Strathcona
by John Atkin
A spit of land in Burrard Inlet, just east of Main Street at the foot of Dunlevy Avenue, is the birthplace of both Vancouver and its first neighborhood--Strathcona. This former native campsite, called Kumkumalay, meaning “big leaf maple trees,” was chosen by Captain Edward Stamp as the site for his new sawmill in 1865. The rag-tag collection of shacks and cottages around the Hastings Mill quickly developed into a residential area that moved south and east away from the mill.
In the beginning Strathcona was simply known as the East End. This referred to an area that took in everything east of Main to Campbell Avenue and from Burrard Inlet to False Creek. At that time, False Creek was four times its present size; at high tide its waters lapped at the pilings of buildings on Pender Street and extended east to Clark Drive. The Strathcona of today is bounded by Hastings, Campbell, Gore, Atlantic and Prior streets.
Strathcona has always been known as a cosmopolitan neighborhood and the student body at Strathcona Elementary, one of Vancouver’s oldest schools, provided a good indication of this diversity. School enrolment in the 1930s included Japanese (who made up almost half the student population), Chinese, Italians, Jews, and a smattering of Scandinavians, Russians, Ukrainians and blacks along with many others. While there were no strict boundaries within the neighborhood, many of the Japanese lived on the north side of Hastings Street, while the Italian community primarily occupied Union and Prior streets. Between these two groups were the Ukrainian Hall, built in 1928 at Hawks and Pender, and one block west at Heatley, the Schara Tzedeck Synagogue. The 1908 Fountain Chapel on Jackson at Prior (previously the German, then Norwegian, Lutheran Church) was the spiritual home for Vancouver’s small black population. The growing Chinese population lived on the edges of Chinatown.
It was because of its mixture of housing and industry, and the fact that it was the entry point to the city for successive waves of immigrants, that the East End name came to have a derogatory meaning and, by the 1950s, planners had declared it a slum for demolition, despite evidence to the contrary.
By 1967, despite protests, 15 blocks of the neighborhood had already been acquired and cleared for urban redevelopment when the city announced a freeway to downtown. Strathcona residents were horrified by plans to use the blocks in between Union and Prior for the freeway, connected via a new Georgia Viaduct to the larger network of roads that were to carve up the downtown.
The outcry from the general public, community activists and professionals was loud and clear about the lack of public consultation and the amount of destruction the new roads would cause. In the end the Georgia and Dunsmuir street viaducts were the only pieces of the system to be constructed; they were opened in 1972 to a city uninterested in freeways.
From the protests and struggle to save the neighborhood, Strathcona has emerged with a strong sense of identity and pride, not found in many of Vancouver’s neighborhoods. It is a place where residents meet as they walk to the corner store, exercise the dog or practice Tai Chi in the park. The street-end parks are meeting places to talk or sit and read in the sunshine. The jumble of buildings are squeezed onto narrow lots, so close to each other that their gutters sometimes touch, and in a mixture of styles and colors that is uniquely Strathcona. Flower gardens overflow the front yards onto the sidewalks and the backyards are used for intensive vegetable gardening. Apartment buildings, houses, and corner stores (which provide for the day-to-day needs of residents and become meeting places and provide community bulletin boards) exist side by side, a form of development that communities across North America are now trying to duplicate. What planners of the 1950s saw as disorder is today becoming the model for the new “urban villages.”
Yet its inner-city location means that Strathcona has its own set of problems, such as pressures from nearby prostitution and drug dealing. Some see the inevitable onset of gentrification as another problem, as the neighborhood grows in popularity due to its proximity to downtown. The architecture, which accounts for a good deal of Strathcona’s charm, is some of Vancouver’s oldest and most fragile. Unsympathetic renovation, demolition and incompatible new construction could endanger the delicate balance that exists in the neighborhood.
But as before Strathcona will not only survive, but thrive, continuing to be a healthy community and a special place to live.
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