Early Black Communities

Hogan’s Alley was a T-shaped alley. The North South part ran parallel to Main Street, and then it T’d right where the Georgia viaduct is. So from Maine, all the way to Jackson Avenue between Union Street on the North side and prior on the South. Hogan’s Alley was not a black only neighbourhood at all. It was where Italians in Vancouver traced their origins to as well. And it was right on the edge of Chinatown, but it did have a cluster of black businesses and institutions in the church that were significant to the black community and some residential areas. Well,one of the things that’s interesting about the neighbourhood is the establishment of the train stations, there were two, there was the Great Northern station and the Canadian National stations. So Great Northern is American and Canadian National, obviously is trans-continental. And the favoured crews on those trains with sleeping cars and dining cars were black men.

In the United States, it was traditional to hire black men, as railway porters, you know, translated over into Canada where there weren’t as many black people but it still became a tradition to hire black men as porters. And it wasn’t a menial job. That’s one of the interesting things in black history is that being a porter was something that you’d arrive, this was a very good position, you had a uniform, you got to travel. It was a fairly well paying job compared to some other jobs that were around. And so at the end of the line, which Vancouver was, you then had that kind of layover for two days, three days, four days as you changed the trains.

And I’m pretty sure that’s why Hogan’s Alley was where it was. If you go very far back, one of the earliest black institutions in that area was the porters quarters, it was kind of a lounge for porters. So you had this kind of mix of sort of transient folks coming in for a few days and stuff like that. And then you had the population that was already here. You also had Vaudeville circuits that came in. And the trains played an important role in that because you move your Vaudville act by train, and all of the circuits came up to Vancouver. And so a lot of black performers came up into Vancouver, some of them stayed, and others like the Hendrix family once the troupe went bust in Seattle, they ended up hearing about jobs in Vancouver. And so that’s why they ended up coming up to Vancouver, even in 1930s and 1940s. I mean, we were major, major, major city, and our nightclubs brought everyone up here. And so we talk about it today as well in one place and sort of the cliche Hollywood North… Well, we were Hollywood North before that was even an idea, so that whole entertainment history plays a huge, huge, huge role in the development of the city.