The Vancouver Police Museum has put together Red Light Rendezvous—a new tour for those of us who can’t get enough of the gritty history of downtown Vancouver.
Cat Rose, who is a crime analyst by day, is also the person behind the Police Museum’s other popular Sins of the City tour: Vice, Dice and Opium Pipes.
Cat has access to the Museum’s records which include arrests by the morality squad in the 1920s. She put these records to good use on the tour, finding (with some help from John Atkin), a still-standing brothel on Dupont (now Pender) once owned by Dora Reno. Dora was one of Vancouver’s earliest madams. She appears in Sensational Vancouver’s “The Social Evil” chapter, and when Dora was charged with vagrancy for illegally profiting from her ownership of a brothel, she hired future Attorney General William Bowser to get her off.
Cat’s tour meanders down Main Street, stops at where the red light district moved to Harris Street (East Georgia) in 1906, and which generated a Province headline of that year: “Conditions in Restricted District are worst in city’s history: innocent youths invited into lowest dives. Officials are shocked.”
Prostitution played an important role in the life in Vancouver, as it did in every port city. When city coffers were low, madams were hauled in front of a judge, paid a fine, and then allowed to go back to work. It was just a cost of doing business, and as Cat notes, the madams used it as a marketing opportunity, parading through town in their best clothes, and then returning to work to find an eager line-up of fresh customers.
As the madams were kicked out of Harris Street they gravitated north up to Alexander Street and my favourite part of the tour. A few of the buildings still exist so you can get a sense of what it was like over a century ago.
Dolly Darlington, for instance, bought a sturdy brick building at the corner of Alexander and Jackson. Other madams such as Marie Gomez and Alice Bernard built luxurious brothels. A few still exist. The one at #504 was designed as a brothel by William T. Whiteway, the same architect who designed the Sun Tower and the Holden Building.
You’ll also hear about these businesswomen’s marketing practices. French-born Alice Bernard only hired French girls, while Marie Gomez’s brothel was known as the House of all Sorts because it hired girls of all races. Marie was so proud of her brothel that she had her name set out in tiles. Unfortunately the tiles went into the landfill along with the building.