On my return to Canada, I’ve been thinking a lot about land. Most talks or performances in Vancouver begin with a land acknowledgment that the city is built on the unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. If at times this becomes performative, as Cliff Cardinal’s provocative show As You Like It Or the Land Acknowledgment,  which we saw last year, showed, it’s also important as a first gesture, at least, towards implementation of the recommendations of the final report of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Yet there’s also another aspect to Vancouver’s growth as a city over the past century and a half. Land has become a commodity, and the history of its commoditization in Vancouver and Canada’s other big cities is also a history of capitalism and its discontents, as well as the root cause of the current fragility of liberal democracy in Canada. As Brian Condon suggests in a recent book, policy changes to make land, and thus shelter, affordable to all who live in the city, offer a real prospect of greater social equality.

As ever, this post is a first draft that I won’t go back and revise, even though the subject needs greater attention This month, with spring finally arrived, and the leaves on our linden tree now fully unfolded, I want to focus on a particular form of land acknowledgment: my efforts to trace, through work in virtual archives, the history of the land beneath the apartment we now live in on Nelson Street, in the heart of the West End. What’s now the West End was, of course, lived on and made use of by First Nations people since time immemorial. Last year, searching for old growth on the North Shore, we’d come across culturally modified yellow cedar trees far from the shore: a sign of indigenous presence. In the West End, much of this has been erased, and the land totally reformed. The land itself was first purchased, and thus commoditized, by three Englishmen in 1862, the so-called “greenhorns” who are commemorated in the name of the Greenhorn Cafe, just around the corner from us in Nicola Street. The great forest trees, the size of those which still survive in Stanley Park, were cut down for timber, and West End remained largely undeveloped for decades, as you can see from photographs such as this in the digital photos collection at the Vancouver Public Library.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the block I live on began to fill up. Fire Hall no.6 was built in 1907, and still stands, as does the block of apartments on the corner of Cardero and Nelson. The rest of the block on both sides of the street were occupied by wooden houses, most probably built off a plan and similar to many others in the West End, including a row of four identical houses that remain just around the corner on Cardero Street. In 1901 there were no houses at all were listed on the block in city directory, but by 1912 there were five on our side of the road, each costing about $2000 to build. The owners all had English, Welsh, or Scottish surnames: another sign of omission. The illustration at the beginning of this post is from 1912 Goad’s Fire Insurance Map, and shows the location of each house and its garden. I couldn’t trace any photographs of the original houses block online in the City Archives, but I did find a photograph of one of them in a newspaper article; it seems similar in design to wooden heritage houses that still stand on the 1500 block of Comox Street. I’ve also reproduced it above.

In the following half century, land remains a commodity, but Rents seem affordable. Houses are bought and sold, and you can trace through the newspapers how individual rooms were rented out. From newspaper articles we can see that these houses also became homes.  Engagements were announced and wedding receptions held. Then there were divorces: in 1931 a young woman living at # 1529 was successful in a petition for dissolution of a marriage to a man she’d only known for a month and married after crossing the border into the United States. “When you marry again,” the judge lectured her, “know your husband for more than a month and don’t go to Bellingham.” Residents passed away, young men during the Great War, and then, as the houses aged, older residents at the end of their natural lives. A boy’s skull was fractured in a baseball game. Thieves broke into a house and stole clothing and personal effects. A woman from # 1517 was set upon by two youths, and her purse stolen. A kitten was found; a beloved budgerigar, suitably named “Butchy,” went missing. One or two intriguing characters emerge from the mists of history. The activities and salons of Mrs. Alice Wilmot Dennis of 1519 Nelson Street were often reported in the Province’s or Sun’s society pages. She ran a “school of expression” – apparently giving elocution lessons —  and given her own origins in Wahington Stare, it’s intriguing to think what variety of English would have conferred greatest social status at the time. Mrs. Dennis was also active in the Aurora Club, with a 1921 article describing how a “musicale” organised by the Club at her house attracted an audience of over two hundred people, “decorated for the occasion withmasses of blue and yellow chrysanthemums, the club colors, the same blossoms, intermingled with tulle,being used effectively on the tea table.” And then the search for what the Aurora Club was takes us out of the virtual archive and into a real one: my trail, on this initial exploration at least, grows cold. 

By the 1960s the houses on our block seem to have become increasingly dilapidated, with more and more advertisements for rooms in what were now rooming houses.  This was also a time when new development was taking place. In 1957, the cap of six stories on apartment buildings was lifted, and a number of concrete rental high-rises were built, until zoning laws limiting building heights were reimposed in the late 1960s and early 1970s.The last advertisement for a rental room I could find was at 1543 Nelson in December, 1970. By then, many of the other houses were abandoned and scheduled for demolition. In January of that year, #1529, now deserted, was set on fire, allegedly by “some youths” who were seen “running from the building just before the fire was noticed.” Despite the house’s proximity to the Firehall, it was extensively damaged. Then there are traces of demolition, and notices of sales of construction material. 

Finally, in 1973, large advertisements begin to appear in the Sun and the Province, marketing the “West End’s newest address for elegant living,” the Admiral, offering the “time and effort saving advantages of an apartment” with “the investment potential and solid equity of a home you own.” This is the four-storey complex where we came to live, seven years ago. Initially offered at prices well below $50,000, the largest apartments now sell at well over $1 million, a price most of the workers in nearby shops, schools, and restaurants cannot afford. A neighbouring couple bought their apartment in the early 1970s, when the spruce tree outside our window was a tiny sapling, and when nearby Robson Street was Robsonstrasse, full of shops started by immigrants from Eastern Europe. The same stretch of the street is now full of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese restaurants. Meanwhile we visit neighbours, discuss how each of them has renovated and transformed their apartments, how a commodity might again become, for a period of time, a home.