It’s the WISE Club, and I’ve been coming here since the early 1990s when I discovered the spot after a folk music show in the upstairs hall. Meg’s been dropping in since she moved to the city in the mid-1990s. And though no doubt on countless occasions we’ve been at different tables here, engaged in different debates about exactly the same kinds of things, it’s only in this last couple of years that we’ve come together, the spot that was each of ours now the spot that is both of ours. Drinking-hole. Dank basement. Gathering place of communists, anarchists, writers, musicians, ne’er-do-wells, students, folkies and local drunks – and we’ve been all of these at various times in this place. It’s the WISE. It’s exactly what we want. But it sure as hell ain’t what it started out to be.

In 1957, Peggy Campbell, a Brit now living in Canada, contacted a Vancouver radio station with her name and information, hoping that she might track down others recently-immigrated from the UK for some social time and reminiscences of home. Responses came in, a little group was formed, and at Lochdale Hall on February 28, 1958, the WISE Club was officially founded. Taking its name from the acronym for Welsh, Irish, Scottish, English, the club based itself around regular gatherings for cards, darts, billiards and the like.

Throughout the 1960s the Club grew, its membership at one point reaching 1000. And its activities grew, too, with a choir, fitness classes, group trips to the UK, and a soccer team being added to the roster of offerings. But what the WISE didn’t have was a home, instead bouncing among various halls for specific gatherings and events.

It was in 1963 that the WISE Social and Athletic Club formed a building committee and sought a home of its own, eventually settling on an old church at 1882 Adanac, just west of Victoria Drive. Bought for $14,000, the building allowed the development of a hall for Club events and outside rentals atop a lounge/ bar in the basement, closed to the public and allowing members a space to drop in for drinks, conversation, cards and darts. But just as some permanence was found for location, just as the WISE transformed from an event-based gathering to a place on the map, its membership went through a massive transformation, dramatically changing the character of the Club.

The original clientele began to move out of town, move into retirement, and membership declined to as low as 20 people. But when a group of folk music buffs – The Rogue Folk Club – partnered up with the WISE in the 1980s, it underwent a re-birth, becoming home to a wide assortment of East Van locals who moved through folk music, protest movement and radical labour circles. The darts remained. The billiards remained. But the character of the place was transformed, as the WISE came by accident to play a central role in building and sustaining a particular East Van working class and activist subculture.

Today, over 50 years after its founding, the WISE remains unique among Vancouver pubs and clubs. The bar is still home to the radicals, and has also attracted a significant cluster of artists, writers, musicians. Tonight, as we still here with our beers sharing a bag of potato chips, there are only occasional stomps from the hall upstairs – no band playing tonight, but instead the monthly gathering of kinksters for a BDSM party. Tonight,some friends from another circle have discovered the place for he first time – he a playwright, she a writer of short stories and poetry – and sit talking wine and writing with a group of former co-workers. Tonight, some dozen activists cycle to and from our table to reflect on and celebrate the anti-Olympics protest we’ve just returned from.

You can’t just walk into the WISE. Members only, guests to be signed in, and show up more than a couple of times and folks’ll start getting on you to buy a membership. But we like it this way. It’s kinda nice to have a place that is exclusively ours, a bar for all those who would otherwise have no neighbourhood bar to take them. A radical, writerly, dark-side of Cheers, where everybody knows your name.

I wouldn’t join any Club that would have me as a member, Groucho joked. Evidently, he didn’t have the WISE.

Vancouver Public Library Press Release: New Location for Downtown Eastside-Strathcona Branch

(Vancouver, British Columbia) – The City of Vancouver has purchased a new site for the future Downtown Eastside-Strathcona Library Branch, bringing one step closer the Library Board’s long-time vision for a full service library in the historic city centre to complement the Carnegie Reading Room.

The Downtown Eastside-Strathcona Branch, which will also provide library service to Chinatown, will be located at 720-730 East Hastings Street on the south side between Heatley Avenue and Hawks Avenue.

“This is truly a dream come true,” said Vancouver Public Library Board Chair Joan Andersen. “Providing full library service to these diverse neighbourhoods, some of which face significant economic and social challenges, has been a longstanding goal of the Vancouver Public Library Board of Trustees. We are delighted to announce that we are closer to making the branch a reality.”

The Library Board will request capital funding from the City for the design process, which is expected to begin this year. In the short term the Library will explore partnership opportunities for the development. The Board has contracted McClanaghan and Associates to consult with neighbourhoods to refine the vision for the library branch. This community input will help inform the library’s development plan.

“People in the community have told us that expanded collections of books, CDs, DVDs, magazines, Internet computer access and community meeting space as well as programs for children, teens, adults and seniors are priorities for the full service library. The Board is committed to again consulting with the community to ensure we can best deliver the desired collections and services and reflect the cultural and creative vitality of the neighbourhoods,” Andersen said.

The City of Vancouver had earlier acquired the Heatley Block, located on Hastings Street at Heatley Avenue, as the location for the library branch. After hearing from the community, however, the Library Board determined that an alternate site would be preferable.

Founded in 1887, Vancouver Public Library is one of Canada’s largest library systems dedicated to meeting the lifelong learning, reading, recreation and information needs of the people of Vancouver. Each year, the Library’s 22 branches serve over six million visitors and offer over 2.5 million items, including books, CDs, DVDs, magazines and countless online resources.

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Following in the track of its successful bike-lane trial on the Burrard Street Bridge, the city is now considering a dedicated bicycle lane on the Dunsmuir Viaduct.

The two-way bike lane, which would be separated from traffic by concrete barriers, would create a strong East-West connection between the downtown and the heavily used Adanac Street bikeway to East Vancouver, said Vision Vancouver Coun. Geoff Meggs.

The beauty of the plan, he added, is that it doesn’t negatively impact motorists.

One of the viaduct’s three traffic lanes was cordoned off several years ago to facilitate the construction of the Spectrum/Costco development near GM Place.

The staff recommendation, which comes before council Thursday, would see existing concrete barriers shifted to the viaduct’s northernmost lane from the southernmost lane —maintaining two traffic lanes into downtown. The cost of the project is $300,000.

The proposed configuration would result in a separated, four-metre-wide, bike-only lane as well as two narrow traffic lanes heading into downtown. The existing sidewalk would be unchanged.

The staff report is also looking at something that could have a large impact on traffic — how to implement separated bike lanes in the downtown peninsula.

Meggs warned that there are no easy answers downtown as separated bicycle lanes would have to come at the expense of parking spots or traffic lanes.

Two shots of a three-block series on the corner of Hastings and Kamloops which document the not-so-distant past of a neighbourhood that creeks flowed through and where people kept bees as part of their backyard agriculture. Continued work around the Hastings Park Conservancy and guidelines adopted to re-allow urban beekeeping in Vancouver in 2005 are part of bringing back to life the natural features that helped make Hastings-Sunrise such a liveable part of the city. Although the Hastings corridor itself is a tad shabby in spots, the surrounding neighbourhood is full of beautiful and productive gardens, fruit trees, and the occasional coop of illegal chickens.

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.

VANCOUVER – Usually, neighbourhoods are happy to get a new library. But a proposal to build a $14.5-million library at Hastings and Heatley has some Strathcona residents outraged because it would involve tearing down historic buildings in the city’s oldest neighbourhood.

The main bone of contention is the Heatley Block, a two-storey commercial building that has four commercial spaces on the main floor and a rooming house above. Built in 1930, it is the only “character” building left on a fairly bleak strip of Hastings.

“The City of Vancouver went out real estate shopping for a site for the new public library, and they just happened to buy the best building on that part of Hastings,” says John Atkin of the Strathcona Residents Association.

“Here we have a building that has people living in it, and retail on the ground floor, viable stores, and we’re going to wipe it out.

“It just seems [dumb] to have purchased the best building on Hastings street architecturally and you’re going to blow it up. I don’t care what the amenity is that we’re getting out of it, it just seems wrong.”

The Heatley Block isn’t on the city’s official heritage register, which was compiled in 1985 and is about to be upgraded. Neither are two old houses on the same site which date to 1889 and 1898. The 1889 structure is probably one of the 10 oldest houses in Vancouver.

Strathcona resident Claudine Michaud says the Heatley Block and the old houses have heritage merit, whether they’re on the official list or not. She sees it as a Strathcona version of the Black Swan building in Kitsilano, another handsome old building with no heritage status that was recently demolished.

“[The Heatley Block is] one of the last buildings of its kind in the city,” said Michaud. “It’s a very handsome building.”

Atkin fears that if the Heatley Block is torn down, it would help cement a commercial dead zone on Hastings, where there are several social housing buildings in the adjacent two blocks.

“If our other stated aim is to revitalize Hastings Street, we’ve done a pretty lousy job of it,” he said.

“We’ve allowed all these social services agencies to go in, and allowed them to escape the requirement for retail.

“There may not be any retail to go on Hastings Street right away, but 10 years from now, as the condo boom keeps moving, we’re going to see people wanting to do retail on Hastings and there won’t be any space.”

The city’s real estate department purchased the three lots on the Heatley block site for $1.8 million on June 15. It is also looking to buy an old welfare office next door to make a bigger library. The office is now co-owned and occupied by the Pivot Legal Society, an advocacy group that bought it for $850,000 two years ago. The proposed library could be up to 16,000 square feet, up from 1,500 square feet at the current Strathcona library.

Paul Whitney of the Vancouver Public Library said the city and library had several meetings with neighbourhood residents about the need for a new library.

“Since the early 1990s, a full- service library branch that serves both the Downtown Eastside and Strathcona communities, and Chinatown, has been a top capital priority for the library board, and we’ve never been able to realize it,” Whitney said.

“We did consultations in 2003 and 2004 and the message we got was that the only way we could do a full-service branch for the disparate communities was to have it on the south side of Hastings Street. People were really clear that it had be on the south side. They wanted it to be as close to the school as possible.”

The Heatley Block met the criteria, so the city snapped it up.

But Michaud feels there may be other factors involved. She said zoning allows for an eight-storey building on the Heatley Block site, and thinks the city wants to build housing on top of the library, as it is doing at the new Mount Pleasant Community Centre at Kingsway and Main.

“We’re concerned they’re going to take full advantage of the zoning on this block to build the full height, in exchange for having a developer pay for the cost of purchasing the land and perhaps building the library,” Michaud said.

“We’re also wondering why they didn’t take the opportunity to buy other buildings that are for sale the next block over, between Heatley and Hawks. These buildings were built in the 1960s or ’70s, they’re single storey, they have no historical value.

“Why didn’t the city snap those up? The only difference is that that block is only zoned for four storeys.”

Atkin said one solution would be to use a brick building on the Strathcona school site at Pender and Heatley for the library.

But Whitney said the problem with the school building is that it would be “next to impossible to effectively serve the Downtown Eastside community from that facility.”

Apparently the city has bought the Heatley Block on Hastings Street with the intention of tearing it down to build a new city library. The Heatley Block is an important heritage apartment building and storefront (1931) attached to two houses also slated for demolition – built in 1889 and 1889. In its place the city is proposing an 8-story modern building, which will significantly change the character of that part of Strathcona.

But there are alternatives!

Please go to these sites dedicated to the preservation of the Heatley Block and get involved with the fight to save what little historic East Vancouver is left:

• Heatley Block @ Blogspot
• Strathcona-Hastings.org
• Heritage Vancouver – Top Ten Endangered Sites 2008

It is not too late to bring options to the city for discussion. We encourage everyone who cares about the preservation of East Vancouver heritage sites to let the city know of your concerns and support the proposal to locate the library into the old Strathcona School site instead.

On Canada Day Brian and I woke up early. A sunny Tuesday, already warm at 6:30 am, I was itching to go for a swim somewhere in the lower mainland despite the potential for holiday hordes lathering themselves up with sunscreen and indulging their screaming children with “fun times outdoors”. Whatever. Brian and I figured we could hit Sasamat (in Port Moody) early, have a quick jog around the lake and a dip before 10:30 and then get outta there before the crowds descended, right?

Well. Except for that little matter of the swim meet organized for that morning. Drove all the way out to Port Moody just to be met by hundreds of cars jostling with each other in the dusty parking lot and people every which way blowing up floating devices and ensuring their coolers were properly loaded to take down to the beach. So we decided to blow over to Buntzen Lake instead – and although we were early enough to get ourselves parking and a little space to dump our towels on the beach , the joy of swimming was not to be mine there either. Still being fed by melt-off from the surrounding mountains, Buntzen was close to freezing and I could not force my body to take the plunge. (I am a cold-water swimmer quite happily – the water has to be atrociously low temperature before I refuse to swim.)

All the way from East Van to Port Moody and by 10:30 Buntzen was becoming over-crowded with early barbeque-ers and pop-up bug screens so it wasn’t like we wanted to hang out until the day got warmer for a potential bout of hypothermia. We left, a little dejected, and determined to get the hell out of the suburbs and back to our hood for some relaxing at least!

Why not Trout Lake? Brian asked when we got back in the car. The lake that is 15 blocks from my house. The one I have never swam in during my entire adulthood living in the area. Why not Trout Lake? I said. At least then we can write about it for Viaduct.

I’m going to step out of the narrative for a moment here to explain that while I have long lived close to Trout Lake, and really enjoy the park (officially John Hendry Park – named after the sawmill baron whose family donated the land to the city), I have always found the idea of swimming in East Vancouver a little off-putting. A spot of neighbourhood prejudice if you will, I’ve had this vague notion that somehow the lake bottom would be littered with broken glass or perhaps the odd hypodermic needle, even though the park is nowhere near the skids. And if not garbage, then the water must be really polluted right?

On the drive back from Port Moody, Brian and I talked about this. Nothing I have ever actually heard or seen at Trout Lake, has given me that impression that it wasn’t safe or clean. And every time I go, there are dozens of children playing in the water with a lifeguard on duty until 9 pm at night all summer long. According to a friend who swims there regularly, the water is routinely tested for fecal coliform and often comes back with much lower levels than Vancouver’s most popular swimming beach at English Bay (this most recent water quality report confirming it – levels in this study being non-existent). A prejudice entirely about the “east” part of Vancouver, about the urban nature of the park – somehow being inferior to the wilds of Port Moody and area. Something to get over, clearly.

We drove the 45 minutes back to the hood, turning off Victoria at 19th and then onto the treed lane to the parking area. Distanced from the suburban packs with their angry summer faces (too crowded! too many screaming children in the back seat!) we found Trout Lake populated by a few locals and their kids splashing about in the shallow water. It was Canada Day here too, with picnics and kids eating concession french fries – but the people just seemed – I dunno – more laid back. Less harried. Most of them had obviously walked or taken transit from elsewhere in the neighbourhood. No one was doing the big all-day-giant-family outings we had seen at Buntzen and Sasamat. No need to jostle or rush past anyone else to get the “perfect” spot because thousands of people hadn’t descended on the tiny strip of beach and concession all at once.

For over one hundred years, Vancouverites have been coming here to swim, boat and ice skate (back when it still got cold enough) – which makes sense given that it is the only lake within Vancouver city limits.

Situated on 68 acres of land, Trout Lake is often listed (by the Parks Board, among others) as the site of an early sawmill in Vancouver, though as far as we can tell, it was never a mill site but a water source for the Hastings Sawmill down on the waterfront at Dunlevy – with a flume running from the lake to the waterfront (a distance of several kilometres) in the late 1800s. A peat bog that apparently had four different creeks draining into it, the lake never did contain trout with the exception of a few stocking efforts over the years, but has been popularly known by the name since locals started using it for recreation. Owned by the family of John Hendry (the owner of Hastings Sawmill among other local interests), the land was donated in 1926 to the city under the condition that it be named “john Hendry Park”. Interestingly, while the city took the land in the interests of local recreation, it wasn’t until 1942 that the Parks Board started referring to it by this name. Of course locals have pretty much always called it “Trout Lake” despite its official name. (Apparently the non-existent fish have more resonance for locals than the name of a long-deceased logging baron). Shortly after becoming a park, the first lifeguard post was set up – 1928 – and has been staffed through the summers since – these days mostly to ensure no one swims outside the boundaries and into the parts of the lake that have been planted with grasses and marsh plants. And of course over the years picnic facilities have been set up, paths have been sculpted in the shade of the trees and bushes that surround the park. A leash-free dog park takes up one corner and on the Victoria side of park is a community center, tennis courts, parking lots, and sports fields.

But oddly, despite the number of years in existence, despite the number of events and people who have passed through the park in its lifespan, there is tremendously little recorded history about it. Few photographs exist in Vancouver’s city archives, and the history of the park is often written with factual inaccuracy. It is impossible to find any information online about the restoration of the green space around the park that took place in the 80s and 90s. Twenty-four hectares in the middle of East Vancouver and it could just as easily not exist except to those who use it as their community park. It is not a destination that people plan to go to like Sasamat or Buntzen – and yet many neighbourhood activities revolve around it. And I suppose it’s better that way, because who needs the crowds that popularity would bring?

As I mentioned above, on Canada Day there were no crowds and I hazard to guess that this was the least populated beach in the whole lower mainland despite being situated in a high-density neighbourhood. When I finally did get around to taking a dip I found the water refreshing but warm, a bit murky and deep enough for proper swimming. A quick spin out and around the floating dock at the edge of the swimming boundary and I was hooked on the fact that this place was available only blocks from my house. A few other adults were out swimming along the perimeter of the rope – enough laps and you can get a work out without being in the shallow kids zone near the beach. Brian even came out to join me for a second dip after I had dried in the sun from the first – concurring with me that in fact that water was not at all too cold or murky for swimming (though you might not want to drink it).

Best part? No milfoil and no swimmer’s itch afterwards – which surprised me since these exist in pretty much every other lake in BC these days (both invasives that barely existed when I was a small child). Taking an outdoor shower at the edge of the beach is not a bad idea anyways. The peaty nature of the lake means that you may encounter some lake scunge in the suit if you don’t have a rinse.

As we have been blessed with a warm and sunny July, I have since been back a few times to swim after work, relishing the look of shock on people’s faces when I tell them I’m going to swim at Trout Lake. The same one I used to wear before I realized that my prejudice was unfounded. After 15 years it was probably about time, and it means my future summers in the neighbourhood will be that much more enjoyable. Thank goodness for the suburban hordes on Canada Day – reminders of who I don’t want to become and where I do not want to be.

From today’s Vancouver Sun….

A picture from my Friday morning walk to work. A long-boarded up restaurant at Cordova & Main kitty-corner to the police station. Wonder how long before that gets torn down and developed into condo towers? Click on the photo for the better-quality image hosted at flickr.

]]> http://viaducteast.ca/2008/07/06/cordova-main/feed/ 0 Megan Eliza