Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix Plays the Pacific Coliseum—September 7, 1968

by Eve Lazarus on September 1, 2018

Long before Jimi Hendrix played the Pacific Coliseum on September 7, 1968, he had a Vancouver connection.

Jimi Hendrix poster Jimi Hendrix played the Pacific Coliseum on September 7, 1968. Four years after the Beatles and 11 years after Elvis Presley played Empire Stadium and changed music forever. The difference was that Jimi had a Vancouver connection—his grandmother Nora Hendrix, a one-time vaudeville dancer who moved to Vancouver in 1911 with her husband Ross Hendrix, a former Chicago cop and raised three children. Al, the youngest moved to Seattle at 22, met 16-year-old Lucille, and Jimi was born in 1942.

Story from At Home with History: the secrets of Greater Vancouver’s Heritage Homes

Nora Hendrix lived at 827 East Georgia between 1938 and 1952. Photo: CVA 786-4736 1978

According to Jimi Hendrix, the Man, the Magic, the Truth, a biography published in 2004, Jimi lived in 14 different places, including short stints in Vancouver. “I’d always look forward to seeing Gramma Nora, my dad’s mother in Vancouver, usually in the summer. I’d pack some stuff in a brown sack, and then she’d buy me new pants and shirts and underwear. I kept getting taller and growing out of all my clothes, and my shoes were always a falling-apart disgrace. Gramma would tell me little Indian stories that had been told to her when she was my age. I couldn’t wait to hear a new story. She had Cherokee blood. So did Gramma Jeter. I was proud of that, it was in me too.”

Dawson Annex, Burrard and Barclay Streets, demolished 1969. Courtesy VSB

According to the Vancouver School Board Archives and Heritage, in 1949, Jimi attended grade 1 at the West End’s Dawson Annex while living at Nora’s house on East Georgia. “It was a long distance to the school so he probably took the bus or streetcar since the fare was only five cents,” notes the VSB.

Shortly after Hendrix left the army in 1962, he hitchhiked 2,000 miles to Vancouver and stayed several weeks with Nora. He picked up some cash sitting in with a group at a local club on Davie Street, now a gay nightclub called Celebrities.*

Now Celebrities Nightclub, 1022 Davie Street was called Dantes Inferno in the ’60s. Courtesy Places that Matter.

Six years later, when Jimi Hendrix Experience played the Pacific Coliseum, one reviewer described the band as “bigger than Elvis.” Hendrix, dressed all in white, played hits such as “Fire,” “Hey Joe,” and “Voodoo Child.” At one point he acknowledged his grandmother, who sat in the audience, and launched into “Foxy Lady.”

In 2002, Vincent Fodera renovated the building at Union and Main Street and found dishes and a stove that he believes came from Vie’s Chicken and Steak House, part of Hogan’s Alley where Nora once worked as a cook. Seven years later Fodera opened a shrine for the dead rock star. Locals told him that Jimi used the space for rehearsals and sex.

Jimi Hendrix Shrine Main and Union Streets. James Gogan photo, 2013

When Jimi played the Pacific Coliseum in 1968 he was 25. Just over two years later, the man widely recognized as one of the most creative and influential musicians of the 20^th century was dead.

1022 Davie Street was designed by architect Thomas Hooper for the Lester Dancing Academy in 1911. Hooper also designed the Victoria Public Library, and Munro’s Books Building in Victoria. And in 1912, the same year he designed Hycroft in Shaughnessy, Vancouver’s Winch Building and submitted plans for UBC, he designed Christina Haas’s, Cook Street brothel

Tags 1022 Davie Street, 827 East Georgia Street, Celebrities Nightclub, Dante's Inferno, Dawson Annex, Empire Stadium, Hogan's Alley, Jimi Hendrix, Jimi Hendrix Shrine, Nora Hendrix, Pacific Coliseum, Ross Hendrix, Thomas Hooper, Vie's Chicken and Steak House

Meet Nellie Yip Quong

by Eve Lazarus on October 11, 2014

This is an excerpt from Sensational Vancouver.

Photo of Nellie Yip Quong, courtesy of Starlet Lum

Eleanor Lum

Wayne Avery knew nothing about the history of his house until one day he saw an elderly Chinese woman peering through his front room window.

He invited her inside and discovered that she was Eleanor (Yip) Lum, and that she had been born in one of the bedrooms of his Strathcona house in 1928 by Nellie Yip Quong who later adopted her.

Nellie was not Chinese as her name suggests, but a white Roman Catholic, born Nellie Towers in Saint John, New Brunswick and educated in the United States. It was while she was teaching English in New York City that she met and fell in love with Charles Yip, a jeweler from Vancouver.

Nellie on the steps of her East Pender Street house. Courtesy Places that Matter

Yip Sang

Charles was the nephew of Yip Sang, a wealthy merchant who built the Wing Sang Building on East Pender Street in 1889. The building was erected to house Yip Sang’s growing import/export operation, an opium production plant, and his family–three wives and 23 children–one wife per floor.

When they married in 1900, Nellie was disowned by her family and spurned by the church. The couple lived in China for a few years, then moved to Vancouver in 1904 to live with Charles’s uncle Yip Sang at the Wing Sang building.

Chinese schoolroom in the Wing Sang Building where Nellie mastered five different Chinese dialects. Courtesy Rennie.com

Advocate

Nellie learned how to communicate with the Chinese and with the authorities who ignored them. She fought on the behalf of the Chinese. She challenged the justice system and shamed the Vancouver General Hospital into moving non-white patients out of the basement. When the White Lunch restaurant put up a sign saying “No Indians, Chinese or dogs allowed,” Nellie made them take it down. She arranged care for the elderly, brokered adoptions, acted as an interpreter, and became the first public health nurse hired by the Chinese Benevolent Association.

Nellie and Charles moved into their East Pender Street house in 1917.

Nine decades later, Wayne took Eleanor through the house where she had grown up. She’d stop here and there and point out something from her past. She told Wayne that Charles did the cooking and the gardening, and one of her favourite memories of Nellie—a large imposing woman—was her wearing a wide hat with a feather in the side and reading a Chinese newspaper on the bus.

Nellie Yip Quong

During the renovation, Wayne had discovered that at different times his house was once a bootlegging joint and a brothel. He found old Finnish newspapers beneath the floor, cartons of cigarettes stashed in the ceiling, booze in a secret hideout in the garden, and locks on the inside of the bedroom doors. He found that in 1911 Nora and Ross Hendrix, grandparents of rock star Jimi Hendrix, lived in his home.

Tags 783 East Pender Street, Charles Yip, Eleanor Lum, Jimi Hendrix, Nellie Yip Quong, Nora Hendrix, Places that matter, Starlet Lum, Vancouver Heritage Foundation, Wayne Avery, White Lunch Restaurant, Wing Sang Building, Women's History Month, Yip Sang

The Georgia Viaduct

by Eve Lazarus on September 27, 2014

Rebuilding of the Georgia Viaduct, 1971 — Vancouver Archives 216-1.23, 1971

The Georgia Viaduct knocked out a lot of buildings in 1971 including Hogan’s Alley and Vie’s Chicken and Steakhouse.

Urban Renewal:

The photo (above) was shot in 1971 and appears in Sensational Vancouver’s Walk on the Wild Side chapter to illustrate “urban renewal”—the City of Vancouver’s excuse for trying to demolish Strathcona and Chinatown.

It’s also one of the few photos that I’ve been able to find that shows that corner of Main and Union Street.

CVA 216-1.23 Vancouver Archives allows you to zoom into the photo which I’ve done in the inset. The building on the corner is still there. The little building next door at 207 Union (recently re-numbered 209) now houses the Jimi Hendrix shrine. Before it was levelled into a parking lot and later turned into an extension of the shrine—the real 209 Union Street had a fascinating history.

Mattlo’s Bootlegging Joint:

In 1937 the house was Louis Mattlo’s bootlegging joint. There’s a great photo in the Vancouver Sun showing Mattlo arrested and hauled off to jail after trying to break into his padlocked house with a screwdriver.

A city magistrate had come up with an innovative idea of ordering police to padlock three of the homes of the most notorious bootleggers. Unfortunately, police had locked in the Mattlo family’s tabby and had to go back in to rescue the cat. And what they didn’t bank on, was that the families would elect to stay inside the padlocked homes. Eve Lazarus photo

Uniformed officers were posted outside each of the homes to help facilitate the departure of the family members should they change their mind. It took over two weeks.

In the late 1940s, the house became Vie’s Chicken and Steak House, a famous Hogan Alley landmark operated by Vie and Robert Moore for more than 30 years.

Vie’s became a favourite destination for visiting black performers including Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong. Local legend has it that Nora Hendrix worked at Vie’s and that her grandson, rocker Jimi Hendrix played there.

Tags 209 Union Street, City of Vancouver Archives, Jimi Hendrix, Louis Mattlo, Nora Hendrix, Sensational Vancouver, Vie Moore, Vie's Chicken and Steak House

Repurposing Vancouver’s Icons–The Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret

by Eve Lazarus on April 19, 2014

You would think that if a couple of young entrepreneurs wanted to bring business to the Downtown east side, one that offered a safe haven from the streets, served healthy, affordable food, and breathed life back into an old icon, the City and the myriad of agencies that have made an industry out of the poor and troubled would be there to help.

Well no, they’re not.

109 East Hastings Street — John Atkin and Malcolm Hassin outside the former Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret

Andrew Turner, 33, and Malcolm Hassin, 30, opened SBC Restaurant last December on East Hastings, near Main Street. They tell me it’s the only indoor skateboard park in Vancouver.

The building has great vibes. As the Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret, the outside of the building used to have an 800-pound neon sign featuring a Buddha with a jiggling belly. The plan, says Malcolm is to get the restaurant back up and running, and grow fruit and vegetables on the roof of the building. They want to bring live music back to the venue.

The Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret was an integral part of Vancouver’s music scene from 1952 until the early 1990s.

The Vancouver Heritage Foundation named the building one of Vancouver’s 125 places that matter last year, and according to the heritage plaque, in the ‘50s it was the Smilin’ Buddha Dine & Dance. In the ‘60s it was part of the touring soul and rock music circuit, and in the late ‘70s it became part of the punk and alternative music scene.

Jimi Hendrix played there, so did Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, DOA and Jefferson Airplane. 54-40 named their 1994 release after the place, bought the sign and restored it.

The building has sat derelict for the last 20-odd years, another blight on the DTES. It’s still no beauty queen, but give the current business owners a break and that will also change.

When I was there on Thursday there was a steady stream of mainly young male customers. Malcolm says that customers range from eight to 56, and there’s a bunch of “older skater dudes” in their 50s that come once a week, plus a lot of people from the film industry.

Like everything in the building, the skateboard ramp is completely salvaged and repurposed. The ramp is part Expo 86, part donation from skateboarding rock star Kevin Harris, and partly built from several ramps scavenged from various eastside backyards.

BC Hydro wants $30,000 from the guys for an immediate upgrade.

The City is jerking them around about a business licence and stopped them serving food. It’s bureaucracy at its stupidest and I bet the Buddha’s smilin’.

Hogan’s Alley and the Jimi Hendrix Connection

by Eve Lazarus on February 10, 2013

It may be long gone, but at least Hogan’s Alley is finally getting the recognition that it deserves. As part of the Vancouver Heritage Foundation’s Places that Matter program, a plaque will be placed near the Hogan’s Alley Cafe at Gore and Union Streets at 2:00 Sunday February 24.

Once a black hang-out for after-hours clubs, gambling and bootlegging — Hogan’s Alley, Vancouver 1958

Hogan’s Alley Project:

The plaque and ceremony is part of the Hogan’s Alley Memorial Project, part Black History Month, and part B.C. Heritage Week.

When the Georgia Viaduct plowed through Vancouver in 1972, it knocked out Hogan’s Alley and with it a lot of black history. At one time Hogan’s Alley was a hang-out and home for Vancouver’s black community and filled with after-hours clubs, gambling and bootlegging joints. Just eight feet wide and a few blocks long, the Alley was really just a collection of horse stables, small cottages and shacks—a place where the west side crowd came to take a walk on the wild side.

Nora Hendrix lived in this Strathcona house from 1938 to 1952 — 827 East Georgia Street

I’ve written about Nora Hendrix and her Vancouver connection in At Home with History.

From 1938 to 1952, the grandmother of rock legend Jimi Hendrix, lived a few blocks from Hogan’s Alley. Nora, a feisty old lady who turned 100 in Vancouver, was born in Tennessee. She was a dancer in a vaudeville troupe, married Ross Hendrix and settled in Vancouver in 1911, raising three children. Al, the youngest moved to Seattle at 22, met 16-year-old Lucille, and their son Jimi was born in 1942.

Jimi was a frequent visitor to his grandmother’s house. After he left the army in 1962 he hitchhiked 2,000 miles to Vancouver and stayed several weeks. He picked up some cash sitting in with a groups at local clubs. Six years later when the Jimi Hendrix Experience played the Pacific Coliseum, Nora was in the audience.

Tags 207 Union Street, 406 Union Street, Al Hendrix, B.C. Heritage Week, Georgia Viaduct, Hogan's Alley, Hogan's Alley Cafe, Hogan's Alley Memorial Project, Jimi Hendrix, Nora Hendrix, Places that matter, Ross Hendrix, Vancouver Heritage Foundation, Vie's Chicken and Steak House, Vince Fodera

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