'It was everything': Vancouver non-profit offers a new vision for Hogan's Alley
The Strathcona area was once a hub for Vancouver’s black community, including Jimi Hendrix’s grandmother
In Vancouver, it's a tiny area with a big past — and a Vancouver non-profit is aiming to reshape its future.
Located along a three-block stretch between Prior Street and Union Street at the edge of Strathcona and Chinatown, Hogan's Alley was once home to much of Vancouver's black community.
Established in the early 1900s, the working-class area drew black immigrants from California, homesteaders from Alberta (many of whom came from Oklahoma), and black railway porters working the Great Northern Railway.
"This was a kind of a hub area. It was also where black folks were allowed to be. There were a lot of discriminatory practices in Vancouver at the time, so this was the multicultural area," says Hogan's Alley Society co-founder Stephanie Allen, standing in the historic locale with The Current host Matt Galloway.
"This is where a lot of racialized people lived. And so that's where black folks could find a home, too."
Inspired, in part, by the city's plans to remove the Georgia viaduct, the society is hoping to turn the historic area into a vibrant new hub.
Allen says her group would like to see a community land trust, and they have put forward a proposal that includes rental housing with small community business and non-profit spaces, and a community centre at its heart.
"My hope is that we see the type of vision that the community has created — that it's got people of African descent prioritized — but that it's really a place for everyone," says Allen, "that there's a thriving 24/7 cultural centre here that really showcases black history and black culture in this city, and that people who desperately need affordable housing have a great place to call home."
At one point, Hogan's Alley was home to more than 800 black community members, and featured the African Methodist Episcopal Chapel (founded in 1923), a residence for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, as well as the legendary Vie's Chicken and Steak House — a hotspot where Jimi Hendrix's grandmother Nora, who was a vaudevillian performer and church choir singer, worked as a cook.
"This was one of the more notorious spots. When famous musicians would come to town, this was the afterparty," explains Allen, whose SFU Urban Studies graduate thesis focused on the area.
"A lot of families lived in this neighbourhood, with kids going to the local schools, and you also had the speakeasies and the juke joints and prostitution houses. It was everything. You know, black folks here weren't really getting access into the main economy," she says. "So a lot of them resorted to the informal economy as well."
In the decades that followed, explains Allen, the community became ghettoized and neglected by the city, and over time, residents were pushed out as industry and infrastructure — including the Georgia viaduct — moved in, dispersing Vancouver's black community.
"We're 1.2 per cent of the population in Vancouver. We're one of the lowest black populations in any major city in Canada. And we really struggle because, as historian Adam Rudder talked about, we have this hypervisibility. So we have five times the carding rate by the [Vancouver Police Department] but we're also invisible when it comes to social policy, when it comes to economic policy, and when it comes to civic life," says Allen.
"So the impact has been long lasting and people of African descent here have been rallying around a new vision for the site."
