you have the nouveau-riche cashing in on quickly built condos, eager to demonstrate their wealth outwardly mixed in with inhabitants of what is for now still the poorest postal code in Canada, but other areas are getting architectural facelifts as well, coming out looking as plastic as Heidi Montag.

The West Side is seeing many of its character homes demolished rather than renovated, something Caroline Adderson has been working to catalogue on her Vancouver Vanishes Facebook page. Citing its fruition in “naivety and frustration,” Adderson began taking photos of the houses she was witnessing being demolished and sending them, along with letters, to city council. Protests falling on deaf ears, she got the idea to put the photos online in January of this year.

One of the biggest issues she sees here isn’t that the houses are in massive states of disrepair, requiring serious work to make them liveable again. Most of these homes are being sold for their property value alone. In the West Side, says Adderson, “lots are generally much larger, so the houses are picked off one by one. The condition of the house is irrelevant; many are newly renovated.”

However, for those that do want to buy a character home for its quirk and charm, trying to make even basic renovations can quickly become a nightmare. The Vancouver Courier recently ran a piece explaining the hoops Alex Burgers and Kyrani Kanavaros had to jump through to renovate the 1912 bungalow they purchased. They aren’t just any home-buyers, either. Burgers has worked for 15 years in the construction industry.

The family waited over a year to get the necessary permits, whereas if they had opted to demolish the house, the permits would’ve taken four months, tops. There isn’t much incentive to reuse as much existing structural material as possible, which seems shortsighted given Vancouver’s constant strides towards greenification. Right now, Adderson quips, “Seventy-four per cent of Vancouver’s DLC (Demolition, Land-clearing and Construction waste) Landfill is waste from residential demolitions. More than 750 homes are demolished annually. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Remember that?”

For us as students, it’s easy to write things like this off. With the job market and economy the way they are, it’s not like home ownership is on the near horizon for the large majority of us. But therein is part of the problem. When we erase the way our city was built, who it was built for, we forget where we came from.

One of the reasons I enjoy (in a remorseful way) the Vancouver Vanishes page so much is because Adderson includes the original owner’s name and their profession. Some houses were turnkey houses people moved into, the more exquisite obviously ordered to fit with a vision in mind. Their owners, though, were ordinary people. While their titles were certainly reflected in the size of the home and its location, whether someone was a manager of a large trading company, a clerk, or a piano teacher, they managed to afford a detached house with a modest to large yard in Vancouver.

It’s not just about having a scenic vista of brightly painted houses like Newfoundland proudly boasts in their tourism brochures (although having a distinct culture doesn’t seem to hurt tourism), it’s about preserving a memory of where we’ve been as a town. When we knock down our second oldest house, a testament to one of Canada’s first architects, when we sell-off Arthur Erickson’s design that he saw fit to call home that likely will be razed while I’m away, we aren’t just making way for more families, we’re saying “fuck you” to our past. More importantly, we don’t have to care about our wrongs if there aren’t visual testaments to them.

One of my favourite stops on the walking tour we took was only accessible through Jane’s Tea and Art, a small tea shop that teaches traditional Chinese tea ceremonies and sells tea, accessories, and any number of desirable shiny things. Through the shop we came to a courtyard, backed by the two-story building we’d walked through and walled in by tall brick buildings. The only way in was through the buildings, but there were small corridors leading to unassuming doorways back onto the street.

In 1907 when the Asiatic Exclusionary League incited the Vancouver riots, smashing windows throughout Chinatown and what was then Japantown (now Oppenheimer Park), the courtyard served as a safe haven for those lucky enough to be in the buildings with access to it at the time of the attack. Once everything died down, people left the alley. Not understanding how so many had managed to escape the riot, stories of underground tunnels in Chinatown began to emerge.

If the alleyway behind the tea shop had been flattened and built over, we wouldn’t have an antidote to conspiracy theories like a system of tunnels under the city, but more importantly, to the whitewashing we like to do when scars of our past become visible. Fortunately, the whole block was owned by a wealthy opium manufacturer who never sold the properties and maintained the buildings largely as they were.

When you’re standing in the alley, however peaceful it seems, you can imagine what it must have been like, hundreds of people packed in a small area, waiting, listening, trying not to breathe, having nowhere to look but up because of the then-sky-scraping buildings keeping them blind, but also obscured from their would-be attackers.

Their owners being interned in labour camps during WWII and all of their possessions seized by the Canadian government, the homes and businesses of Japantown largely didn’t survive to tell the same stories as those in Chinatown. Only a few of the original buildings at Jackson Ave and Powell Street remain.

History tends to be cyclical, but that doesn’t mean we have to repeat ourselves. While I’d like to think we’re well past race riots, we made it clear two years ago we weren’t past rioting altogether (even if it was in the name of nothing, it would seem). I’m not trying to give you some meandering Golden Age Fallacy about how much better Vancouver was before, although I do personally favour the aesthetics of days gone by.

I would be heartbroken to come back to Vancouver and see the streets I liked to walk down dramatically changed, even though change is inevitable. Rather, I’m troubled by our willingness to throw out history with the yard trimmings and organic matter. Too easily we move on to the next big thing.

In an article detailing Hastings Crossing Business Improvement Association’s initiative, in partnership with Ninja Games, to use an incremental clue treasure hunt throughout the DTES to teach people about Vancouver’s history through architecture, Wes Regan explains that “Vancouver’s architecture tells us the story of our city, the myth, meaning(s) and power of place.”

This is as true of the East, West or South Sides as it is for the DTES. While single-family homes surely don’t carry the history of as many people as Vancouver’s original skyscrapers, they still tell the story of a generation’s hopes and desires. They tell us who was living where, and who was able to afford what.

Vancouver isn’t an old city, at least in our Euro-centrist view of Canada, but it’s old enough that we no longer get to have the luxury of pretending we all came here with nothing. If we’re looking to improve the way our city operates and the fairness with which our inhabitants are able to access things like safe and affordable housing, we need to pay attention to our past so we aren’t doomed to repeat the same mistakes.