Last chance to try and snag a brick or two before the 1911 Henry Hudson Elementary School in Kitsilano is just a distant memory. Demolition of the red brick building started Thursday.
The Namesake:
Since it’s out with the old, I’m wondering if a name change was considered for the new school? Henry Hudson, it turns out, was a 17th century English navigator and explorer who never visited Vancouver. He disappeared after a mutiny in 1611 and was presumed dead. Apart from his total lack of connection to the city—the closest he came to Vancouver was Hudson Bay in northeastern Canada, roughly 4,700 km away—he’s not exactly the kind of role model I’d want for my kids.
According to Britannica: “As a commander, Hudson was more headstrong than courageous. He violated his agreement with the Dutch and failed to suppress the 1611 mutiny. He played favourites and let morale suffer.”
Rifle champions:
I couldn’t find out much about the history of Henry Hudson Elementary. Vancouver is Awesome wrote up an article in June 2012 when the school was celebrating its centennial. It said that during the First World War, Henry Hudson students earned the title of city rifle champions (1915 and 1916). The team included Nat Bailey who would go on to baseball and White Spot, and Hugh Matthews, the son of Vancouver’s first archivist Major Matthews.
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Babes in the Woods:
Derek and David D’Alton, the two little boys who were murdered in Stanley Park in the 1940s and identified as the Babes in the Woods in February 2022, attended Henry Hudson Elementary in the mid 1940s.
The Little Yellow School House:
Some of you will remember the little yellow school house that sat beside the soon-to-gone school building. It was built in 1912 as a Manual Training School. Google tells me that was a school that focussed on training in trades like carpentry and metal work.
Instead of being tossed in the landfill to make way for a new school, it is now part of the Chief Joe Mathias Centre on North Vancouver’s Capilano Road where children learn the Squamish Nation’s language Sḵwx̱wú7mesh sníchim.
If you went to Henry Hudson Elementary I’d love to hear your stories!
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9 comments on “RIP Henry Hudson Elementary School”
Interesting! I love it when old buildings in great shape are repurposed! I love it when old schools are torn down, and seismically safe ones are built! I think ALL the old schools in Vancouver should be rebuilt into marvelous safe structures that will serve the future generations for years. I’m so very sad that Sir Guy Carleton School was vandalized by fire in 2016 and has been closed for 9 years now; nothing is being done about re-building a new one on the same land, and this area is being built up with large condo towers now. I wish someone would do something about it. I love old school buildings, but I love new ones for the future children too!
I attended Henry Hudson from grades 1 through 5 in the late 50s and early 60s. I lived in a house with my parents on Creelman Ave. just a few blocks away, across from Kits Beach. My dad was a musical arranger and my mom was a homemaker, though she was also involved in opera and amateur theater.
I remember I enjoyed grades 1 and 2. After that it was mostly… not so enjoyable. I had a tough time learning long division in grade 3. Grade 4, my teacher was a real bitch on wheels (Ms. D’Andrea as I recall). After grade 5, in 1963, my family packed up and moved to Toronto, where my dad forged a successful career, working in the music biz with record producers Jack Richardson (The Guess Who, Bob Seger) and Bob Ezrin (Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd).
Toronto was a real culture shock, and I didn’t adapt particularly well, so in the late 60s, I came back to Vancouver, and found friends within the counter culture community of 4th Ave. I was kind of back and forth between Vancouver and Toronto for some years, working as a musician, among other gigs. Eventually I settled on Vancouver, moving back here in 2005.
As for Henry Hudson Elementary, as George Harrison wrote… All Things Must Pass. I’m sure the old red brick school house must’ve been getting long in the tooth. Will there be a new school on the same property?
Thanks for adding to the story Bruce! Sorry about your grade 4 teacher, I had one like that as well. And, yes the old building needed a lot of very expensive seismic upgrades and remodelling, and has been replaced by a new school on the property
Kindergarten in 1949 and Grade 7 finally arrived in 1957. I think of myself still as a lifer.
A few observations… kids moved on. Looking at my class photos (thanks mum), there’s so many kids I didn’t recognize or remember. I think the Kitsilano neighbourhood attracted newcomers for a year, dad found a job and then the family moved to a house in a new neighbourhood. Hmm, then there were the kids I knew who never got to Kitsilano High. Where did they go?
Teachers were mostly alright. Many unmarried women and it took me years to understand why… The Great War substantially reduced the prospective husband pool, even for women born in the early years of the century. Fortunately there were jobs as teachers so these women were able to earn a living rather be spinsters living out their lives with their parents.
A few kids were bullies, some other kids were racist with words they didn’t understand, some kids were smart and other kids weren’t, some were good at sports while others were klutzes. Some were confident with outgoing personalities while others were shy and quiet. Misbehaving kids were strapped. Psychologists? What are they?
Boys and girls were segregated from each other outside of class. Boys and girls had separate basements with the furnace separating them. Girls played in the front of the school and boys played in the back. It wasn’t until we were “graduating” that I saw a boy being nice to a girl and I thought “what’s happening here?”
“If you hear sirens going off and there’s a bright light outside, don’t look at the windows and get underneath your desk.”
Lining up to get a polio shot. No one thought to say NO!
Wow! That’s fascinating. When my kids started about 15 years ago, the school still had a Girls’ Basement and a Boys’ Basement. The first time I was called to the Boys’ Basement, I was very confused. Both were now general purpose. Later, they renovated the rooms for kindergarten expansion.
Remember it well. Friends lived across from it. Heard from others the school was good so when a neighbour in an other part of the city was looking for a school which would be better for her child, I suggested Henry Hudson. The child attended for the rest of elementary school Like the old building. Do hope they don’t sell the land.
Nope, a spanking new, fully seismic approved school is taking its place.
Alan Patola Moosmann and I did a lot of the historical research for the Centennial. A lot of that info made it into the article from VIA. Rob Ford was PAC chair and a lot of other parents were involved in bringing forth history. The Hudson daycare was the first out of school care, formed by 1970s moms who got jobs after Molson lost a case. The City’s first hot lunch program was at Hudson, after women in the area were called to work for the war. I think it also had the first City-funded community playground, recognizing the needs of inner city kids (around 1980). The school was always very multicultural and had a wide socioeconomic profile. Many of the dock and mill workers lived in the area. The school was built on a former marsh, pond and creek and, to my understanding, was very important to the First Nations people in the area, including those forced on to a barge and left adrift in the harbour. Compare this to how gently their descendants treated the little yellow school house. The little yellow school house was the first manual training centre. These were schools created to demonstrate that people with what we now call intellectual and/or developmental disabilities can be taught skills so they can work. There are a lot of difficulties with how that looked but it was the first launch into education for students with support needs.
This is fascinating, thanks so much for taking the time to add to the story!