Every Place Has a Story

Jimi Hendrix Plays the Pacific Coliseum—September 7, 1968

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Long before Jimi Hendrix played the Pacific Coliseum on September 7, 1968, he had a Vancouver connection.

Jimi Hendrix posterJimi Hendrix played the Pacific Coliseum on September 7, 1968. Four years after the Beatles and 11 years after Elvis Presley played Empire Stadium and changed music forever. The difference was that Jimi had a Vancouver connection—his grandmother Nora Hendrix, a one-time vaudeville dancer who moved to Vancouver in 1911 with her husband Ross Hendrix, a former Chicago cop and raised three children. Al, the youngest moved to Seattle at 22, met 16-year-old Lucille, and Jimi was born in 1942.

Story from At Home with History: the secrets of Greater Vancouver’s Heritage Homes

Nora Hendrix lived at 827 East Georgia between 1938 and 1952. Photo: CVA 786-4736 1978

According to Jimi Hendrix, the Man, the Magic, the Truth, a biography published in 2004, Jimi lived in 14 different places, including short stints in Vancouver. “I’d always look forward to seeing Gramma Nora, my dad’s mother in Vancouver, usually in the summer. I’d pack some stuff in a brown sack, and then she’d buy me new pants and shirts and underwear. I kept getting taller and growing out of all my clothes, and my shoes were always a falling-apart disgrace. Gramma would tell me little Indian stories that had been told to her when she was my age. I couldn’t wait to hear a new story. She had Cherokee blood. So did Gramma Jeter. I was proud of that, it was in me too.”

Dawson Annex, Burrard and Barclay Streets, demolished 1969. Courtesy VSB

According to the Vancouver School Board Archives and Heritage, in 1949, Jimi attended grade 1 at the West End’s Dawson Annex while living at Nora’s house on East Georgia. “It was a long distance to the school so he probably took the bus or streetcar since the fare was only five cents,” notes the VSB.

Shortly after Hendrix left the army in 1962, he hitchhiked 2,000 miles to Vancouver and stayed several weeks with Nora. He picked up some cash sitting in with a group at a local club on Davie Street, now a gay nightclub called Celebrities.*

Now Celebrities Nightclub, 1022 Davie Street was called Dantes Inferno in the ’60s. Courtesy Places that Matter.

Six years later, when Jimi Hendrix Experience played the Pacific Coliseum, one reviewer described the band as “bigger than Elvis.” Hendrix, dressed all in white, played hits such as “Fire,” “Hey Joe,” and “Voodoo Child.” At one point he acknowledged his grandmother, who sat in the audience, and launched into “Foxy Lady.”

In 2002, Vincent Fodera renovated the building at Union and Main Street and found dishes and a stove that he believes came from Vie’s Chicken and Steak House, part of Hogan’s Alley where Nora once worked as a cook. Seven years later Fodera opened a shrine for the dead rock star. Locals told him that Jimi used the space for rehearsals and sex.

Jimi Hendrix Shrine Main and Union Streets. James Gogan photo, 2013

When Jimi played the Pacific Coliseum in 1968 he was 25. Just over two years later, the man widely recognized as one of the most creative and influential musicians of the 20th century was dead.

  • 1022 Davie Street was designed by architect Thomas Hooper for the Lester Dancing Academy in 1911. Hooper also designed the Victoria Public Library, and Munro’s Books Building in Victoria. And in 1912, the same year he designed Hycroft in Shaughnessy, Vancouver’s Winch Building and submitted plans for UBC, he designed Christina Haas’s, Cook Street brothel
Related:

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

Meet Nellie Yip Quong

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This is an excerpt from Sensational Vancouver.

Nellie Yip Quong
Photo of Nellie Yip Quong, courtesy of Starlet Lum
Eleanor Lum

Wayne Avery knew nothing about the history of his house until one day he saw an elderly Chinese woman peering through his front room window.

He invited her inside and discovered that she was Eleanor (Yip) Lum, and that she had been born in one of the bedrooms of his Strathcona house in 1928 by Nellie Yip Quong who later adopted her.

Nellie Yip Quong
Eleanor (Yip) Lum in front of 783 East Pender ca.1940s

Nellie was not Chinese as her name suggests, but a white Roman Catholic, born Nellie Towers in Saint John, New Brunswick and educated in the United States. It was while she was teaching English in New York City that she met and fell in love with Charles Yip, a jeweler from Vancouver.

Nellie on the steps of her East Pender Street house. Courtesy Places that Matter
Yip Sang

Charles was the nephew of Yip Sang, a wealthy merchant who built the Wing Sang Building on East Pender Street in 1889. The building was erected to house Yip Sang’s growing import/export operation, an opium production plant, and his family–three wives and 23 children–one wife per floor.

Wing Sang Building. Eve Lazarus photo.

When they married in 1900, Nellie was disowned by her family and spurned by the church. The couple lived in China for a few years, then moved to Vancouver in 1904 to live with Charles’s uncle Yip Sang at the Wing Sang building.

Chinese schoolroom in the Wing Sang Building where Nellie mastered five different Chinese dialects. Courtesy Rennie.com
Advocate

Nellie learned how to communicate with the Chinese and with the authorities who ignored them. She fought on the behalf of the Chinese. She challenged the justice system and shamed the Vancouver General Hospital into moving non-white patients out of the basement. When the White Lunch restaurant put up a sign saying “No Indians, Chinese or dogs allowed,” Nellie made them take it down. She arranged care for the elderly, brokered adoptions, acted as an interpreter, and became the first public health nurse hired by the Chinese Benevolent Association.

Nellie Yip Quong
Places that Matter presentation with Eleanor (Yip) Lum and Starlet Lum, 2013

Nellie and Charles moved into their East Pender Street house in 1917.

Nine decades later, Wayne took Eleanor through the house where she had grown up. She’d stop here and there and point out something from her past. She told Wayne that Charles did the cooking and the gardening, and one of her favourite memories of Nellie—a large imposing woman—was her wearing a wide hat with a feather in the side and reading a Chinese newspaper on the bus.

Nellie Yip Quong

During the renovation, Wayne had discovered that at different times his house was once a bootlegging joint and a brothel. He found old Finnish newspapers beneath the floor, cartons of cigarettes stashed in the ceiling, booze in a secret hideout in the garden, and locks on the inside of the bedroom doors. He found that in 1911 Nora and Ross Hendrix, grandparents of rock star Jimi Hendrix, lived in his home.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.

The Georgia Viaduct

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Rebuilding of the Georgia Viaduct, 1971
Vancouver Archives 216-1.23, 1971

The Georgia Viaduct knocked out a lot of buildings in 1971 including Hogan’s Alley and Vie’s Chicken and Steakhouse.

Urban Renewal:

The photo (above) was shot in 1971 and appears in Sensational Vancouver’s Walk on the Wild Side chapter to illustrate “urban renewal”—the City of Vancouver’s excuse for trying to demolish Strathcona and Chinatown.

It’s also one of the few photos that I’ve been able to find that shows that corner of Main and Union Street.

CVA 216-1.23Vancouver Archives allows you to zoom into the photo which I’ve done in the inset. The building on the corner is still there. The little building next door at 207 Union (recently re-numbered 209) now houses the Jimi Hendrix shrine. Before it was levelled into a parking lot and later turned into an extension of the shrine—the real 209 Union Street had a fascinating history.

Mattlo’s Bootlegging Joint:

In 1937 the house was Louis Mattlo’s bootlegging joint. There’s a great photo in the Vancouver Sun showing Mattlo arrested and hauled off to jail after trying to break into his padlocked house with a screwdriver.

A city magistrate had come up with an innovative idea of ordering police to padlock three of the homes of the most notorious bootleggers. Unfortunately, police had locked in the Mattlo family’s tabby and had to go back in to rescue the cat. And what they didn’t bank on, was that the families would elect to stay inside the padlocked homes.Eve Lazarus photo

Uniformed officers were posted outside each of the homes to help facilitate the departure of the family members should they change their mind. It took over two weeks.

In the late 1940s, the house became Vie’s Chicken and Steak House, a famous Hogan Alley landmark operated by Vie and Robert Moore for more than 30 years.

Vie’s became a favourite destination for visiting black performers including Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong. Local legend has it that Nora Hendrix worked at Vie’s and that her grandson, rocker Jimi Hendrix played there.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus. 

Recognizing Black History: The Canada Post Stamps

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Nora Hendrix and Fielding William Spotts

From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

In February 2014, Canada Post came out with two stamps in recognition of Black History Month. One shows Hogan’s Alley, the unofficial name for an area near Union and Main Streets and home to much of Vancouver’s early black community. The other is of Nora Hendrix and Fielding William Spotts.

The photo of Spotts was taken in 1935, and it shows the 75-year-old  standing outside his home at 217 ½ Prior Street in Hogan’s Alley, which would be bulldozed out of existence our decades later to make way for the Georgia Viaduct.

On the stamp, Spotts stands next to a young Nora Hendrix, who lived to be 100, spent much of her life in Strathcona and become famous for her grandson, rocker Jimi Hendrix. According to the city directory of  1930, Spotts ran a shoe shine business at 724 Main Street.

Rosemary Brown was Canada’s first Black female member of a provincial legislature and the first woman to run for leadership of a federal political party. She received a stamp in 2009

This was the sixth year that Canada Post produced a stamp for Black History Month—Rosemary Brown was first up in 2009, and it was the first time the stamp focussed on a place instead of a person.

I was curious how Canada Post chose these images, so I called media relations. Turns out it’s quite a process. A committee of 12 selects the subject matter. Our one representative from Vancouver in 2014 was artist Ken Lum. He joined a panel of designers, philatelists (stamp collectors), curators, and curiously, Toronto economist David Foot who wrote Boom Bust & Echo.

Joe Fortes
Joe Fortes, legendary Vancouver lifeguard, received a stamp in his honour in 2013

I also wondered who buys stamps these days. Turns out while not many of us mail letters, there’s still a large worldwide demand for stamps. Canada Post churns out about 50 different stamps every year.

You can suggest your own stamp. It takes about two years from inception to find its way to an envelope.

Eleanor Collins, Canada’ first lady of jazz, 2022

Stamps for 2022 include Queen Elizabeth, Calla lilies, Vancouver’s Elsie McGill for the Canadian’s in flight series, and music legend Eleanor Collins who is 102 and lives in Surrey, BC.

© Eve Lazarus, 2022

Hogan’s Alley and the Jimi Hendrix Connection

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It may be long gone, but at least Hogan’s Alley is finally getting the recognition that it deserves. As part of the Vancouver Heritage Foundation’s Places that Matter program, a plaque will be placed near the Hogan’s Alley Cafe at Gore and Union Streets at 2:00 Sunday February 24.

Once a black hang-out for after-hours clubs, gambling and bootlegging
Hogan’s Alley, Vancouver 1958
Hogan’s Alley Project:

The plaque and ceremony is part of the Hogan’s Alley Memorial Project, part Black History Month, and part B.C. Heritage Week.

When the Georgia Viaduct plowed through Vancouver in 1972, it knocked out Hogan’s Alley and with it a lot of black history. At one time Hogan’s Alley was a hang-out and home for Vancouver’s black community and filled with after-hours clubs, gambling and bootlegging joints. Just eight feet wide and a few blocks long, the Alley was really just a collection of horse stables, small cottages and shacks—a place where the west side crowd came to take a walk on the wild side.

Nora Hendrix lived in this Strathcona house from 1938 to 1952
827 East Georgia Street

I’ve written about Nora Hendrix and her Vancouver connection in At Home with History.

From 1938 to 1952, the grandmother of rock legend Jimi Hendrix, lived a few blocks from Hogan’s Alley. Nora, a feisty old lady who turned 100 in Vancouver, was born in Tennessee. She was a dancer in a vaudeville troupe, married Ross Hendrix and settled in Vancouver in 1911, raising three children. Al, the youngest moved to Seattle at 22, met 16-year-old Lucille, and their son Jimi was born in 1942.

Jimi was a frequent visitor to his grandmother’s house. After he left the army in 1962 he hitchhiked 2,000 miles to Vancouver and stayed several weeks. He picked up some cash sitting in with a groups at local clubs. Six years later when the Jimi Hendrix Experience played the Pacific Coliseum, Nora was in the audience.

© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.