Restaurants, public spaces, moments in the history of struggle – all of these make for good introductions to this piece of the world we call Van East. Sometimes, though, nothing so dramtic or notable is required at all. Sometimes, it is just one home among many.

I’ve lived in East Van most of my life, but in 1990, as I approached the end of my high school days, the family moved from the southeast corrner of the city, round the Knight Street Bridge area, to East Georgia Street, on the eastern edge of the Downtown Eastside. It was an old house, the quintessential run-down Vancouver “character home”, three levels on a narrrow lot, solid wood construction that had been covered over many many years past with asbestos shingles. The home sat directly across the street from Seymour Elementary School, and it sits there still – though my folks have moved on, I have moved on, and the 100 year old cedar that shaded the front yard for so long has sadly been taken down.

I bought the home from my parents in 2003, and lived there 4 years before selling it. During that time, I was intrigued by the constant discoveries in the place – truancy notices from 1913, stuck all these years in a heating vent; newspapers from the neighbourhood going back decades, used as an under-layer for wallpaper that had since been painted over numerous times; broken tools and nails and pots and pans found in the garden or in the way of a new track of pipe.

So, in 2006, I finally took the plunge and got a local home researcher to search the records, place the home in the broader context of the neighbourhood and the city, and generally see what he could find out about my little place. James had done a number of these projects, and has a neat site for Vancouver house histories, and he went to work right away, returning just a couple of months later with a little booklet on Vancouver, the East Side, Strathcona, and the house on Georgia I called home.

And the history? Nothing remarkable, nothing newsworthy, nothing shocking. But important, nonetheless, and it certianly did not disappoint, giving me a greater sense of history and place, and the place in history of all the countless houses like mine-at-the-time that dot East Vancouver.

In 1905, construction started on this little street then called Harris – the name East Georgia would only come a decade later, with the building of the first Georgia Viaduct to link the eastside with the downtown core. The house was put up by Charles White Elliot, a ships’ carpenter originally from Nova Scotia, and to this day you can see his maritime professional interest represented in little features like the unique, sea-inspired carving of the home’s bannister and stairwell.

It was a pretty good location at the time. Close to the major work-sites, docks and canneries and railway yards. Seymour School stood across the street. And the year the home was completed, 1906, the City initiated streetcar service along Harris – its cobbles and tracks no longer visible on that stretch of what is now Georgia Street, but at numerous other points in the neighbourhood. So the house had no trouble selling, and over the next years it changed hands a whole bunch of times, this working class district housing a signficant transient population as folks moved in, moved out, moved up and down in search of work and community.

Charles and his wife, Mary, stayed just two years. The next two it housed Max Grossman, a jeweller and clothier. Then it was CNR engineer John Black and his wife Mildred, governess May Battell and her family, master mariner Harold Hansen, tailors and furniture-makers of the Gorosh clan. And after the Great War, the succession of owners and tenants continued – widows, pile drivers, mill workers, labourers. On until 1925, when Adreanna and Jacobus Twisk – he at first the janitor at First United Church, then a worker on the CP railway, brought a little stability to this old house, staying put and building roots for some fifteen years.

By the time the Second World War came and went, stability was the order of the day at this Georgia Street home. Annie Clarridge and her husband, a rigger named William, stayed six or seven years; followed by a Ukranian immigrant and widow, Pelagin Ivers (nee Scherbina) who stayed a decade. And then, Jack and Seu Yeu Quan.

Jack Quan. a cook, brought his family to this home in 1958, as the street began to shift demographically to include homeowners from the large Asian-Canadian community that had lived in this area – but not on this street – for decades. They stayed the longest, making this their place until 1987. Then a few years of short tenancies and long vacancies til my mom and dad bought in 1990. Mom and dad were working with the Downtown Eastside Seniors’ Centre and the Portland Hotel Society, looking for a place close to work and community after careers spent travelling. And so our family’s own 17-year stint there began.

Wow. Lots there to give the home some character. And that’s just the tenancy roster. The neighbourhood indeed went though its share of changes over the years while families moved in and out. Harris Street, as mentioned above, became East Georgia in 1915, and a number of neighbouring roads saw names changed – Glen Drive, now home of the famous La Casa Gelato, was intially called Boundary Avenue; Frances Street, named for the Anglican nun who opened one of Vancouver’s first hospitals and social service centres, St Luke’s; Union Street – this replacing Barnard Street for no other reason than it was often mis-heard as Burrard. And what we now know as Princess Street originally having been called Dupont, that name dropped to shake the reputation Dupont had as a sex-workers’ stroll.

There was the streetcar, as I’ve mentioned. And a firehouse, just a few blocks away at Keefer and Vernon. And it was, from, the start a neighbourhood that mixed residential homes with light industry, an area of working class folks and working class homes. A diverse neighbourhood, peopled by immigrants from China, Russia, Italy, Japan, by seamstresses and housewives, workers on ships and workers in lumbercamps, railway workers, cooks, and the often-unemployed.

This was the neighborhood where crowds attacked Chinese workers in 1907. This is the neighbourhood where Hogan’s Alley housed a vibrant black community until it was razed with the construction of the second Georgia Viaduct in 1970. This was the neighbourhood where the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies, held free speech fights in 1909 and 1910, refusing to shut up for cops or capital. It’s the neighbourhood where militant moms blockaded railway cars, where sex workers demanded and demand still spaces free from police harassment, where anarchists and punk rockers make their squats, where kids still play hockey in the street with whatever bits of wood are handy and whatever best approximates a puck.

It was my neighbourhood. And always will be, somehow. But I appreciated it, loved it, understood it, on a whole other level after taking a read through the history of that one house. And y’know, Vancouver’s full of them. The East Side, especially, is full of them. And each is full of its own set of stories, and holds somewhere its own mapbook to our past.

Just a house. But sometimes that’s enough.