1918 Vancouver general strike
The 1918 Vancouver General Strike was the first general strike in Canadian history and was held 2 August 1918. It was organized as a one-day political protest against the killing of draft evader and labour activist Albert "Ginger" Goodwin, who had called for a general strike in the event that any worker was drafted against their will; the strike was met with violence from returned soldiers, mobilized and supplied with vehicles to storm the Labour Temple at 411 Dunsmuir Street. Three hundred men ransacked the offices of the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council, twice attempted to defenestrate VTLC secretary Victor Midgely and forced him and a longshoreman to kiss the Union Jack. A woman working in the office was badly bruised when she prevented Midgely from being thrown out the window. Labour activist and suffragette Helena Gutteridge was at the scene, but was unscathed. In response to virulent opposition from business and the middle class, strike leaders could point to the vote by VTLC delegates that supported the strike 117 to 1.
After the strike, all the strike leaders resigned and nearly all were re-elected, demonstrating widespread support for the action amongst organized workers and that it was not the product of a Bolshevik conspiracy. Although the strike call was province-wide, it was only in the city that it took general strike proportions. Numerous other strikes took place in the city that year, the general strike was as much a show of labour strength as much as it was a political protest over Goodwin's death. War-time inflation reduced real income profoundly. Other factors such as the Bolshevik Revolution the previous year and the realization that capital profited immensely from the First World War while workers were cannon fodder fuelled the belief that labour deserved more than what employers were voluntarily willing to give. Although only one day in duration, the 1918 strike was thus an important marker in the Canadian labour revolt that peaked with the Winnipeg General Strike the following year. A 1919 Vancouver strike in sympathy with Winnipeg would be the longest general strike in Canadian history.
Allen Seager and David Roth, "British Columbia and the Mining West: A Ghost of a Chance," in Craig Heron, ed. The Workers' Revolt in Canada, 1917-1925, 250
Downtown Vancouver
Downtown Vancouver is the southeastern portion of the peninsula in the north-central part of the City of Vancouver. It is the main city centre and central business district of the city, Metro Vancouver, the Lower Mainland regions; the downtown area is considered to be bounded by Burrard Inlet to the north, Stanley Park and the West End to the west, False Creek to the south, the Downtown Eastside to the east. Most sources include the full downtown peninsula as downtown Vancouver, but the City of Vancouver defines them as separate neighbourhoods. Besides the identifiable office towers of the financial and central business districts, Downtown Vancouver includes residential neighbourhoods in the form of high-rise apartment and condominiums, in Yaletown and Coal Harbour. Other downtown neighbourhoods include the Granville Mall and Entertainment District, Downtown's South, Gastown and Chinatown; the downtown area includes most of the remaining historic buildings and many of the larger notable buildings in the region.
There are two major sporting facilities in Rogers Arena and BC Place Stadium. The NHL's Vancouver Canucks play at Rogers Arena, while the CFL's BC Lions and the MLS's Vancouver Whitecaps FC use the neighbouring BC Place Stadium. SkyTrain Stadium-Chinatown station provides easy rapid transit access to the district; the presence of water on three sides limits access to downtown Vancouver. There are four major bridges: the Lions Gate Bridge, connecting to the North Shore municipalities and the Trans Canada Highway, the Burrard Street Bridge, Cambie Street Bridge, Granville Street Bridge provides access to the commercial and residential areas south of False Creek; the historic Waterfront station is the principal transit hub for the downtown core. There are six subway stations located in downtown Vancouver running on two SkyTrain lines: the Expo Line and Canada Line; the Expo Line travels from Waterfront station at the foot of the central harbor and through Dunsmuir Tunnel to the east. The Canada Line travels from Waterfront station and tunnels south under Granville Street and Davie Street, linking downtown to central Richmond and Vancouver International Airport.
SeaBus is a passenger-only ferry that connects from Waterfront station to the North Shore in 10–12 minutes. The West Coast Express commuter rail system travels from Waterfront station to the eastern suburbs and exurbs. Terminals are available near Waterfront station for float planes and helicopters. Most north-south Vancouver bus routes serve Downtown Vancouver, in addition to suburban routes from the North Shore and Burnaby; the bus rapid transit line 98 B-Line had eight stops in the downtown core along Seymour Street and Burrard Street. This service was replaced on August 2009 by SkyTrain's Canada Line; the 95 B-Line started service in December 2016 in conjunction with the opening of the Evergreen Extension, connecting downtown to Simon Fraser University along Hastings Street. There are two private passenger water taxi operators, providing service between several downtown neighbourhoods, False Creek, Granville Island; the city is planning to extend the downtown streetcar from its current route of Granville Island to the Main Street SkyTrain station, with future plans extending it to Chinatown and to Stanley Park.
City of Vancouver Community Profiles: Downtown Downtown page, Vancouver Then and Now website, comparisons of old photos with modern locations
Dominion Building
The Dominion Building is a commercial building in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Located on the edge of Gastown, it was Vancouver's first steel-framed high-rise. At 53 m, the thirteen-storey, Second Empire style building was the tallest commercial building in the British Empire upon its completion in 1910, its architect was John S. Helyer, said to have died after falling off the staircase in the front of the building, though this is an urban legend; the financiers of the structure were the Counts von Alvensleben from Germany, who were active in Vancouver's financial scene at the time. It was held at the time that they were a front for the Kaiser's money, which carried the suggestion that the Empire's tallest building had been built by its greatest rival. Today it is a provincially designated Class. Owned by Newton Investments Limited, it was restored by restoration expert Read Jones Christofferson; the building's current tenants include a film production company, a law firm, clothing designers, record labels, antiquarian booksellers, Kokoro Dance, professional web developers, marketing agency, Bowery Creative, the office of the Green Party of Vancouver, a dentist, non-profit organizations such as Living Oceans Society and Fair Trade Vancouver, an artist's supply store, a Lebanese restaurant, Nuba.
The Dominion Building sits across the street from Victory Square, site of the former provincial courthouse, relocated to Georgia Street in 1913. The Dominion Building was at the hub of the city's legal district until that move; the backside of the building and Cambie Street was filmed during the street scenes of The Neverending Story. It can be seen from Water Street; the Dominion Building, as well as other elements of Victory Square, were filmed for scenes in an abandoned city in Battlestar Galactica. The initial rooftop chase scene from Blade: Trinity was shot at the Dominion building; the 2012 TV show Alcatraz used this as a location in the opening episode, although the program was set in San Francisco, a lot of the location work was done in Vancouver. The Dominion building can be seen in the background in the series when a landmine is found in Victory Square. Can Lit. author Timothy Taylor. Maintains a writing office in this building. List of tallest and other historical buildings in Vancouver Oakes Weekly Dominion Building restoration Dominion Building
Chinatown, Vancouver
Chinatown in Vancouver, British Columbia, is Canada's largest Chinatown. Centred on Pender Street, it is surrounded by Gastown and the Downtown financial and central business districts to the west, the Downtown Eastside to the north, the remnant of old Japantown to the northeast, the residential neighbourhood of Strathcona to the east; the approximate borders of Chinatown as designated by the City of Vancouver are the alley between Pender and Hastings Streets, Georgia Street, Gore Avenue, Taylor Street, although unofficially the area extends well into the rest of the Downtown Eastside. Main and Keefer Streets are the principal areas of commercial activity. Chinatown remains a popular tourist attraction and is one of the largest historic Chinatowns in North America. However, it experienced decline as newer members of Vancouver's Cantonese Chinese community dispersed to other parts of the metropolitan area, it has been more overshadowed by the newer Chinese immigrant business district along No. 3 Road in the City of Richmond, south of Vancouver.
Many affluent Hong Kong and Taiwanese immigrants have moved there since the late 1980s, coinciding with the increase of Chinese ethnic retail and restaurants in that area. This new area is designated the "Golden Village" by the City of Richmond; the proposed renaming of the area to "Chinatown" met resistance both from merchants in Vancouver's Chinatown and from non-Chinese residents and merchants in Richmond itself. Chinatown was once known for its neon signs, but like the rest of the city, lost many signs to changing times and a sign bylaw passed in 1974; the last of these was the Ho Ho sign, removed in 1997. Ongoing efforts at revitalization include efforts by the business community to improve safety by hiring private security, considering new marketing promotions, introducing residential units into the neighbourhood by restoring and renovating heritage buildings; the current focus is on the adaptive reuse of the distinctive association buildings. Due to the large ethnic Chinese presence in Vancouver—especially represented by multi-generation Chinese Canadians and first-generation immigrants from Hong Kong—the city has been referred to as "Hongcouver".
However, in recent years, most immigration has been from Mainland China. Chinatown is becoming old traditional businesses flourish. Today the neighbourhood features many traditional restaurants, markets, tea shops, clothing stores, other shops catering to the local community and tourists alike; the Vancouver office of Sing Tao Daily, one of the city's four Chinese-language dailies, remains in Chinatown. OMNI British Columbia had its television studio in Chinatown from 2003 to 2010; the renowned bar & nightclub known as ‘Fortune Sound Club’ is situated within the heart of Chinatown. As of 2019, they have grown to become one of the most popular night clubs in all of BC, rivalling off the Granville Entertainment District and bringing in world-class musicians. Vancouver experienced large numbers of immigrants from the Asia-Pacific region in the last two decades of the twentieth century, most notably from China, whose population in the Vancouver Census Metropolitan Area was estimated at 300,000 in the mid-1990s.
A significant development since the 1980s has been the increase of transnational awareness among the Chinese. The heightened mobility of capital, information and commodities across territorial boundaries and distance challenged the traditional meaning of migration. Compared to Chinatown itself, more Chinese immigrants have settled in Richmond, drawn by its lower house prices, considerable concentration of Chinese retailers, the nearby Vancouver airport; the business heart of Chinatown was visibly affected after the arrival of suburban Asian shopping districts, such as Richmond's Aberdeen Centre, promoted as North America's largest enclosed Asian mall in the proximity of other Chinese shopping centres, which offered more parking and open space than historic Chinatown. In 1979, the Chinatown Historic Area Planning Committee sponsored a streetscape improvement program to add various Chinese-style elements to the area, such as specially paved sidewalks and red dragon streetlamps that demarcated the area's borders while emphasizing it as a destination for heritage tourism.
Starting with its designation by the province as a historic area in 1971 and subsequent economic shifts, Chinatown shifted from a central business district to playing a cultural role. Murality, a local non-profit, is installing a mural on East Pender Street with the aim of bringing colour and vitality to the neighbourhood; the growth of Chinatown during much of the 20th century created a healthy, robust community that became an aging one as many Chinese immigrants no longer lived nearby. Noticing local businesses suffering, the Chinatown Merchants Association cited the lack of parking and restrictive heritage district rules as impediments to new uses and renovations, their concerns subsequently led to a relaxation of zoning laws to allow for a wider range of uses, including necessary demolition. Additions in the mid-1990s included a large parkade, a shopping mall, the largest Chinese restaurant in Canada. More residential projects around the community and a lowering of property taxes helped to maintain a more rounded community.
Reinvigoration was a discussed topic along government members, symbolically embedded in the Millennium Gate project, which opened in 2002. It can be argued that the role of the early Chinese settlers in Vancouver's Chinatown area in the late 19th and early 20th centuries helped to put Vancouver on the global map as a popular destination for Asian investment
Strathcona, Vancouver
Strathcona is Vancouver, British Columbia's oldest residential neighbourhood. It is bordered by Chinatown to the west, Clark Drive to the east, Canadian National Railway and Great Northern Railway classification yards to the south. By some definitions, its northern border is the roads just south of Burrard Inlet, much of the Downtown Eastside lies within Strathcona. By other definitions, Strathcona's northern boundary is just south of Hastings Street, the Downtown Eastside is a separate neighbourhood to the north and northwest of Strathcona Over 11,800 people live in Strathcona, which grew during the city's boom years between the city's founding in 1886 and 1920 due in large part to the choice of early Vancouver as a railway terminus, it emerged from the original settlement. Called the East End, the neighbourhood adopted the name Strathcona in the 1960s, it has always been a working-class neighbourhood, its residents have always been from many ethnic backgrounds. It is the only neighbourhood where English is not the most spoken language, with 61% of residents reporting Chinese as their mother tongue, followed by English at 24%.
The neighbourhood was earmarked for demolition in the 1950s as part of an urban renewal program. Strathcona would have been transformed into "block upon block of identical apartments buildings and townhouses" for social housing; the redevelopment plans proceeded with the construction of the McLean Park housing development between Union, Keefer and Jackson, Stamp's Place on Campbell between Hastings and Raymur some 15 blocks of the neighbourhood were bulldozed including Hogan's Alley, the only area with a concentration of blacks in Vancouver. Development was stopped due to opposition from the community, led by residents such as Bessie Lee, Mary Lee Chan, her husband Walter Chan, daughter Shirley Chan, who banded together to form the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association. Important municipal figures such as mayor Mike Harcourt and the TEAM and COPE party emerged from this movement. In 1971, residents came into conflict with the north-south rail line that had had bisected the neighbourhood since 1909.
Mothers of children who attended Admiral Seymour Elementary School were concerned that trains blocked the route that their children took to walk to school. This group, which became known as the Militant Mothers of Raymur, occupied the tracks, leading to the construction of a pedestrian/cyclist overpass at Keefer St. Just as the neighbourhood organisers were making headway at preserving the neighbourhood, city engineers proposed putting a freeway through the southern part of the neighbourhood which would have connected to a proposed waterfront route; the connectors along Gore and Carrall Streets, would have destroyed Chinatown and Gastown. The Mau Dan Gardens Co-operative was established in October 1981, the last of five projects initiated by the Strathcona Area Housing Society to provide housing for the residents of the Strathcona area whose homes were expropriated and demolished in the urban renewal clearance scheme of 1965. In 1972, after protest by the local community, the city abandoned its plan to build a municipal fire hall on the vacant site and reserved the property known as site "C & D" for family housing.
The land, owned by the City of Vancouver, is now leased to the Mau Dan Gardens Co-operative Housing Association. The founding membership of the Co-operative was predominantly of Chinese ethnicity, but included families of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Canadian origin. In recent years, Strathcona has been subjected to a significant gentrification process, reinforcing the economic disparity of the area; the late 19th and early 20th century architecture in the area is a relative rarity in Vancouver and many houses in Strathcona are designated heritage houses. This housing stock in particular is being renovated, thus raising property values and attracting wealthier home owners to the area. A number of homeowners have restored their houses in the original Victorian or Edwardian styles, with a particular attention to the "true colours" of the period, which in some cases has been supported by grants from the "Restore It!" program of "Restore It!" Program Vancouver Heritage Foundation There are two public elementary schools located within Strathcona: Lord Strathcona and Admiral Seymour.
Named for Donald Smith, 1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal, Lord Strathcona Elementary was founded in 1891 and is the oldest school in Vancouver. The school is attached to a community centre and the school library doubled as a branch of the Vancouver Public Library. Admiral Seymour Elementary was named in honour of Sir Edward Hobart Seymour, a former Admiral of the fleet of the Royal Navy. Strathcona is in the secondary school catchment area of Britannia Secondary School. There is an independent school, Avenir School. Avenir is for gifted children and educates in grades 6 to 12, it was founded by a non-profit organization. Vancouver Japanese Language School is located in Strathcona. Established in 1906 as Vancouver Japanese Citizens School, it is the oldest Japanese school in Canada. Although properties owned by Japanese Canadians were forfeited by the government during World War II and were never returned, the school building on Alexander Street is the only property in Canada where half of the ownership was returned to the Japanese Canadian community after the internment.
Vancouver Japanese Language School is offering Japanese immersion preschool as well as various Japanese language courses. As of 2006, Strathcona has 11,920 people, a 3% increase from 2001. 13.5% of the population is under the age of 19.
Flophouse
A flophouse, doss-house, or dosshouse is considered a derogatory term for a place that offers low cost lodging, providing space to sleep and minimal amenities. Flophouses, or British "doss-houses”, have been used for overnight lodging by those who needed the lowest cost alternative to staying with others, shelters or sleeping outside. Rooms are small, bathrooms are shared, bedding is minimal, sometimes with mattresses or mats on the floor, or canvas sheets stretched between two horizontal beams creating a series of hammock like beds. People who make use of these places have been called transients and have been between homes. Quarters are very small, may resemble office cubicles more than a regular room in a hotel or apartment building; some flophouses qualify as boarding houses. American flophouses date at least to the 19th century, but the term flophouse itself is only attested from around the early 1900s, originating in hobo slang. In the past, flophouses were sometimes called lodging houses or workingmen's hotels and catered to hobos and transient workers such as seasonal railroad and agriculture workers, or migrant lumberjacks who would travel west during the summer to work and return to an eastern or midwestern cities which ran along the rail lines, such as Chicago to stay in a flophouse during the winter.
This is described in the 1930 novel The Rambling Kid by Charles Ashleigh and the 1976 book The Human Cougar by Lloyd Morain. Another theme in Morain's book is the gentrification, beginning and which has led cities to pressure flophouses to close; some city districts with flophouses in abundance became well known in their own right, such as the Bowery in Manhattan, New York City. Since the middle 20th century, reforms there have made flophouses scarcer; the resulting gentrification and higher real-estate value has further eroded the ability of flophouses and inexpensive boarding-style hotels to make a profit. Cage homes, described as "wire mesh cages resembling rabbit hutches crammed into a dilapidated apartment", were built in Hong Kong in the 1950s for single working men from Mainland China; as of 2012, the number of impoverished residents in Hong Kong was estimated at 1.19 million, cage homes, along with substandard housing such as cubicle apartments, were still serving a portion of this sector's housing needs.
The combination of high rents and income inequality has been given as one reason that cage homes persist. Michael Adorjan, a University of Hong Kong criminology professor, has noted that "The United Nations has called cage and cubicle homes an'insult to human dignity.'" Cage hotels, a form of single room occupancy, were common in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. These were lofts or other large, open buildings that were subdivided into tiny cubicles using boards or sheets of corrugated iron. Since these walls were always one to three feet short of the floor or ceiling, the open space was sealed off with chicken wire, hence the name “cage hotels." A 1958 survey by Christopher Jencks found that homeless men preferred cage hotels over shelters for reasons of privacy and security. A similar preference for cage hotels over shelters was reported in turn of the century New York City, where single working men ranked their housing preference in the following order: They preferred lodging and boarding houses to cages, cages to dormitories, dormitories to flops, flops to the city’s shelters.
Men could act on these preferences by moving. "Regulatory efforts to combat low-cost'cage hotels,'... a driver of the expansion of the homeless population in US cities", according to Jencks. Capsule hotel Common lodging-house Hostel Punk house Jesse Walter Dees. Flophouse. A sociological study that includes English origins of mass relief, samples of American mass relief and a modern investigation of public and private policies in Chicago. Francestown, New Hampshire: M. Jones Co. Retrieved 2013-02-13
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