Wing Sang Building

by Eve Lazarus on May 15, 2021

Update: In February 2022 it was announced that the Wing Sang Building at 51 East Pender Street and reportedly the oldest in Chinatown, is going to be the new home of the Chinese Canadian Museum.

Story from Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

In 2006, I wrote a story for Marketing Magazine featuring Bob Rennie and his move into Chinatown. Just two years before, Rennie paid a million dollars for the Wing Sang Building. He bought it sight unseen and didn’t go inside for the first six months. “People think I’m crazy,” he told me. “Do you want to go for a walk around inside? It’s scary.”

Yip Sang with children and family members in front of 51 East Pender ca.1890s. CVA 2008-010.4050

And it was, in a dilapidated, kind of fascinating way. I followed Rennie and his constantly ringing mobile into the bowels of the building. When we came to a boarded-up door, Rennie looked around, rolled up his expensive shirt sleeves, and found a shovel to lever off the bar. Then we were climbing up six flights of stairs, past rat traps, broken windows and old stoves.

Yip Sang and family members in front of the Wing Sang building, ca.1902. Courtesy Henry Yip

Built in 1889:

The original building, a two-storey Victorian Italianate structure went up in 1889. That was back when the population of Vancouver was around 15,000 and extremely hostile to the Chinese. Yip Sang operated an import/export business, a bank and a travel agency and sold everything from Chinese silks and curios to opium—which was legal until 1908. He added a third storey in 1901, and in 1912, a six-storey building went up across the alley. It was connected by an elevated passageway to include a warehouse, a meeting place, and a floor for each of his three wives and their 23 children. Because there were so many offspring, they were each given a number in order of their birth.

Wing Sang Building, Eve Lazarus photo, 2020

Henry Yip, son of Kew Mow, number three son of first wife, was born in 1917 on the fourth floor of the building. He was only 10 when his grandfather died, but when I talked to him in 2006, he told me he remembered Yip Sang as a “Disciplinarian.” “He used to sit beside a potbelly stove next to the doorway of at the front of the building smoking his pipe and watching everybody go in and out.” Yip Sang had a strict curfew and would lock out family members not home by 10 p.m.

Chinese schoolroom in the Wing Sang Building where Nellie studied Chinese. Courtesy Rennie.com

$10 million renovation:

Shortly after my tour, Bob Rennie spent $10 million to turn the back of the building into a private art space to house his massive art collection. He left the original Chinese schoolroom untouched and put a neon sign that says “EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT” on the building’s rooftop garden. Bob regularly holds free public tours of the building and art gallery, and at one point it became a satellite gallery for the Royal BC Museum with an exhibit by a young Emily Carr.

Tags Bob Rennie, emily carr, Henry Yip, Kew Mow, Wing Sang Building, Yip Sang

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

In the year of the dragon: the changing face of Chinatown

by Eve Lazarus on February 6, 2012

For more stories about Chinatown see: At Home with History: the secrets of Greater Vancouver’s Heritage Homes

Last October the Feds designated Vancouver’s Chinatown a National Historical Site. In November, the National Geographic named the Dr. Sun yat-sen Gardens one of the top 10 city gardens in the world. It’s long overdue recognition for one of the largest and oldest Chinatowns in North America.

I took a walk around Chinatown last week. On the surface, not a lot has changed in the last 20 years or so. There are the dim sum restaurants, herbal shops, tacky ornament shops and the in-your-face production of food—duck and pig carcasses, live bullfrogs in buckets on the sidewalk, tanks full of exotic fish and an array of fruit and vegetables still a long way from mainstream.

Built by Yip Sang in 1889 — The Wing Sang Company Building, 51 East Pender Street

Yet for all the traditional elements, Chinatown is an area in transition. Condos are going up, bars, coffee shops and trendy clothes stores are nudging up against traditional grocery stores, and new business is moving in.

Art exhibit by Martin Creed — The Wing Sang Building in 2011

Bob Rennie was one of the first to see the potential when he bought the Wing Sang Building for a million bucks in 2004. He spent another $10 million turning the back of the building, where Yip Sang’s three wives once raised their 23 children, into a private art space to house his massive collection. Past exhibits by Mona Hatoum and Richard Jackson are edgy and interesting, but my favourite was Martin Creed’s where you walked through an office filled with pink balloons, dodged runners on the main floor and sipped champagne while looking at broccoli. Creed is also behind the controversial “everything is going to be alright” neon sign on the building’s rooftop garden which is clearly visible from the Sun yat-sen Gardens, and a good chunk of Vancouver. Rennie regularly holds free public tours of the building and art gallery, but next year he turns into a satellite gallery for the Royal BC Museum with an exhibit of the young Emily Carr.

Built in 1889 it's the oldest building in Chinatown — The roof top of the Wing Sang Building

Boutique agencies like St. Bernadine Mission Communications are finding costs are cheaper in Chinatown. David Walker and Andrew Samuel bought a newish space at East Georgia and Main, a block away from the oddly garish Jimi Hendrix shrine. In keeping with the heritage—it was once a Chinese Laundry—the partners installed the Kee’s Laundry Gallery with photography and art displays from other agency creatives in the city.

It’s transforming yes, but there’s a strong sense of community. Residents of Strathcona and Chinatown were asked to vote on the kind of business they wanted to see open at 243 Union Street—what was once Hogan’s Alley—the black part of town before city planners replaced it with the Georgia Viaduct in the 1960s. Locals decided they wanted a local grocery store on Union and named it Harvest. They even got to choose the graphic designer who’d brand it—Naomi Macdougall from a list of six.

Tags 243 Union Street, 51 East Pender Street, Andrew Samuel, Bob Rennie, David Walker, Dr. Sun yat-sen Chinese gardens, emily carr, Georgia Viaduct, Hogan's Alley, Jimi Hendrix Shrine, Kee's Laundry Gallery, Martin Creed, Mona Hatoum, Richard Jackson, St. Bernadine Mission Communications, Wing Sang Building, Yip Sang

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