Elegy for 227 Union: An Interview with James Johnstone, East End House Historian
March 23, 2007
Wayde Compton

Seven Oaks is pleased to present the following conversation between poet/historian Wayde Compton and James Johnstone, “an East End-based house genealogist who has researched the history of over 500 houses in Vancouver and New Westminster of which over 200 are in what is now called Strathcona.” Compton is co-founder of the Hogan’s Alley Memorial Project, “an organization established in 2002 to collect and document the oral histories of elder black Vancouverites,” and which takes its name from the East End  neighbourhood which was once a home to Vancouver’s black community.

Wayde Compton: I want to start by quoting back to you an email you sent me on 7 January: “Dear Wayde, / They are tearing down 227 Union. I could just weep, I feel so depressed. / James.” A day or two after I got your email, I drove down Union and had look to confirm it. Can you tell me why you felt this way that day, and what the site means to you?

James Johnstone: Some years back when I was trying to build my home history research business I realized that I needed to be able to show potential clients a variety of samples of my work. During the often large gaps between paying projects I would research houses that caught my fancy. Usually these involved old homes in danger of imminent demolition. More often than not these houses were isolated remnants of once thriving residential areas surrounded by encroaching condos or industrial sprawl. I called them my “orphans.”

Though my ultimate goal was to make my new business a paying proposition I began to hope that my work might save some of these old houses. So far I haven’t had much luck. One of my pet projects involved those three little houses near the corner of Main and East 12th.  The day after I completed the research on them they were front-page news, destroyed by a punk rocker arson party. The really sad thing is that the owner apparently was not averse to saving them and that my booklet might have ensured their survival.

227 Union was another of those projects. Even though the front finial was falling away from the front eaves and the front porch needed repair it looked like it was in good shape. To my mind it was one of the last remnants of the neighbourhood that once adjoined old Hogan’s Alley. As with all my projects I don’t just do one house but include the history of the surrounding houses to give it a context. The project involved thirteen addresses — five on the north side of the street, and eight on the south. All of the houses except 227 Union were of course already demolished. I got really excited when I realized that Vie’s Chicken and Steakhouse was actually included in the project. It stood at 209 Union just across the alley to the west. The house it was in had been built in 1891. During World War I it was a boarding house and someone had attempted to have a restaurant there as early as 1913.

As I gathered and wove together the various strands and layers of data I collected I was fascinated with the various changes this little slice of the old East End had gone through. People came in waves, it seemed, from all over the world to find a new life on this section of that East End Vancouver street. Digging deeper, I scrolled through hundreds of birth, death and marriage records for the people who lived in these houses. As I named their names in my head, the feeling that I might be the only person who was remembering these men and women and their stories overwhelmed me.

Anyway, the more I found out about the house, the more I got attached to it. I was determined that somehow it could be saved. Seeing the house all secured behind chain link fence and its stained glass windows all wrenched out was like witnessing a violent attack on an old friend.

WC: Maybe ¾ to put the block in context, as you say ¾ you can tell us what Vie’s Chicken and Steak house was, and describe some of the past residents of 227 itself.

JJ: Sad to say I never had the pleasure of a visit to Vie’s, although I know quite a few people who have. As you know, the neighbourhood had a number of Southern-style chicken joints run by enterprising Black women who had immigrated to Canada from various parts of the US. They were mostly in the 200 and 300 blocks of Union, Prior and Keefer. Daphne Marlatt and Carol Itter’s amazing collection of East End oral history, Opening Doors, has a great story about how Rosa Prior started her Chicken Inn. Anyway, Vie’s Chicken and Steak House at 209 Union opened in late 1947 or 1948 and was operated by Robert and Viva Moore until 1975 or 1976 when it was taken over by someone named E. Clark. It closed in 1978. Though there were a number of those Southern-style chicken restaurants in the neighbourhood, Vie’s Chicken and Steak House become a Vancouver icon, perhaps because it lasted the longest of all of them. I am not aware of any place in Vancouver now that serves real chicken-fried steak. Are you?

As for 227 Union, it was built around 1900 by a man named John Bruce Smith who was born in New Brunswick on December 25, 1863. His parents, John Smith and Jean Isabella Dempster, were both from Scotland. John Bruce Smith came to Vancouver in 1882. He was a bachelor until August 3, 1912 when he married, at the age of 49, a 51 year-old widow named Emma McDonald, the daughter of Warren Graves and Harriet Beamish.

277 Union was home to John Bruce’s extended family, which include his widowed mother, his brother and his wife and family, from 1900 to 1912. In 1913 the house was rented out to a Russian-born Jewish tailor ¾ Joseph Lacterman ¾ and his English-born wife, Bessie Cooper. According to the city directories a laborer named H. Garberi lived in the house for two years. Garberi’s not traceable through the BC Archives Vital Events records. To me it sounds like an Italian name. That would make sense because the Italian colony was building up in the 600 and 700 blocks of Main Street at the time, but it may be Finnish.

By 1916 John Bruce Smith was back at the house with his wife Emma. Smith was working as a pile driver for Evans Coleman and Evans, one of Vancouver’s largest exporters of timber and the builders of Vancouver’s first deep sea dock. Smith was most likely involved in its building.

In 1922 the house was rented for a year to a Chinese family (not named in the city directory — not an unusual thing during those days), then from 1925 to 1933 it was home to Kansas-born African-American laborer Elijah Holman, the first black person to live in the house. Elijah Holman and a Mamie Holman owned and lived next door at 221 Union from 1922 to 1924. Perhaps he owned both of the houses. Elijah Holman was born on March 8, 1875 and came to Vancouver in 1911 where from 1932 to 1942 he worked as a labourer for the city of Vancouver.

By 1934, Lige Holman had moved back to 221 Union. From 1935 to 1942, 227 Union was home to Italian-born labourer Alberto Barichello and his wife Angelina. During the 1930s and 1940s the block was a mix of Black, Italian and Chinese families.

From 1945 until recently 227 Union has been home to a number of Chinese families, first the Shuen and then the Jang families. Both Wah John Shuen and Yow Sing Jang were labourers in neighbourhood lumber and shingle mills. Elijah Holman continued to live next door at 221 Union until his death on October 25, 1951 at the age of 75. He is buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery. According to his death certificate he never married.

WC: Can you describe your East End Community History Mapping Project for me?

JJ: I live in the East End. Don’t ask me to call it Strathcona; that’s a new name with none of the neighbourhood’s history behind it. Whether they came by boat or train, the East End was where most new immigrants arriving in Vancouver looked for their first home to establish themselves. Close to the port and the BC Sugar Refinery, the East End was an ideal place for new arrivals, with little or no English skills, to find work as labourers. The East End was home to stevedores and tugboat captains, merchants, fishermen and railway workers. It was home base for seasonal labourers working in the lumber, fishing and mining industries, as well as a large number of people working in all sorts of retail, service, and distribution industry jobs.

Over the years, small but growing ethnic and community-based colonies were established in various blocks of certain streets in the neighbourhood: Italians and later Croatians on Union and Prior, Ashkenazi Jews on East Georgia, Japanese on Alexander and Powell, Chinese on Pender, Maronite Christians from Syria on Campbell, and Blacks in Hogan’s Alley. There was even a colony of Newfoundlanders on Princess Avenue. These new Canadians carved out a new life for themselves through their toil, determination and mutual support in an often unwelcoming environment.

The racial and social mix, not to mention the bordellos on Gore and Alexander, the bottle joints and late night bars in Hogan’s Alley, and the bootleggers who seemed to operate out of the back doors of private homes and corner stores throughout the neighbourhood earned the East End an unsavoury reputation among the Anglo-Saxon righteous in the city. Something had to be done about the East End.

By the end of the 1940s and early 1950s the East End became the focus of a campaign to rid the city of “urban blight.”  Plans were drawn up that would see vast swaths of the old East End and Chinatown demolished for a freeway system linking the downtown to points east. Banks withheld loans from homeowners wishing to maintain or repair their property. Property values declined and the city bought up property in anticipation of a radical reorganisation of the East End. Hundreds of families left the East End in anticipation of the disruption.

Although the execution of the overall plan was eventually thwarted through the efforts of neighbourhood activists, great damage had been done. Entire blocks of Victorian and Edwardian-period homes were demolished to make way for high-rise project housing or to replace parkland lost to building those high-rises. Hogan’s Alley was wiped off the map to make way for the new Georgia Viaduct off-ramp.

The goal of the East End Neighbourhood History Mapping Project is to research all available data and assemble every available archival image relating to the old East End (District Lots 196, 181 and 182) and to upload everything on an interactive web site. Clicking on one of the district lots shown on the home page map would provide a user with a more detailed page showing the area’s street grid and the various numbered blocks within the area. Clicking on a particular block would get a user a more detailed map of the block and its numbered lots with their legal description and the current street address. Clicking on a particular lot would get the user an image — hopefully a black and white archival image — of the house that occupied the lot and a summary of the basic information available on the house, such as its architectural style, when it was built, by whom and for whom and for how much, when the house was hooked up to the city water service, etc.

On the same page would be a scrolling icon or button which would allow the user to see who lived in the house year-by-year, and find out where these people came from, (both where they were born and, if they lived in Vancouver previous to moving to this address, the address of their previous residence), where and to whom they were married, where they worked, where they moved to when they left this particular address, and where and how they died, and even where their remains are buried.

The website would include profiles of the various ethnic and religious communities that lived in the neighbourhood and the legacy left by these people. It would include musical and other sound capabilities so aural histories and period music could be accessible on the site.

Through the website, lost neighbourhoods like Japan Town, Hogan’s Alley, and the blocks occupied by the Mao Dan, MacLean Park and RayCam Housing Projects, the block of houses that were demolished for the creation of the new MacLean Park, as well as the neighbourhoods lost to retail and industrial expansion close to the port and Clark Drive and isolated pockets such as Cordova Street, would be resurrected and reconnected to the remaining residential neighbourhood — at least in virtual reality.  

This would become a matrix upon which past residents or their descendants could add their data, their stories, and their photos.

WC: For me, 227 has a particular significance because Bob Sherrin and I photographed it for a poem of mine called “Rune” in my book Performance Bond. We used the house as the site of a fictitious organization I called the Strathcona Coloured People’s Benevolent Society of Vancouver. (I can see the sign we used when I look to my left as I type this; it’s hanging on my apartment wall now.) I recall climbing the fence and taping the sign up on the porch while Bob set up the shot. My reasons for doing this have something to do with a desire to imagine a Black Vancouver that may have been rather than the one that was. I wonder what, for you, is the effect of knowing what you’ve come to know about the neighbourhood’s past. You are one of a few people able to look at a house and know in detail its lineage. What sort of perspective do you think this gives you?

JJ: I’ve seen the picture. I think for me it’s a question of consciousness, an awareness that wasn’t there before, but now, having done the research, having gone through all those birth, death and marriage records, and especially now since I have been inside that house, touched the place where these people lived…. I don’t know, it’s like the houses and the neighbourhood have come alive. There’s a ghost neighbourhood still there in spite of everything. Like an East End Black Brigadoon it shimmers just outside the line of my vision. If I only knew the right tune to whistle or song to sing that I could cross over and be there. I know; it sounds crazy.

Bottom line, knowing what I know and feeling so deeply a connection to what remains of what was, it makes me feel like I have witnessed such a devastating crime in the demolition of that old house. It wasn’t just timber and plaster. It had a life. That old house and its residual energy was like a portal to the past for me. And now the door is closed.

WC: When I saw the local dance legend Leonard Gibson perform at Radha, upstairs from The Brickhouse, this past fall, in a production by the Vancouver Moving Theatre, he actually referred to Hogan’s Alley as “like Brigadoon” during an ad-lib. (Radha is located, by the way, in what I think is now the last old building on that block.)

I wonder how you feel politically about all of this. What do you make of social housing, gentrification and preservation as East End issues? Hogan’s Alley was essentially destroyed by a very callous ¾ and I would say racist ¾ plan of urban renewal. (Blacks in the Sixties used to joke that “urban renewal” should really have been called “Negro removal.”) What do you see as the larger wheels in motion today? Is there a connection between social housing issues and the preservation of the community’s memory?

JJ: That’s wild about Leonard Gibson and the Brigadoon mention. That’s the first time I’ve ever channelled anybody.

I think you are bang on with your assessment of the Negro Removal thing. It wasn’t the first time the folks at City Hall tried to solve one of their problems that way. The unit and 100-blocks of Dupont (East Pender) Street was our red light district until the city demolished all the houses on the south side of one of those blocks for the construction of a railway station. By the time the madams had re-established themselves on Shore Street, the 100-block of Harris, that too was obliterated for the off ramp of the first Georgia Viaduct. If you look at the original plans for the second viaduct and the connecting highway system, vast swaths of Chinatown were at risk as well. 

Getting back to those three big issues ¾ bottom line, I want to see this neighbourhood and its people survive and thrive. It think it’s the West Hotel at 488 Carrall Street that has the big sign on top saying “No Homes, No Peace.” Who can argue with that? Social housing is needed in this city and needed in a big way, throughout the city, not just in the Downtown Eastside. Steps, and giant steps, need to be taken to solve the homelessness, drug and crime problems. The forces that would knock down the old historic houses that I love and replace them with high rise condos are the same forces that work to whittle away at the remaining traditional stock of cheap and affordable housing in the Downtown Eastside — the residential hotels. I would like to see the city support creative ways to combine the saving of these old heritage buildings and the creation of low-income, social housing and co-ops. Barclay Heritage Square in the West End is perhaps a little more upscale than what we are talking about here, but I don’t think it’s a bad model of combining heritage preservation and providing affordable housing.

Gentrification ¾ as far as I can see there has to be a healthy mix for the greater neighbourhood to thrive. The East End started as a mixed community of wealthy, middle and working classes. The early stately homes of the entrepreneurial elite, the Alexanders, the McNairs, the Bell-Irvings, etc. were on Alexander Street and Carl Avenue (now Princess Avenue), some standing only a block away from the pattern house and row house starter homes built for mill workers and recent immigrants.

What I am trying to do as a person invested in this neighbourhood, especially as a house history researcher doing work here, is to create an interest in and a respect for the rich human and social history represented by each and every house in this neighbourhood. I want people to remember that Harris (East Georgia) Street was the centre of Vancouver’s first Jewish Community, that the 600 and 700 blocks of Carl (Princess) Avenue was largely pioneered by a colony of Newfoundlanders from Brigus and Bay Roberts, and that 844 Dunlevy is the only remaining house built by the man who built Vancouver its first City Hall. I want people to know that for decades the area around the intersection of Princess and East Georgia was the epicentre of Christian missionary activity — Lutheran, Catholic and Anglican — among the Chinese in the neighbourhood, that 343 Prior was the family home of lawyer and athlete Angelo Branca, one of the leading lights of Vancouver’s Italian Canadian community during the war years, and that 827 East Georgia had Black people living there continuously from the 1920s, the last of whom was Nora Hendrix, Jimi Hendrix’s grandmother.

Every old house has a story to tell, something to teach us. I am hoping that the more we know about the old East End houses that remain and the people who lived in them, the less likely it will be that we will let them be torn down. The more we know, the more we will have pride in them, and work to preserve what is left. To me that’s urban revitalization.

James Johnstone is now actively looking for sponsors and other funding sources and support to allow him to research the entirety of Vancouver’s old East End (district lots 196. 181, and 182) and to put all the data and images collected on an interactive neighbourhood history mapping web site. Contact him at househistorian@yahoo.ca. His web site is: http://www.homehistoryresearch.com

-Wayde Compton is the author of the poetry collections 49th Parallel Psalm and Performance Bond, and the editor of Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature (all books from Arsenal Pulp Press).  He is co-founder, too, of Commodore Books, Western Canada’s first black-owned small press. Compton teaches in the English departments of Coquitlam College and Kwantlen University College, and in Simon Fraser University’s Writing and Publishing Program, where he is a creative writing instructor in the Writer’s Studio.

Home Features David and Goliath Stop smirking, Bettman Books this week Essays & Reviews The Big Sellout Operation Filmmaker Salud!