Vancouver

Hogan's Alley

In 1858, Governor James Douglas invited Black Americans from California to settle in British Columbia. They came first to Victoria and Salt Spring Island, then to Vancouver. By the early 1900s, Black porters working the Great Northern Railway settled in the blocks between Union and Prior streets, Main and Jackson. Homesteaders from Alberta, families originally from Oklahoma, followed. The neighbourhood they built became known as Hogan's Alley.

By the 1940s, nearly 800 Black residents called Strathcona home. They didn't just live here. They built here. Restaurants, nightclubs, churches, and businesses, block by block, from nothing.

Erased from the Map

It didn't happen overnight. First, the City of Vancouver stopped collecting garbage. Stopped maintaining the roads. They bought residential properties and left them vacant, let them rot. Then they declared the neighbourhood "blighted" and used that as justification to demolish it.

By 1967, more than a dozen blocks had been levelled for the Georgia Viaduct, the first phase of an interurban freeway that would have gutted Chinatown and Gastown too. Community activists like Bessie Lee and Mary Lee Chan formed SPOTA and fought back. They saved Chinatown. They saved Gastown. But Hogan's Alley was already gone.

Nearly 800 residents were dispersed across the city. The jazz clubs, the chicken joints, the barbershops, the Fountain Chapel, all of it demolished. What replaced a living community was a concrete viaduct and empty lots that sat unused for decades.