Eve Lazarus
Mount Pleasant Stories: Historical Walking Tours, by Christine Hagemoen
Walking Tour #1:
We had a lot of fun road-testing Christine Hagemoen’s Mount Pleasant Stories: Historical Walking Tours this week. Christine, a researcher and photographer wrote and published her guide—the first of five walking tours in the Mount Pleasant area—last November.
On June 3, 2005, 82-year-old Gim Foon Wong set off on his Ride for Redress. Starting at Mile Zero in Victoria, he planned to arrive in Ottawa July 1 on his Honda Goldwing motorbike, accompanied by his son Jeffrey. He planned to have a few words with Prime Minister Paul Martin about the brutal Chinese head tax that cost his mother and father each $500 in the early 1900s.
The Industrial School for Girls operated out of 868 Cassiar Street from 1914 until 1959 and was known as the “house of horror.” Now a residential condo, Cassiar is one of the properties featured on this year’s virtual Heritage House Tour, Thursday June 2. For tickets see: Vancouver Heritage Foundation
This story is from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
In 1954, 17-year-old Gay Turner was tossed into the Provincial Industrial School for Girls for being drunk.
The Melbourne Hotel became No5 Orange in 1971, after 67 years as a hotel and beer parlour
The Melbourne Hotel opened in August 1904 at Westminster Avenue and Powell Street. According to the daily classified ads that ran in the Vancouver Daily World and Province, it had steam heating, electric lights and a white cook.
Long before the Vancouver Film School occupied the building at East Pender and Columbia Streets, there was a railway station that was later repurposed into the legendary Marco Polo restaurant.
Story from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History
Train Station:
If you’re walking around Chinatown, you’ll likely notice the four-storey brick building at the corner of East Pender and Columbia Streets, now home to the Vancouver Film School.
If you lived in Vancouver’s West End after 1981 you may not know that street barricades and parklets are a leftover from the West End’s prostitution era
West End:
Aaron Chapman’s latest book Vancouver Vice, is a colourful history of the West End in the 1970s and ‘80s. In those days up to 300 sex workers—male and female—strolled the streets—40 to 50 of whom might be working on any given day or night.
Rolie Moore grew up in Burnaby’s Hart House and became the president of the Flying Seven, Canada’s first all female pilot club
I had the pleasure of having lunch with the delightful George Garrett at Hart House last week, a restaurant I’ve wanted to visit ever since I first heard that one of its inhabitants was the amazing Rolie Moore.
Maximum Security:
BC Penitentiary was a maximum-security federal prison plagued with riots throughout its 100-year life. There was the 1975 riot and hostage taking resulting in the death of Mary Steinhauser, a 32-year-old social worker. She was one of 15 hostages shot when police stormed the prison. Long before that, there was the 1934 riot when 78 prisoners refused to work unless they were paid.
