Opening Doors In Vancouver S East End

"There was nothing but parties in Hogan's Alley," a black musician named Austin Phillips reminisced in 1977, "Night time, anytime, and Sundays all day. You could go by at 6 or 7 o'clock in the morning and you could hear the juke boxes going, you hear somebody hammering on the piano, playing the guitar, or hear somebody fighting." The black ghetto of Hogan's Alley was just one of the ethnic neighbourhoods that made the historic Strathcona district the most cosmopolitan and colourful quarter in Vancouver for over a hundred years. Home to Chinatown, Japantown, the Loggers' Skid Row and Little Italy among others, it had been the city's first residential neighbourhood but became the refuge of the city's working and immigrant classes when better-off Vancouverites migrated westward around 1900. By the 1950s planners had declared it a slum slated for demolition, but in the 1960s residents united in a spirited defense that guaranteed Strathcona's survival and revolutionized city planning across Canada. It had long been known that some of Vancouver's best stories lurked behind the closed doors of the Strathcona district (rock legend Jimi Hendrix spent part of his childhood living there with his grandmother, who is interviewed in this book.) Between 1977 and 1978, Strathcona writers Daphne Marlatt and Carole Itter undertook to open those doors and collect 50 oral histories representing the best of the stories. First published in 1979 as a double issue of the journal Sound Heritage, Opening Doors has been celebrated as one of the best books about Vancouver you couldn't obtain for love nor money. To help mark Vancouver's 125th Anniversary, Harbour is republishing this underground classic as a Raincoast Monograph richly illustrated with vintage photographs.

Focusing on Vancouver's social history, the essays written for thisspecial edition of BC Studies treat hitherto neglected areas of thecity's past and bring new insights into how its residents lived andworked. Receiving particular attention is the socio-economic andresidential structure of Vancouver with one author arguing that thecity's economy created an urban working class which was at oncemore complex and politically more conservative than that of the highlypolarized communities on Vancouver Island and in the Interior.

A brisk chronicle of Vancouver, BC, from early days to its emergence as a global metropolis, refracted through the events, characters and communities that have shaped the city. In Becoming Vancouver award-winning historian Daniel Francis follows the evolution of the city from early habitation by the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, to the area’s settlement as a mill town, to the flourishing era speakeasies and brothels during the 1920s, to the years of poverty and protest during the 1930s followed by the long wartime and postwar boom to the city’s current status as real-estate investment choice of the global super-rich. Tracing decades of transformation, immigration and economic development, Francis examines the events and characters that have defined the city’s geography, economy and politics. Francis enlivens his text with rich characterizations of the people who shaped Vancouver: determined Chief Joe Capilano, who in 1906 took a delegation to England to appeal directly to King Edward VII for better treatment of Indigenous peoples; brilliant and successful Won Alexander Cumyow, the first recorded person of Chinese descent born in Canada; L.D. Taylor, irrepressible ex-Chicagoan who still holds the record as the city’s longest-serving mayor; and tireless activist Helena Gutteridge, Vancouver’s first woman councillor. Vancouver has been called a city without a history, partly because of its youth but also because of the way it seems to change so quickly. Newcomers to the city, arriving by the thousands every year, find few physical reminders of what was before, making a work like Becoming Vancouver so essential.

In 1922-23, Chinese students in Victoria, British Columbia, went on strike to protest a school board's attempt to impose segregation. Their resistance was unexpected and runs against the grain of mainstream accounts of Asian exclusion, which tend to ignore the agency of the excluded. In Contesting White Supremacy, Timothy Stanley combines Chinese sources and perspectives with an innovative theory of racism and anti-racism to explain the strike and construct an alternative reading of racism in British Columbia. His work demonstrates that education was an arena in which white supremacy confronted Chinese nationalist schooling and where parents and students contested racism by constructing a new category � Chinese Canadian � to define their identity.

Provides up-to-date profiles on the careers of leading and emerging poets.

Produced in conjunction with the website Vancouver Is Awesome, this book collects stories and photos about the people, places, events, and phenomena that collectively have infused Vancouver with a distinct flavor and flair and which laid the foundation for the eclectic city that is consistently named one of the world's top tourist destinations. From vaudeville to beatniks, Rudyard Kipling to Hunter S. Thompson, violent squirrels to train-hopping dogs, Vancouver Was Awesome is an entertaining, informative, and at times jaw-dropping tour of one city's awesome past. Lani Russwurm is an historian who runs the blog Past Tense Vancouver.

An anthology of 50 stories about Vancouver and environs in the early years of the 20th century. These stories grew out of a collection of picture postcards -- not just any old postcards, but particularly appealing 'real photo' cards that seemed to be waiting to have their stories told. While some of the images are not uncommon, most of the pictures are rare, if not one-of-a-kind survivors of the 'golden age' of postcards, which encompassed the years between 1900 and 1914, the relatively short period of time when Vancouver ended its days as a frontier town and became a significant Canadian city.