Dolly Darlington

Heritage Vancouver’s Top 10 Most Endangered Heritage Resources of 2016

by Eve Lazarus on May 7, 2016

Bayview Community School (1913-1914) tops the 2016 list

Heritage Vancouver hosted its 16th annual bus tour today, taking people to the buildings, streets and landscapes that the Society believes have the most perilous survival rate. And, it’s not just the mansions—but also schools, churches, streets, and areas—all the things that make a community rich.
Not all the buildings are that old either. There’s the 1978 Crown Life Plaza, St. Stephen’s United Church built in 1964, and the 65-year-old art deco Salvation Army Temple.
HV townley

The 63 remaining Townley & Matheson homes claim a spot—represented by 1550 West 29th, built in 1922 to showcase the use of electricity and which Heritage Vancouver calls “demolition derby.”
Chinatown and Commercial Drive also make the list, as does the Red Light District of Alexander Street, one of the most interesting of all, and an area I studied extensively for Sensational Vancouver.
HV 500 alexander

In 1913, Chief Rufus Chamberlin wrote in a report called “Social Evil” that “there is no restricted district in the City of Vancouver at this time.”
Clearly no one had told the dozen or so madams who had either renovated existing buildings or built luxurious and expensive brothels along Alexander Street. In 1912, a time when there were few opportunities for women, brothel keeping was an attractive proposition. Dolly Darlington bought a sturdy brick building at the corner of Alexander and Jackson. The one at #504 was designed for Kathryn Maynard by William T. Whiteway, the same architect who designed the Sun Tower, while Alice Bernard hired Woolridge and McMullen architects to design and build a two-storey brick rooming house.
These three buildings still exist, as do three others in the 600-block.
HV marie

Others, such as the ones owned by Fay Packard and Marie Gomez’s House of Nations, named for her multi-cultural employees, are long gone.
The lists and the tours are certainly raising awareness, but I was curious whether they are actually working. Heritage Vancouver’s Patrick Gunn says past wins include Carleton Hall Arthur Erickson’s 1980 Evergreen building, but otherwise it’s hit and miss.
He sent me this list from the first tour in 2001 as an illustration:
1.Firehall 13 & 15: one lost, one saved
2. James Shaw House (1894): saved and restored
3. Alexandra Park Cottages: lost
4. VGH Heather Pavilion: ongoing
5. Opsal Steel (1918): saved
6. BC Electric Showroom (1928): saved
7. Pantages Theatre (1907): lost
8. Stanley Park structures: various stages
9. 100-block West Hastings, Ralph Block (1899): saved
10. Ridley House (1911): lost, illegal demolition

Tags Alice Bernard, Arthur Erickson, Crown Life Plaza, Dolly Darlington, Fay Packard, Heritage Vancouver, Kathryn Maynard, Marie Gomez, Patrick Gunn, Rufus Chamberin, Salvation Army Temple, St. Stephen's United Church, Sun Tower, Townley & Matheson, William T. Whiteway, Woolridge and McMullen

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

Mug-Shot Books and the Vancouver Police Museum

by Eve Lazarus on August 9, 2014

Vancouver Police Museum, 240 East Cordova — The Vancouver Police Museum is in the old Coroner’s Court and Morgue

I am thrilled to have the book launch for Sensational Vancouver at the Vancouver Police Museum on Tuesday. The Museum is housed in the old coroner’s court and morgue on Cordova which makes an authentic backdrop for all the great displays.

A large chunk of the material for my book came straight from the Museum’s archives.

One of my favourite “finds” was the prisoner record books. These are huge, heavy leather-bound books full of mug shots of the desperate and the unlucky. The brief, hand-written entries tell whole stories about people’s lives and deaths.

Courtesy of the Vancouver Police Museum

For instance, there is poor Walter Pretsel, 25, who came to the police station in 1912 to ask for a job as a stenographer. “He was found to be insane and was later committed to the insane asylum.” It doesn’t say why.

There are dozens of “notorious gamblers” and prostitution is listed as a profession.

Other entries are just bizarre.

Burnette F. Davis, 28, was a school principal in Washington D.C. He married one of his students, 17-year-old Christine Verhorick, brought her to Vancouver and put her to work at Dolly Darlington’s brothel on Alexander Street. He got five years and a $2,000 fine. It doesn’t say what happened to Christine, but it notes that it’s the second time Burnette had tried this. In 1907 he married a Miss Wade from Kent, Washington. She wasn’t as lucky as Christine. She died and was buried with the “aid of inmates.”

Mug-Shot Books aFrom the archives at the Vancouver Police Museum — Prisoner Record Books 1912

Then there’s little Annie Smith aged 38. Annie, alias Mrs. Stanfield was a bigamist from England. She told police that she believed that her husband, Mr. Smith was dead. She answered a personal ad in a Spokane newspaper, and through the ad, met and married Mr. Stanfield in 1909. She divorced him under grounds of cruelty and fled to Vancouver with her two small children. Stanfield somehow found Smith, who was in fact not dead, and the two men went to police in Vancouver. Annie was found “technically guilty,” but given a suspended sentence, we’re told “on account of the troubles and suffering she had endured.”

Tags Annie Smith, Annie Stanfield, Burnette F. Davis, Christine Verhorick, Dolly Darlington, Mug shots, Prisoner Record Books, Sensational Vancouver, Vancouver Police Museum, Walter Pretsel

Lani Russwurm’s Awesome Vancouver

by Eve Lazarus on January 25, 2014

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

From Brothel to Teen Housing

by Eve Lazarus on September 15, 2013

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.

Tags 500 Alexander Street, 502 Alexander Street, Atira Women's Resource Society, British Seamen's Mission, Dolly Darlington, Heritage Vancouver, Janice Abbott, red light district, shipping containers

Vancouver’s Early Red Light District and the Heritage House Tour

by Eve Lazarus on May 11, 2013

There are some beautiful homes on the Vancouver Heritage House Tour this year—a couple of old Shaughnessy manors, a quirky turreted terra cotta and stone house in Mount Pleasant, and a colorful Edwardian on Kitchener Street, but the one I am most interested in is a tenement building in the DTES.

One of 12 homes featured on the Vancouver Heritage Tour — 313 Alexander Street

The house at 313 Alexander Street first appears in the city directories in 1907 built for Yonekichi Aoki, and listed as a Japanese boarding house. Aoki was a contractor for the CPR, and this area near Powell Street was part of a bustling Japan town district.

By 1912 the area was changing as madams were chased out of Dupont Street (East Pender), bounced through Shanghai and Canton Alley, and evicted from Shore Street (100 block East Georgia). Alexander Street—especially the 500 and 600 blocks—became Vancouver’s flashy new red light district.

I wrote about the Alexander Street brothels in Sensational Vancouver.

Mugshot of a prostitute arrested in Victoria in 1912

Brothels went up at a rapid pace, either bought or built by madams such as Dolly Darlington (500 Alexander), Lucille Gray (504 Alexander) and Alice Bernard (514 Alexander). Marie Gomez even had her name spelled out in mosaic tile inside the door at 598 Alexander, unfortunately now a vacant lot. The brothels were luxuriously decorated and furnished, the prostitutes beautifully dressed, and the work earned the “inmates” a liveable income, something almost impossible to achieve as domestics, seamstresses or florists—a few of the only jobs open to women.

A police crackdown on the brothels in 1914 gave the madams—who were mostly American—the choice between six months in prison or a return to the States—and prostitution quickly disappeared from the area.

The boarding house at 313 Alexander stayed in the Aoki family until WW2 when the Japanese were interned and their properties confiscated.

Charles Haynes, a West Vancouver architect, bought the building in 2006 and proceeded to renovate 24 rooms into Single Room Accommodation as a tribute to his son Ross, 19, who died from a drug overdose in 2000. The original fir floors, tongue & groove panelling still remain, as well as the ghost lines of several doors that led from a room now used as a kitchen, leading to speculation that it may have been part of the red light district.

The 11^th Annual Heritage House Tour is on Sunday June 2 from 10 am to 5 pm. Tickets are $40 and available through the Vancouver Heritage Foundation.

Tags 313 Alexander Street, 500 Alexander, 504 Alexander, 514 Alexander, 598 Alexander, Alice Bernard, Dolly Darlington, DTES, Lucille Gray, Marie Gomez, Yonekichi Aoki

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