Atira Women's Resource Society Archives

When Lani Russwurm jumped online in 2008 he was one of the first to write about history in his blog Past Tense. The blog morphed into a weekly writing gig with Bob Kronbauer’s Vancouver is Awesome and last year he published Vancouver was Awesome: a curious pictorial history, a hugely popular local history book which has sat on the best seller list for the past several weeks.

“I did my Masters degree at SFU on a local subject,” he says. “I’d find out all these interesting things that were not directly related to my thesis, but I collected them anyway and after I was done I had all this material that I wanted to share, so I started blogging.”

There are a lot of great stories in Vancouver was Awesome, but one that caught my attention was a photo of 500 Alexander Street, a one-time brothel built and owned by Dolly Darlington in 1912. For years it was the headquarters for the British Seaman’s Mission and today it’s run by the Atira Women’s Resource Society as housing for at-risk teens.

What I learned from Lani is that back in the 1950s, the building also played a role in Vancouver’s drug history as the mailing address for Al Hubbard, an eccentric American millionaire with a penchant for LSD. Hubbard, writes Lani, became the biggest North American supplier of LSD through his Uranium Corporation. Hubbard apparently turned a number of people onto LSD including Aldous Huxley, the head of Vancouver’s Holy Rosary Cathedral, and then partnered up with Ross MacLean, a high profile psychiatrist who for a time owned Casa Mia and ran the Hollywood Hospital in New Westminster.

There’s a great picture of Harry Gardiner “The Human Fly” climbing the Sun Tower in 1918, and a photo of a 17-year-old Yvonne de Carlo with a boxing kangaroo. Lani tells the story of Percy Williams, a skinny little guy, who for 11 years, was the fastest man alive; and the story of George Paris, a one-time heavyweight boxing champion of Western Canada, personal trainer to Jack Johnson, boxing trainer for the Vancouver Police Department and a jazz musician at the Patricia Hotel.

When he’s not blogging or writing books, Lani lives on the edge of Chinatown with his daughter Sophia and works at a DTES hotel for Atira.

Tree Stump House 1900s, now 4230 Prince Edward Street in Mount Pleasant

The story of the Alexander Street brothels is featured in Sensational Vancouver.

Alexander Street was the red light district in 1912 — 500 block Alexander Street

Janice Abbott, CEO of Atira Women’s Resource Society, took me on a tour of some new real estate Friday—a dozen brightly coloured orange and blue recycled shipping containers piled on top of each other like giant lego blocks. This housing—the first social housing development of its kind in Canada—has attracted all sorts of attention as a potentially viable form of cheap accommodation.

The fact that it sits squashed between two former 100-year old brothels was part of the appeal, she says.

Atira also owns the big brick building next door at the corner of Jackson Street. Dolly Darlington bought the building in 1912 and transformed it into a brothel and part of the red light district that existed on Alexander Street. “Most of the young women who live right here now have been on the street since they were 12 or 13,” she says. “Our goal is to get them using less and working less and it’s meant to be transitional so after about a year or two they should be going somewhere else.”

The self-contained shipping containers will house women over 50 from the DTES who have managed to get their lives back on track and who will mentor the girls.

1888 house demolished in 2012 — 502 Alexander Street in 2012

The shipping container development sits on the site that, up until its demolition last year, was the second oldest house in Vancouver. Abbott says the idea was to keep the 1888 house, renovate it, and put the containers behind it in the alley. The property had been owned by one family for the past 40 years, had not been kept up, was infested with rats, and the house had no foundation, but sat on four cinder blocks. Too costly to fix.

Built by John Baptist Henderson in 1888 — Alexander Price outside 502 Alexander Street ca.1905

“Where has everybody been for the last 40 years? When we bought it it wasn’t even on the [City of Vancouver Heritage house] Register” says Abbott.

Two people thought they might move the house–one a couple of doors down on Alexander Street and another who wanted it for a laneway house on Cordova.

But it was still too expensive to move, and the City refused to kick in a penny said Abbott.

The former brothel, and one-time home of the British Seaman’s Mission, has Heritage B status on the Register and Abbott has tried to replicate the original stain-glass at the front and mosaic tiles in the foyer.

Abbott said they had another fight with the City over a thin strip of garden. The city wanted ornamental bushes, the girls wanted to grow vegetables. They decided to plant veggies and beg forgiveness later.

Too bad about the house. It could have shared a 125^th birthday party with the City of Vancouver.

Lani Russwurm’s Awesome Vancouver

From Brothel to Teen Housing

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