Sensational Vancouver

The House that Joe Built

by Eve Lazarus on January 7, 2024

Multiplexes will soon replace single family homes all over Vancouver. How many stories will be erased from our history?

I was reading an article in the Vancouver Sun yesterday called “Multiplexes may be coming to your neighbourhood soon.” It’s City Hall’s way of densifying our neighbourhoods, replacing those entitled single family homes with up to six strata homes on a single lot.

2667 Pender Street — Vancouver Sun, January 6, 2024

2667 East Pender Street:

The article is illustrated with two pictures – the five-unit development proposed for an east Pender Street house in the Hastings Sunrise neighbourhood “made possible through the city’s ‘missing middle’ zoning,” and the little house that it replaces.

And, then I realized, hey I know this house.

Louise Ricci at 2667 East Pender Street. Eve Lazarus photo, 2014

The new project, says the article, would almost double the livable square footage, and the guy who now owns the property expects to get $1.65 million each for the two units in the front of the building and another $900,000 each for the ground level two-bedroom units. It doesn’t say what the new owners will pay for the laneway house at the back, or the monthly strata fees. But let’s assume fees will be hefty, and clearly at these prices, we’re not talking about first-time, average wage-earning home buyers.

Louise Ricci sitting on her dad’s knee, ca 1932 at 2667 East Pender Street. From Sensational Vancouver

Detective Joe Ricci:

So, let’s take a minute to look at the diminishing heritage house stock that these multiplexes will replace. The house in the article was built by Vancouver Police Detective Joe Ricci in 1922. Joe immigrated to Canada from Falvaterra, Italy in 1906, and six years later, he was the first Italian to join the Vancouver Police Department.

Joe Ricci Vancouver Police Detective — Joe Ricci and daughters 1930s, from Sensational Vancouver

Joe raised his two daughters in this house, and in 2014 when I took photos for my book Sensational Vancouver, his daughter Louise still lived there. I know because I sat with her in their kitchen going through boxes and boxes of newspaper clippings and photos about her Dad. Louise showed me the back porch where Chinese gangsters broke into Joe’s house during the Tong Wars of the 1920s, and threw chicken blood all over the cupboards. It was a warning for Joe to stay away.

West Coast Central Club:

Joe was on duty March 20, 1917, the night that Police Chief Malcolm MacLennan was killed in a shootout in Strathcona. He worked on the dry squad, the drug squad, and later, the Morality Squad. He left the force and founded the West Coast Central Club right next to the old police station on Main Street. Louise worked at the club and remembers serving newspaper reporters like Jack Wasserman and Jack Webster. “Webster used to sit beside the planters so nobody would see him. I’d serve him screwdrivers,” Louise told me. She remembered Officer Bernie “Whistling” Smith as well as crime boss Joe Celona and Judge Les Bewley.

That’s just one house’s story. I wonder how many more we’ll be erasing in the coming years.

2667 East Pender Street

Tags 2667 East Pender Street, Jack Wasserman, Jack Webster Bernie "Whistling" Smith, Joe Celona, Joe Ricci, Les Bewley, Louise Ricci, Sensational Vancouver, West Coast Central Club

Paul Yee’s Vancouver Archives

by Eve Lazarus on March 23, 2019

About six years ago, I was doing some research for my book Sensational Vancouver and took a tour of Strathcona with James Johnstone. I was excited to meet Paul Yee, a historian who now lives in Toronto, and has written several brilliant books which include Salt Water City, Tales from Gold Mountain, and most recently, A Superior Man (see Paul’s website for a full list).

Paul Yee outside his childhood house at 540 Heatley Street in 2013. Eve Lazarus photo

Paul told me that he lived in three different houses in Strathcona between 1960 and 1974.

“I was an orphan,” he said. “When whole blocks of houses around me were demolished, I felt like I was being shoved onto a stage for the world to see all the shame that came from living in a slum. Even as a child, I knew Vancouver had better neighbourhoods. I was embarrassed to tell people my address, show others my library card.”

Paul’s first address was 350 ½ East Pender Street. The house is long gone, and the ½ refers to a smaller house that stood at the rear of the main residence, he says. The family left in 1968 to live above the Yee’s family store at 263 East Pender, and in 1971 they moved to 540 Heatley Street. Later, the Yee’s moved east into the Grandview Woodlands Neighbourhood.

200 Block East Hastings in 1986, from the Paul Yee Fonds, Courtesy CVA 2008-010.0523

Paul, was amazed at how much Strathcona had changed “When I walk through Strathcona now, what really hits me is how green and lush it is. The place is now respectable, unlike when I lived there,” he said.

This week, Vancouver Archives announced that thanks to funding from the Friends of the Vancouver City Archives, they have now digitized 3,700 photos that the Yee family donated in 2014. Many are Paul’s own photos, and there are also oral interviews online from the ‘70s and ‘80s with Chinese Canadian seniors and community members. You can read more about it on their great blog AuthentiCity.

A racist poster from UBC in 1987. Courtesy Paul Yee Fonds and CVA 2008-010.1762

Many of the historical photos that you see in our books and on the many Facebook pages that are about “old” Vancouver, including my own Every Place has a Story, come from Vancouver Archives, and it’s all free of charge. It’s an incredible resource, and if you become a member of the Friends of the Vancouver Archives, your money goes to digitizing more of these records.

Arrival of Chinese Statesman Li Hung-Zhang at the CPR dock at the foot of Howe Street in 1896. Courtesy Paul Yee Fonds and CVA 2008-010.4121

Personally, I’m looking forward to the AGM on March 31 with guest speaker Ron Dutton. Ron started the BC Gay and Lesbian Archives in 1976, and he recently donated over 750,000 posters, sound recordings, photographs, magazines and clippings to the Archives.

Tags 540 Heatley Street, BC Gay and Lesbian Archives, Friends of the Vancouver Archives, James Johnstone, Paul Yee, Paul Yee fonds, Ron Dutton, Salt Water City, Sensational Vancouver, Vancouver Archives

The Black Hand’s Vancouver Connection

by Eve Lazarus on August 27, 2016

Joe Ricci’s story is in Sensational Vancouver

Joe was a kick-arse Italian cop who worked for the Vancouver Police Department between 1912 and 1928 and didn’t get bogged down in the details. He’d kick down the doors of opium dens, shoot first and ask questions later, and not worry too much about legal things like warrants and warnings.

The Black Hand (La Mano Nera) was an extortion racket, a sort of early form of the Mafia, that was well established in major Italian communities in American cities in the early part of last century.

Typically, a member of the Black Hand Society would send a letter to a target threatening violence, kidnapping, arson or even murder if they didn’t pay protection money. The letter was often decorated with a smoking gun, a noose or a knife dripping with blood, and accompanied with the message: “held up in the universal gesture of warning” drawn in thick black ink.

Black hand letter 2

In November 1923, Joe was flipping through the circulars and pictures of wanted criminals, when he stopped at one, sat back and whistled softly. Starring back at him was the face of Dominic Delfino, a lieutenant and hit man for the Black Hand Society who was wanted by every police department in the U.S. after his escape from jail several years before.

Just a few hours earlier one of Joe’s informants had tipped him off that a “very bad Italian—maybe a murderer” was being held in a jail cell in Nelson, BC, on an immigration charge. The prisoner had boasted: “I shot my way out of the death house, and they’ll never hold me very long.”

Delfino had been held in a county jail in Pennsylvania charged with multiple murders. Before he could be transferred to his execution in New York, two of his colleagues disguised as nuns managed to smuggle in a saw and a revolver. Delfino escaped, murdering four guards on the way out.

Joe decided to play a hunch and went to Nelson to see for himself. Delfino wouldn’t talk, but the detective identified him from the mug shot. Delfino was sent back to the States and electrocuted. Ricci received front page headlines and collected a $500 reward.

Tags Dominic Delfino, Joe Ricci, La Mano Nera, Sensational Vancouver, The Black Hand, Vancouver Police Department

Vancouver Heritage House Tour and Manson’s Deep

by Eve Lazarus on June 3, 2016

Never heard of Manson’s Deep? You’re not alone. It’s one of the deepest points in Howe Sound just off Point Atkinson. It’s also been a burial ground for old sailors since 1941.

Manson’s Deep gets its name from Captain Thomas Manson who came to Vancouver from Scotland in 1892.

Captain Manson. From Westcoast Mariner, 2000

According to an article by Kellsie McLeod*, Manson, himself was buried there in 1946. Part of the service, she writes was the recital of a poem: “Now again, ‘Old Cap,’ you’re with your first love, with the sea. We hear you shout, ‘Stand by and tack, when the Shetland Isles you see.”

Kellsie’s own husband, Ernie McLeod, had his ashes scattered from a tug into Manson’s Deep in 1977. Ernie was a rum runner and appears in Sensational Vancouver “built on rum,” chapter as well as in the ghost chapter because the house that he and Kellsie lived in on Glen Drive was haunted.

You may even catch the ghost of Captain Manson on the annual Vancouver Heritage House Tour Sunday. The West 2^nd Avenue house is one of nine houses that you’ll be able to get inside. Others include craftsman houses in Kerrisdale and Kitsilano, a Tudor in South Granville, and WilMar on Southwest Marine Drive. WilMar, a 9,000 square-foot 1925 house on a two-acre lot was in the news recently because of redevelopment plans that will hopefully save the old mansion from demolition.

If Art Moderne is more to your taste, the Vancouver Heritage Foundation has you covered. You can get a peek inside the Barber Residence—that’s the big white concrete house that sits up on the West 10^th Avenue hill near Highbury in Point Grey.

Apparently there is some dispute as to who designed this futuristic looking house (remember this was 1936). My money is on Ross Lort, a super talented architect who is featured in At Home with History. At one point Lort worked with Samuel Maclure, and he designed Maxine’s on Bidwell, G.F. Strong building on Laurel, the Park Lane Apartments on Chilco and Casa Mia on Southwest Marine Drive.

Barber Residence on West 10th. Vancouver Sun photo, 2011

If you need to buy tickets on Sunday, they are $42 or $31.50 with student ID. You can pick them up after 9:00 a.m. at the information booths at 3118 Alberta Street and 2744 Dunbar. These are also two of the tour houses.

* Westcoast Mariner, 2000

Tags Barber Residence, Captain Thomas Manson, Casa Mia, Ernie McLeod, Kellsie McLeod, Manson's Deep, Maxine's, Ross Lort, Samuel Maclure, Sensational Vancouver, Vancouver Heritage House Tour, WilMar

West Coast Modern on Display

by Eve Lazarus on June 28, 2015

There is a chapter on West Coast Modern Artists and Architects in Sensational Vancouver.

If you love West Coast modern like I do, check out the art and architecture exhibit at the West Vancouver Museum this summer.

Work from all the greats is there—Fred Hollingsworth, Arthur Erickson, B.C. Binning, Ned Pratt, Ron Thom, Gordon Smith, Len Norris, Jack Shadbolt, Bill Reid and Zoltan Kiss and documented by photographers Selwyn Pullan and John Fulker.

I had spent time in the houses of Barry Downs, Ned Pratt and Selwyn Pullan while writing Sensational Vancouver and it was great to see their work highlighted. I didn’t know that Hollingsworth and Pratt designed furniture, Kiss made pottery, or that cartoonist Len Norris was originally an architectural draftsman.

Len Norris, 1955. Reproduced from the original

Ned Pratt of Thompson Berwick Pratt, may be the most important architect to come out of Vancouver. He hired and mentored some of the most influential architects of the time—Erickson, Thom, Downs, Hollingsworth all cut their teeth at TBP.

Pratt’s crowning achievement was winning the commission to design the B.C. Electric building on Burrard Street—a game changer in the early 1950s.

Fred Herzog photo of B.C. Electric building in 1959

Pratt built his own home on an acre lot in the British Properties in the ‘50s.

When Peter Pratt, also an architect, took over the house after his father’s death, it had started to leak and rot. “I don’t know how many times I heard ‘it’s a tear down Pratt you can’t save it’,” he said in Sensational Vancouver. “This is our home, it’s not so much an asset, it’s our home. It has a sense of place.”

Peter Pratt in front of the mural designed by Ned Pratt and Ron Thom made from paper, coloured dyes and fibreglass. Eve Lazarus photo, 2015

Peter not only saved much of the family home, he built his own post-and-beam home right next door.

Hollingsworth just died a few months ago at age 98. His wife Phyllis still lives in the North Vancouver house he designed in1946.

Barry Downs, who was recently awarded the Order of Canada, still lives with his wife Mary in the gorgeous West Vancouver house he designed for them in 1979.

Eve Lazarus and Barry Downs. Tom Carter photo, 2015

A huge Gordon Smith painting hangs in the dining room. The artist is a good friend of the Downs’ and lives nearby in a house designed by Arthur Erickson.

Ironically, Erickson, who was probably the most famous of all, chose not to design his own house, but bought a large corner lot with a small cottage and a garage in Point Grey out of which he created a 900-square-foot home, and lived there for 52 years.

Arthur Erickson. Selwyn Pullan photo, 1972

The West Vancouver Museum is at 680-17^th Street in West Vancouver. It’s located inside the Gertrude Lawson House, a 1940 stone house built in the Colonial Revival Style.

Tags Arthur Erickson, B.C. Binning, B.C. Electric building, Barry Downs, Bill Reid, Fred Hollingsworth, Gordon Smith, Jack Shadbolt, John Fulker, Len Norris, Ned Pratt, Ron Thom, Selwyn Pullan, Sensational Vancouver, Thompson Berwick Pratt, West Coast modern, Zoltan Kill

446 Union Street

by Eve Lazarus on June 5, 2015

It may not be the grandest house on the Vancouver Heritage Foundation’s tour, but I bet 446 Union Street house is one of the most interesting, at least when it comes to its social history.

From: Sensational Vancouver

Adamo Piovesan built the brick house in 1930 for his wife Maria and their four daughters. Piovesan was a longshoreman when he could get work, but like dozens of Italian families in the area, the Piovesans bootlegged their way through the Depression. The family made beer and wine in the European tradition and bought rum from the government-run liquor store which they then resold in shots. Drinks sold for a dime, while a glass of bucaro, a wine usually made from raisins and the mash of a better wine, sold for a nickel.

Fines:

Once the Piovesan’s were raided and Maria had to pay a $300 fine—a massive amount of money that forced the family to bootleg more liquor to pay it.

Gilda, the oldest daughter remembers a colorful crowd of customers. There was Kitty the Bitch, Gumboot Annie, Shortie the Painter, Jimmy the Corker, and the Spaniard from the area, a stream of loggers from the camps, and railway workers arriving by taxi.

In 1944 the Piovesans moved out of the area to a bigger place on Franklin Street and sold their house to Wally “Blondie” Wallace and his wife Nellie.

Blondie Wallace:

While the Piovesans were small time bootleggers driven by need, Wally was one of the largest bootleggers in the area.

Wally was a neighbourhood hero, dodging the cops in his bootlegging operation by night and teaching the kids to box in the basement of his house during the day. He operated a thriving distribution centre from the garage just off a lane at the back of the house, and ran Wallace Transfer out of an old Union Street garage.

“That’s how he got caught,” says his niece Judy Maida. “He bought a whole fleet of moving and storage trucks and paid cash and they got him for income tax evasion because how does a guy who doesn’t make any money, all of a sudden put out $100,000 for a truck?”

When I visited the Union Street house in 2006 it was owned by Brian Dedora, a master gilder, who made his gilded picture frames in the garage where Wallace once stored his booze. Descendants of Adamo and Maria called around and left him with old photos and a great story. He told me that knowing something about the people who had lived there before him gave him a deeper connection to his house. “It’s sort of a custodial thing, like owning an antique or a painting,” he said. “I’m here to take care of it for my time.”

I’m told that the current owners are furniture makers and now use the garage for that purpose.

** I’ll be at the Marguerite house (#8) between 9:30 and 1:00 p.m. on Sunday. Please drop by and say hello!

Tags 446 Union Street, Adamo Piovesan, At Home with History, Maria Piovesan, Sensational Vancouver, The Vancouver Heritage Foundation, The Vancouver Heritage House Tour, Wallace Transfer, Wally Wallace

Red Light Rendezvous at the Vancouver Police Museum

by Eve Lazarus on May 30, 2015

Frankie Russell, 1912 inmate of disorderly house

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's brothel — 500 Alexander, as a sailor’s home in 1924 VPL 3127

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.

Marie Gomez brothel — Curt Lang photo, 1972 VPL85872X

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.

Tags Alice Bernard, Dolly Darlington, Dora Reno, Frankie Russell, Marie Gomez, Red Light Rendezvous, Sensational Vancouver, Vancouver Police Museum, William Bowser, William T. Whiteway

Meet Lurancy Harris: Canada’s First Woman Police Officer

by Eve Lazarus on March 7, 2015

Lurancy Harris and Minnie Millar became the first two women police officers in Canada when they were hired by the VPD in 1912

The following is an excerpt from Sensational Vancouver.

Lurancy Harris and the Vancouver Police Department — Lurancy Harris ca.1915. Vancouver Archives

Joins VPD:

Lurancy Harris was a 48-year-old seamstress from Nova Scotia had moved to Vancouver in 1911 and rented a small apartment on Robson at Howe. One day she was flipping through a newspaper when an ad caught her eye. The Vancouver Police Department was looking for “two good reliable women” to form the nucleus of a women’s protective division centred around issues of morality and protecting the safety of wayward women and children.

She and Millar were sworn in as fourth class constables, the lowest rank in the department with a salary of $80 a month. The women were given full police powers and thrown into the job with no training, no uniform and no gun.

First Arrest:

Lurancy made her first arrest five months after she was hired. In the Prisoner Record book of 1912 at the Vancouver Police Museum, Annie Smith, 38, alias Mrs. Stanfield, a bigamist from England told police that she believed that her husband was dead and had answered a personal ad in a Spokane newspaper, met and then married a Mr. Stanfield. On account of his “cruelty” she fled to Vancouver with her two small children. Stanfield found her, found the original Mr. Smith and the two men went to police. While Annie was found “technically guilty” she was given a suspended sentence “on account of the troubles and suffering she had endured.”

Arrest of Lorena Mathews:

Lurancy’s big break came a month later when she was given the task of escorting Lorena Mathews on the train back to Oklahoma after she was arrested in Vancouver. Mathews had bolted across the continent with her two children and Jim Chapman, her 25-year-old black lover who was suspected of helping her murder her much older husband. Chapman was convicted, Mathews was acquitted, and Lurancy got a promotion.

In 1916, Lurancy bought a lot on Venables Street in East Vancouver. She had a small craftsman house built and planted a monkey tree. The house is still there, a second floor was added in 1983, and the monkey tree towers over it all.

By all accounts, Lurancy had an amazing career. In 1924 she was promoted to inspector, although she was kept at the pay scale of a sergeant. She retired in 1928 aged 65.

While more women gradually joined the police force, things were slow to change. Women did not get uniforms until 1947, they were not allowed to drive police cars until 1948 (they went to calls on foot or took the street car), and it wasn’t until the 1970s that women had the right to carry firearms and were assigned to the same duties as their male counterparts.

Tags 1836 Venables, International Women's Day, Jim Chapman, Lorena Mathews, Lurancy Harris, Minnie Millar, Sensational Vancouver, Vancouver Police Department, Vancouver Police Museum

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