Vancouver in 1920s

Fortunes were made on the stock market and in the

province’s natural resources, and, for a select few, in the rum-

running business — satisfying America’s thirst for liquor

during Prohibition. With the opening of the Panama Canal

in 1914, Vancouver had emerged as a key port in global

trade, an ice-free harbor that could ship Canadian grain and

timber not only to Asia but also to Europe. Prairie grain

was increasingly flowing to the West Coast for export, and

by 1924 Vancouver boasted that the port’s wheat exports had

surpassed that of Montreal. Credit was easy to come by and

Granville Street’s theatres, cinemas, and garish electric signs

exemplified the city’s material progress and affluence.

 

The city had continued to grow. By 1925 the population

of just over 125,000 was expanding east along Kingsway to

Burnaby and New Westminster and west into Kitsilano.

The neighboring municipalities of Point Grey and South

Vancouver — closely connected to Vancouver by the

B.C. Electric streetcar lines — were also developing and

amalgamated with Vancouver in January 1929. Overnight

the city mushroomed to 242,000 people living on forty-four

square miles.

 

However, for all its seeming prosperity, Vancouver had

a dark underbelly. For many residents, the decade was a

time of poverty and destitution. In 1922, Hastings Park was

home to three thousand unemployed men and three years

later, eighteen hundred men were still on relief, getting fifty

cents a day to live on. The city remained racially segregated

— anyone not of white, Anglo-Saxon stock had little chance

of prospering. By 1923, federal laws prohibited immigration

from India, China, and Japan. Asian residents in Vancouver

found themselves largely excluded from civic life, denied the

right to vote or seek post-secondary education, and for the

most part confined to menial jobs.

 

Not a pristine city, Vancouver at times seemed

overwhelmed by the hundreds of industrial enterprises that

had taken root.

 

“In downtown Vancouver . . . the air was grime and soot

as boats and trains, sawmills and flourmills, breweries

and food-processing plants, shoe factories and clothing

factories belched clouds of heavy black smoke . . . . The

city was now held fast in the toils of industry — industry

constantly expanding to satisfy the apparently insatiable

demands of the export markets.”22

 

The inhabitants’ commitment to the arts and philanthropic

ventures was noticeably absent. The city lacked a museum,

and the public library and art gallery existed in rundown

buildings. In 1929, Duff Patullo remarked that of the city’s

eighty-three millionaires, not one had been known to make a

gift to or sponsor a civic enterprise.23

 

The Capitol Theatre in 1921. Vancouver Public Library VPL 16393