Forbidden City

The Dupont Street Train Station and the Marco Polo Restaurant

by Eve Lazarus on May 14, 2022

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

Sign from the Vancouver, Westminster and Yukon Railway depot, 1979 — The sign stayed on the building until it was demolished in 1983. Angus McIntyre photo, 1979

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. But if you were to take a stroll down the 100 block of East Pender in the early years of the 20^th Century, you would actually be on busy Dupont Street and you’d find visitors from the U.S. disembarking at the Vancouver, Westminster and Yukon Rail depot.

The VW&YR depot on Dupont street in 1915 — VWYR depot on Dupont Street (now east Pender Street) in 1915. Vancouver Archives

Several hundred people came to see the first fast train leave for Seattle on March 20, 1905 and cross the new trestle bridge that connected the north and south sides of False Creek. The last train left on May 31, 1917 and the building turned into the Hu Ye Restaurant and later the Forbidden City. The last and most famous tenant was the Marco Polo Restaurant.

The Ghost Sign:

Before the building could be destroyed in 1983, heritage advocate Arthur Irving made a deal with the demolition crew and pried 88 bricks off the wall that still had the original railway sign VW&Y To Trains printed in black letters. He had the bricks mounted in a box to preserve them, and in doing so, saved one of the few pieces that remain of the Vancouver Westminster and Yukon Railway that operated between 1904 and 1908.

Tom Carter and Arthur Irving with the vintage railway sign in 2012. Andrew Martin photo

After Arthur died in 2018, Tom was helping to clear out his house when he came across the sign and the blueprints for the Great Northern Station built in 1919. “We found them in Arthur’s basement, in a bathtub salvaged from the 1916 Hotel Vancouver,” says Tom.

Marco Polo restaurant, 90 East Pender Street, Vancouver — The Marco Polo occupied 90 East Pender Street for decades before moving to North Van in 1982. Tom Carter collection

The brick sign and the blueprints are with the West Coast Railway Association in Squamish. The bathtub is in Arthur’s next-door neighbour’s garden.

Goad's map — Goad’s Map of 1912 showing the train depot. With thanks to Tom Carter

Tags Angus McIntyre, Arthur Irving, Forbidden City, Hu Ye Restaurant, Marco Polo restaurant, Tom Carter, Vancouver Westminster and Yukon Rail

Whose Chinatown?

by Eve Lazarus on March 20, 2021

The Wong Wing family on Keefer Street. Yucho Chow photo, 1914. Yucho Chow Community Archive

I had the pleasure of visiting Griffin Art Projects with Tom Carter last Saturday. It’s a gallery of sorts hidden in an industrial building on Welch Street in North Vancouver. The exhibit features stories, photos, videos and paintings about Chinatowns in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, many from private collections.

The Band at the W.K. Gardens, ca.1950. Tom Carter collection

Some of Tom’s personal collection is featured and includes everything from scrapbooks from the Marco Polo, to postcards from Ming’s and Bamboo Terrace in the late ‘50s to souvenir photos from Mandarin Gardens and Forbidden City. These Chinatown nightclubs offered revues, dance bands and floor shows.

Tom Carter with some of his collection from the Marco Polo. Eve Lazarus photo.

Emily Carr’s sketch of a Chinese boy in 1908 is included as is a terrific display from the Vancouver School of Art. Yitkon Ho was in the first graduating class in 1929 along with Beatrice Lennie, Vera Weatherbie (Fred Varley’s young mistress), Fred Amess and Irene Hoffar. There are also some sketches and information about Eugene Bond, a Chinese student and one of two Asian models at the art school.

There are also some fabulous photos by Fred Herzog and Jim Wong-Chu, several of which I was seeing for the first time. And, Yucho Chow also has photos ranging from the Dominion Produce Company in the 1930s and the Ming Wo store in the early 1920s to the wonderful portraits of Chinese families that Catherine Clement drew attention to in her book: Chinatown Through a Wide Lens.

A banner tells the story of Gim Foon Wong. In 2005 when he was 82 he rode his motorcycle to Ottawa with a dozen other bikers in what became known as Gim Wong’s Ride for Redress so he could have a chat with the PM about the Chinese head tax. The banner, which Tom tells me was created by our friend Elwin Xie, was auctioned off at a Montreal dinner to raise enough money so Wong could get home. He received the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012.

The exhibition runs until May 1. You can book online—Tom and I were the only visitors in our half hour slot which made the whole visit quite magical.

Tags Bamboo Terrace, Elwin Xie, emily carr, Eugene Bond, Forbidden City, Fred Herzog, Gim Foon Wong, Griffin Art Projects, Jim Wong-Chu, Mandarin Gardens, Mings, Tom Carter, Vancouver School of Art, W.K. Gardens, Yitkon Ho, Yucho Chow

The Lost Scrapbooks from the Marco Polo

by Eve Lazarus on July 15, 2017

In 2017, Tom Carter bought scrapbooks from the Marco Polo that were found in a Chinatown dumpster. The club closed in 1983. From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

By Tom Carter

Tom Carter is an artist, a musician, a historian, and a private collector. He has kindly agreed to write a guest blog about one of his most exciting finds.

There are some “holy grails” out there in Vancouver entertainment history—stuff we fantasize about that still exists somewhere. I still can’t believe I landed one of the biggest of them—the owner’s scrapbooks from the Marco Polo!

The Marco Polo, a club deep within Chinatown, was one of Vancouver’s legendary nightclubs. In the ‘60s it was considered one of the “big three” along with The Cave on Hornby and Isy’s Supper Club on Georgia. While posters, cards and ephemera are pretty common from The Cave and Isy’s, the Marco Polo has long been shrouded in mystery.

Over the years there have been rumours of scrapbooks kept by Victor Louie, manager and one of the Louie brothers who owned the club. They had become a legend among collectors like Jason Vanderhill and Jim Wong-Chu who have been hunting them for years.

What we knew was that Victor Louie had loaned the scrapbooks to Jason Karman when he was researching a film about Harvey Lowe in the early 1990s. Lowe was a yo-yo champion, owner of the Smilin’ Buddha and a staple of the Chinatown entertainment scene with connections to the Marco Polo.

After Karman returned the scrapbooks they vanished!

Then, last year, they miraculously resurfaced when a dealer I know bought the scrapbooks from a picker who had pulled them out of the garbage behind a warehouse in Chinatown. (A “picker” is someone who combs through junk in alleys, dumpsters, etc. looking for things of value to sell to antique dealers).

The dealer told me he planned to dismantle the books and sell off the bits—effectively destroying their historical value.

Instead, I bought everything.

When I got the scrapbooks home, I discovered photos of musicians on stage and chorus girls. There were menus and handbills and all sorts of letters from clients. Harvey Lowe had produced and emceed the opening show, and I found his script. There was even a handwritten listing of every act that played the club from 1964 to 1968!

These scrapbooks form a more-or-less complete history of the Marco Polo from 1960 when the Louie’s took over the Forbidden City and renamed it, through to 1982 when the original Chinatown club closed and moved to North Vancouver.

Everything is now photographed, and with the assistance of BC PAMA and the UBC School of Library Archival and Information Studies, the entire contents of the scrapbooks will eventually be online.

Tom Carter has been painting historical views of Vancouver for many years with artwork in prominent private and corporate collections. Tom serves on the boards of the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame, Friends of the Vancouver Archives and the Vancouver Historical Society. You can read more about his work in Vancouver Confidential “Nightclub Czars of Vancouver and the Death of Vaudeville.”

Tags Forbidden City, Harvey Lowe, Isy's, Jason Karman, Marco Polo, the Cave, Tom Carter, Victor Louie

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