[MG1]

As seen through our eyes.................

I'm not the oldest member here, but old enough to remember what Vancouver was like in the 50's and 60's. Some of this stuff is not in the history books, because it is nothing major, but to guys like me, it's the little things that made the neighbourhood what it is/was.

Please contribute with stories of your old neighbourhood, whether it be Chinatown, Marpole, Killarney, Point Grey, North Van, etc. Oh, and correct me if I get stuff mixed up. It's hard to remember shit that far back.

My neck of the woods, for the first 16 years of my life, was the Downtown Eastside. Main and Hastings. It's nothing like it is today. The area back then was flooded with kids. So many kids. Most of them were children of poor immigrants with a sprinkling of the odd First Nations kid. Actually, I think most of the FN ones I saw on the streets never went to school. Anyway, Chinatown and Japantown were very busy places. London Drugs got its first start on Main Street. Did you know there was a Safeway on Hastings and Gore? On the southwest side. Parking lot and all. On the other side of Hastings was a post office. A fairly big one. Carnegy Hall on Main and Hastings was actually the Vancouver Museum. Really cool place from what I recall. On the other corner, kitty corner to Safeway was the Salvation Army Temple. These places are nowhere to be seen today, of course. The United Church on the southeast corner of Hastings and Gore was not there. I cannot remember what was there, but it was an open area of some sort. The firehall on Gore and Cordova was a real firehall. It was Firehall No 2. The biggest and best back then.

On the northwest corner of Hastings and Dunlevy, there was a huge ass car wash and gas station. The car wash was one of those state of the art (back then) pull-the-car-through types. I think it was a 76 gas station. Purves Ritchie had a foundry just up the block and businesses in general were bustling with activity. The big news back then was the building of the Chinese School on Pender Street. Kitty corner to Strathcona Elementary.

Strathcona Elementary. What a great school. I think the population hit nearly 1500+ back in the day. Three buildings. One was the junior building - four stories high, the primary building - two stories and the senior building - three stories high. We had our own dentist. Mrs. Cunninham. Boy, was she scary. Made many a children hate dentists for the rest of their lives. Because the people in the area were so poor, we had great subsidized lunch programmes, too. Cafeteria with hot food for dirt cheap. The school had basement play areas. Great on rainy days. I suppose all Vancouver schools were like that. I knew all the connecting secret passageways between the buildings in the dungeons. As long as my friends and I didn't get caught by any teachers or the engineers who lurked in the basements, we ventured into the girls play area. So cool......... Oh, back then, we were not horny little boys. Girls were like evil little monsters, LOL. Strathcona was by far the best school to be a teacher or a principal at. I heard this from many former teachers and principals. the children who went there ate out of the teachers' hand. Hung on every word. Discipline was not an issue. Even though, and probably more so, because we were so poor, we were taught by our parents that education was the only way out of that miserable existence. Even a happy go lucky guy like me took school seriously. I'm sure the Asian way of life had a lot to do with it, but academics at Strathcona was second to none. Problem was, most of the children were disadvantaged by lack of money, resources, and of course, the language barrier. Still, I look back at what my friends and people I hung out with have accomplished in their lives and boy, I don't know of one single kid who didn't make it out of there (the neighbourhood) to make something out of themselves.

Around the early to mid 60's, the government decide to create low income housing in the form of huge complexes. Enter the Raymur <sp?> projects. That's when all of a sudden, we started to see more and more caucasian kids. Most of them were losers and very few were nice to us and even to each other. I think so many families moved into the projects that they had to reconfigure the catchment area for the schools. Most of them went to Seymour Elementary, which made sense. Why mix Caucasians with Asians, right?

Because the Strathcona / Chinatown area was so full of young children, it had an effect on the rest of Vancouver's downtown. Just the other day, when I was driving over the Georgia Viaduct I noticed that the downtown core is totally void of any children. Man, back in the day, kids were everywhere downtown. We walked to the main library, which used to be on the corner of Burrard and Georgia, to study and do homework on the weekends. We took side trips to our favourite record store, Kelly's (Kelly Dejong). CKLG 73 was the biggest radio station by far. I went every Saturday to get me the top 40 hits flyer for the week at Kelly's. Kelly's then turned into A & B Sound, and we know what happened to them recently.

Oh, the Georgia Viaduct never existed back then. They built it when I was in grade 7, I think.

I remember favourite places, like Jong Wah. It's still there today. Got firecrackers and all kinds of goodies there. Anyway, nuff for now.........