Places that matter

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

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

Arbutus Grocery

by Eve Lazarus on August 21, 2012

Courtesy of VPL Accession Number 46758 (1979) — The Arbutus Grocery Store at West 6th and Arbutus in 1979

When I lived in Kitsilano 20 years ago, I used to drop into the grocery store on the corner of Arbutus and 6^th. Even back then it was ahead of its time with organic produce and hard-to-find items. But just like The End of the Line and the Corner Store in North Vancouver have transformed from grocery stores to neighbourhood cafes, so has the Arbutus Grocery store – now Arbutus Coffee.

I was there on Sunday when Ros Coulson, manager, was given a Places that Matter plaque from the Vancouver Heritage Foundation. Ros says most of her customers are regulars that come from a four-block radius. Some come every day.

The food is great. Specials of the day were a split pea soup, balsamic and quinoa salad, a cheddar and zucchini quiche or a grilled panini with artichoke hearts, asparagus and roasted peppers. Likely because it was late in the day the regulars were polishing off the blueberry pie, a decadent looking German chocolate cake, and maybe the best looking carrot cake I’ve ever seen.

The store was built by Thomas Fletcher Frazer in 1907 with a boom town front. Thomas also owned the California-style bungalow next door at 2084 W. 6^{th —}(shown in the archival photo).

The store is part of Kitsilano’s Delamont Park neighbourhood, and what’s surprising is that it’s still there. The store and houses all along W. 5^th and 6^th were intended to be fodder for a freeway planned for the Burrard-Arbutus connector.

During the 1960s Arbutus Grocery catered to a lively group of artists. Figurative painter Frank Molnar paid $65 a month for his two-bedroom apartment across the street at 2205 W. 6^th. Artist Jack Akroyd had a corner apartment, while another tenant, Elek Imredy had already carved out a solid reputation as a sculptor. Poets John Newlove, bill bissett and Judith Copithorne all lived there at one point. Judith was one of three women who modeled for Imredy’s Girl in a Wetsuit sculpture that sits on a rock in Stanley Park.

Arbutus Coffee and the houses that surround it are still owned by the city. Many are now over a century old. May they be there for the next one.

For more information on the Places that Matter Plaque Project visit the Vancouver Heritage Foundation.

Tags Arbutus Coffee, Arbutus Grocery, bill bissett, Delamont Park, Elek Imredy, End of the line, Frank Molnar, Girl in a Wetsuit, Jack Akroyd, John Newlove, Judith Copithorne, Kitsilano, Places that matter, Ros Coulson, The Corner Store, Thomas Frazer, Vancouver Heritage Foundation

Places that Matter

by Eve Lazarus on June 23, 2012

At 7:30 pm on Tuesday June 26, the Vancouver Heritage Foundation is presenting a Places that Matter plaque to the Joy Kogawa House. The house at 1450 West 64^th Avenue is one of 125 places chosen to celebrate Vancouver’s 125^th anniversary and represent people, places and events that have shaped the city and that matter to Vancouverites. Everyone is welcome to attend.

For more about Joy Kogawa and Kogawa house see Sensational Vancouver’s legendary women chapter

While huge numbers of perfectly solid old houses have been torn down all over Vancouver, replaced by monster houses or parking lots or subsidized government housing, those that remain form an important part of the city’s early history. More importantly, these houses provide a context for the social history of Vancouver and reveal secrets that would otherwise be forgotten or hidden forever.

1450 West 64th Street — Joy Kogawa House – 1912

Joy Kogawa’s childhood house is a perfect example. The 1912 house is a modest wood-framed bungalow in South Vancouver, one of the few original houses that remain in the neighborhood. While there’s really nothing architecturally significant about it, what makes it of great historical importance and worth preserving is the house’s social history.

The house figures prominently in Joy’s classic novel Obasan, considered one of the 100 most important Canadian books ever written. The house is a physical reminder of the time when 22,000 Japanese-Canadians—fishermen, miners, merchants, and foresters—were wrenched from their homes and interned at places like Slocan, BC, during the Second World War. It was a shocking period in Canada’s history, and Joy’s house is an important monument to that time.

Obasan tells the story of the Japanese internment through the eyes of Naomi Nakane, 6, who had her family ripped apart by the war. In reality, Joy Nakayama, born in 1935 and her family had their house confiscated by the Canadian Government and sold without their permission, in 1942.

“The house, if I must remember it today, was large and beautiful,” she writes in Obasan. “I looked it up once in the November 1941 inch-thick Vancouver telephone directory. “I wrote to the people who lived there and asked if they would ever consider selling the house, but they never replied.”

1450 West 64th Avenue — Joy Kogawa House c1940

Joy goes on to write that the house she remembered had a hedge and rose bushes, flowers and cactus plants that lined the sidewalk. The backyard had a sand box, an apple tree and a swing where she would dangle by her knees.

In 2003 Joy drove past the old house while on a trip to Vancouver. She was stunned to find that it was for sale. “But the asking price was out of sight, over $500,000 dollars,” she told a Vancouver Sun reporter. “Still it was amazing that the house was still there, when all around it, the old houses were gone and replaced with new ones.”

When it looked like the new owner was set on tearing down the house a group formed the Joy Kogawa Homestead Committee, and together with the Land Conservancy, saved the house from demolition.

Today the house is a writers-in-residence site and a literary landmark.

For more information: Places that matter and Joy Kogawa House

Tags 1450 West 64th Avenue, Joy Kogawa, Nakayama, Obasan, Places that matter, The Land Conservancy, Vancouver Heritage Foundation

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