If you were in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the early 1970s, standing on the corner of Union Street and Gore Avenue, you could not have missed the Prior Street on-ramp of the new Georgia–Dunsmuir viaduct. As you came off the viaduct, you would see our red brick Union Laundry building at 274 Union Street. Our home, business, and the rental house next door stuck out like sore thumbs: my father was still in dispute with the City of Vancouver long after our former neighbours had relocated to make way for the new viaduct.
Fast forward to 2020. At our former laundry site is now Nora Hendrix Place, a temporary modular housing structure. Television reporters looking for Black Lives Matter stories frequently focus on this building named after the grandmother of musician Jimi Hendrix. While Hogan’s Alley had a strong Black presence in the past, during my family’s years in the neighbourhood, it was very multicutural.
Although the identity of Hogan himself remains unclear, some believe the name may have derived from the American comic strip Hogan’s Alley featuring The Yellow Kid, an Irish slum urchin in Brooklyn, New York. Whatever its root, the name Hogan became synonymous with ghettos throughout North America. In the heyday of Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley, American musicians, especially Black performers, could be found chilling at Vie’s Chicken and Steak House at 209 Union Street after performing in downtown Vancouver nightclubs such as The Cave.
For me, this block of Union Street evokes different memories. During the 1960s and ’70s, long after its colourful history of late-night speakeasies and prostitution during Prohibition, I’d be toiling away in the family business or completing my homework next to the large flat-iron machine. If you happened to be walking down our dusty pot-holed alley while I was practising for an upcoming Britannia Secondary School band concert, you may have heard my rendition of “When the Saints Come Marching In” on the trumpet. By the time our family arrived on Union Street in 1948, the area’s heyday was already winding down, although Vie’s Chicken & Steakhouse and Sarah’s Café were still going concerns. The original London Drugs was at the other end of our block in the southeast corner of Union and Main, still owned by Sam Bass long before it became a chain.
During the 1960s, Vancouver city hall’s new urban plan newspaper in the daytime and jammed on their musical instruments in the evenings. Behind it, our shack facing into Hogan’s Alley was rented out to a bearded loner who first handed me hallucinogenic morning glory seeds while playing his Hohner harmonica. Typical of housing in Hogan’s Alley, these shacks were a stone’s throw from the Canadian National terminus, which had in earlier decades hired many Black men as porters.
