West End

Who Killed Nurse Inglis?

by Eve Lazarus on September 10, 2023

On September 10, 1969, 26-year-old nurse Myrna Louise Inglis finished her shift at St. Paul’s Hospital. It was shortly after midnight, the end of a long day, and she was tired. She changed out of her nurse’s uniform and into her street clothes. Because it was chilly, she draped her nurse’s cape around her shoulders.

Lived in the West End:

Myrna lived close by on Barclay Street in a West End apartment she shared with two other nurses. She said goodnight to the hospital’s security guard and headed west on Nelson Street. Myrna had just passed Broughton Street when a young man in his early twenties stepped out of the shadows and surprised her. He was tall and thin with dark brown curly hair and wearing a brown suede jacket.

He walked right up to her and said: “Don’t say anything.”

Then he brought his knee up and landed a brutal blow to her stomach. As Myrna doubled over in pain, the young man stabbed her five times in her upper back and neck. Then he ran away leaving Myrna bleeding on the sidewalk.

St. Paul’s Hospital, ca. 1960s. Vancouver Archives photo

Rushed to St. Paul’s:

Residents responded to her screams and Myrna was rushed back to the hospital from where she had just left and taken into surgery.

One of her ribs was broken, her lungs were punctured and her spinal cord was severed. She was paralyzed but doctors expected that she would survive. Myrna’s father, a doctor in their hometown of Gibsons on the Sunshine Coast rushed over to be with her.

Police looked into her background but couldn’t find anything that would warrant such a vicious assault. It appeared to be a random attack by a stranger, and that struck fear into the residents of the West End, many of whom took up self-defence lessons. Police also questioned anyone who may have seen the attack or her attacker. Myrna was also able to give a description the day after the assault—five days later she was dead.

West End, 1960s. https://www.flickr.com/photos/45379817@N08/6077669771

What was the motive?

While police had a good description of Myrna’s attacker, they couldn’t figure out a motive for the attack. Was it an attempted rape or was it someone with mental health issues and Myrna was just in the wrong place at the wrong time?

It was also years before DNA became part of the forensic toolkit, and it’s likely any physical evidence from the attack that could solve the murder today, has long been lost or discarded.

Myrna’s funeral was held in Gibsons and was the second one for her father in less than a year: Myrna’s 16-year-old brother David had died the previous December from head injuries resulting from a motorcycle accident.

If you have any information about Myrna Inglis’s attack and murder, contact the Vancouver Police Department at 604-717-3321 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477.

Tags Myrna Inglis, West End

Vice in Vancouver’s West End

by Eve Lazarus on May 6, 2022

If you lived in Vancouver’s West End after 1981 you may not know that street barricades and parklets are a leftover from the West End’s prostitution era

West End:

Aaron Chapman’s latest book Vancouver Vice, is a colourful history of the West End in the 1970s and ‘80s. In those days up to 300 sex workers—male and female—strolled the streets—40 to 50 of whom might be working on any given day or night. As Aaron says, the only evidence that this open-air brothel existed is a memorial dedicated to sex workers on Jervis Street and the barricades that created those charming cul-de-sacs and parklets.

“The barricades were first proposed to calm traffic in 1973,” says Aaron. “But when they were eventually installed in 1981, the City of Vancouver was so desperate to look like they were doing something about the sex worker issue in the West End that their purpose was renamed.” The idea was that barricades would discourage motorists from driving up and down residential streets in search of sex.

Prostitution:

Up until the 1970s, prostitution was mostly tucked away behind closed apartment and rooming house doors, and later nightclubs and hotel lounges. A couple of high-profile cases managed to push sex workers out onto Davie Street. “Then people are upset that there is prostitution on Davie Street, so it goes to the residential streets and the people get upset who live there,” says Aaron. Increased patrols and a greater uniformed police presence in the West End had mixed results.

Hookers in Vancouver's West End — A West End sex worker, Courtesy Aaron Chapman, ca. 1980

“It seems like everything that the VPD tried to do to curb street prostitution had the worst unintended effect, including the street barricades,” he says. “The street barricades don’t really work because they just slow traffic down and that allows the sex workers more time to negotiate a price with their clients.”

On November 16, 1981, City of Vancouver workers began installing $28,000 worth of temporary barriers. These were little more than chain link fences made permanent the following year.

West End residents protest prostitution — West End residents protesting, ca.1980. Courtesy Aaron Chapman

Residents upset:

At the time, says Aaron, this upset residents who couldn’t park outside their apartment buildings. Even local Fire Hall #6 worried about longer response times and complained about the barricades. “If you proposed removing those barricades today and opening the streets back up to traffic, you’d have the same amount of people saying they don’t want cars going down their streets and parking in front of their buildings,” says Aaron.

Shame the Johns in Vancouver's West End — Shame the Johns, ca.1980. Courtesy Aaron Chapman

Vancouver After Dark: Richards on Richards

Tags Aaron Chapman, prostitution, Shame the John, Vancouver Police Department, Vancouver Vice, West End

Crystal Pool (1929-1974)

by Eve Lazarus on March 26, 2022

Before we had the Vancouver Aquatic Centre, there was the Crystal Pool.

The story is from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History.

The proposed Connaught Beach Club. Courtesy Neil Whaley collection

Crystal Pool:

Joe Fortes taught hundreds of children how to swim in English Bay, If the much-loved life guard were still alive when Crystal Pool opened in July 1929, it’s hard to imagine that the parks board would have got away with separate swim days—six days for whites, one day for “coloureds and Orientals”*—segregating their mostly young customers for the next 17 years.

Sunset Beach:

The salt-water pool at Sunset Beach was built as part of a swanky private club called the Connaught Beach Club. As well as a pool, there were plans to include tennis, badminton and squash courts, Turkish baths for men and women, a beauty parlour, barber shop, roof garden and a ballroom. But the operators went broke, and the contractors finished only the pool for shares in lieu of cash.

Crystal Pool, ca.1974. Courtesy Vancouver Archives

The city bought the land in 1939 and the parks board held the lease. The pool had bled money during the Depression and some of the stunts to bring in customers included watching George Burrows, superintendent of beaches and parks leap off the three-metre board, tied in a gunny sack for his underwater escape act. Gordon Ross, manager was talked into diving through the air to hit a ring of flame on the water, while Percy Norman, swim coach would wrestle contenders on a platform until one fell into the water. Another draw was throwing 1,000 pennies into the pool and having the kids dive for them. The kids would later return them to the pool by buying sweets at the concession stand. On Saturdays, a 15-cent admission got kids a hot dog, Coke and bus fare home.

Crystal Pool interior, 1929. Courtesy Vancouver Archives

Vivian Jung:

In 1945, 21-year-old Vivian Jung was stopped from getting the life-saving certificate she needed to join the Vancouver School Board as a full-time teacher because she wasn’t allowed to swim in Crystal Pool with the white folk. Her students and colleagues refused to go to the pool without her, and the segregation rule was finally abolished. Vivian became the first Chinese Canadian teacher hired by the Vancouver School Board and taught at Vancouver’s Tecumseh Elementary School for 35 years. In 2014, the year that she died, Jung Lane was named for her. Fittingly, the lane runs right by Sunset Beach.

In 1966, Harry McPhee head of the Seahorse Swim Club went to war with the parks board in an effort to save the pool from demolition for competitive swimmers, even though the facility was aging and losing money. “Perhaps it was a fluke by the builders in the first place, but it’s the right width, the right length, the right everything,” he told a reporter. “It may not look all that glamorous, but it’s got something of the Stradivarius about it.”[2] McPhee lost. Crystal Pool was demolished, though Vancouver gained the Aquatic Centre, which opened in 1974.

[1] “Colour Bar Removed from Crystal Pool.” Province, November 6, 1945

[2] Chester Grant. “Harry’s Campaigning to Save Crystal Pool.” Vancouver Sun, December 3, 1966

Our missing West End residential heritage: What were we thinking?

by Eve Lazarus on April 25, 2015

For more stories like this one see Vancouver Exposed: Searching for this city’s hidden history Westend in the 50s Tom

I was trekking around the West End with artist and historian Tom Carter on Tuesday. I found some pictures of gorgeous old West End houses at the archives and I wanted to see what replaced them.

Tom had some aerial photos of the West End taken in the ‘50s that showed masses of houses, low rise apartment buildings and lots of trees, built in the late 1880s and early 20^th century, before Shaughnessy opened up and the West End was still a desirable place to live.

Many of the old mansions became apartment buildings and rooming houses, and when the six-storey height limit was removed in the late 1950s, most of these old houses and their beautiful gardens disappeared in a frenzy of demolition.

1201 Pendrell

The house first shows up in the directories in 1906, built for Duncan Rowan who is listed simply as “cannery man.” Duncan died a few years later and the house sold to the Buttimer family where it stayed until1930. When this photo was taken in 1956 it was an apartment building called The Pillars.

Here’s what we’ve done with the lot:

1221 Burnaby

Built for George Coleman in 1901, directories show that at one time it was the Convent of the Sacred Heart and later a school called the Vancouver Academy. The house became an apartment building called Wootton Manor in the 1940s.

This is Wootton Manor’s replacement:

Wootton manor replacement

1185 Harwood

Well, at least the stone fence is still there. The house was once surrounded by other old mansions and built for Alex Morrison, a contractor. It stayed in the family until 1930 and became the Margaret Convalescent and Nursing home during the war years.

1025 Gilford

Thomas Fee house — 1025 Gilford, VPL 16134, ca.1910

Architect Thomas Fee designed this house for his family in 1907 because Mrs. Fee wanted a house in the country. Fee was part of Parr and Fee a prolific architectural firm that designed numerous buildings such as Glen Brae in Shaughnessy, The Manhattan apartments on Robson, the Hotel Europe in Gastown and the Vancouver Block. The house became the Park Gilford Hotel in the late 1940s. It came down in 1961.

All that remains is a few holly trees.

fee today

For more about the West End:

The Last of the West End Mansions
The West End Guest House: one of the last ones standing
The Former Houses of Beach Avenue
The Life and Death of the Englesea Lodge
Our Missing Heritage
For more stories like this one see Vancouver Exposed: Searching for this city’s hidden history

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