Scenes from a Lost Vancouver
Earlier this week, on a remarkably sunny afternoon, I walked down Robson Street and into the Vancouver Art Gallery. I was there to see images of a lost Vancouver.
All photos by Fred Herzog. Above, from top to bottom: Black Man Pender, 1958; Flâneur Granville, 1960; Hastings at Columbia, 1958; Chinese New Year, 1964.
In 1952, a young man named Fred Herzog left the devastation of postwar Germany for Canada. He passed through Montreal and Toronto before heading west to his final destination: Vancouver. At the time, Canada’s western metropolis was a fairly hardscrabble port city of half a million inhabitants, a garish carnival of neon signs, waterfront industry and brightly painted storefronts. Herzog settled in the city’s east end and he set out to explore his new home by foot, camera in hand. In 1957, he began a concerted effort to document Vancouver’s urban life on film.
The end result is an impressive collection of tens of thousands of Kodachrome colour slides that reveal 1950s and 60s Vancouver with astonishing verve and detail. After two years of sifting through the collection, curators at the Vancouver Art Gallery have mounted an exhibition of Herzog’s work that will run until May 13th. It includes several dozen of his photos, a narrated slideshow and a black-and-white film of late-1950s Vancouver streetlife.
Although the Vancouver that Herzog captured fifty years ago still resembles, in some ways, the Vancouver of today, what is most striking is how drastically things have changed. The postwar years were a giddy period for cities across North America, but that was especially true in Vancouver. At the time, it was one of the neon capitals of the world, and streets such as Granville, Hastings and Pender were lined by ecstatic signs and billboards that gave Vancouver a metropolitan air unbecoming of its position on the margins of Canada’s economic and cultural life.
Whereas the Toronto of the time was a dour, stuffy town controlled by a strait-laced Protestant elite, Vancouver was a bit more like Montreal, a deviant city where all sorts of strange and shady activities flourished between the cracks of cultural solitudes. Herzog’s photos reveal this side of Vancouver in all its glory: flâneurs who lurk in the neon glow of Granville Street; a riot of advertising and unbridled commerce; the Pacific National Exhibition, where working-class East Vancouver went to play. The fact that Herzog chose to shoot in colour was quite unusual, since most “serious” photography at the time was black-and-white, including most street photography. But Vancouver was such a colourful place, it seems, that it demanded to be represented in all of its multi-hued glory.
Granville Street from Granville Bridge, 1966
Main Barber from Sidewalk, 1968
Wreck at Georgia/Dunlevy, 1966
Howe and Nelson, 1960
Today, Vancouver is different. It is certainly a great city, one that has eschewed its position at North America’s periphery and embraced a new role as a Pacific Rim metropolis, linked as much to Hong Kong and Seoul as Toronto. Culturally, though, it is split by a tension between two opposing forces, one that seeks to hide the city from itself and another, visible in Herzog’s photographs, that is daring, crass and unabashedly urban.
The change in Vancouver’s character can be marked by a 1966 decision that virtually outlawed neon signs and billboards, a revolutionary move in a city with many thousands of them. In the decades that followed, Vancouver’s dominant aesthetic became one that emphasized harmony with its natural surroundings. Pale grey, green and blue dominated the city’s palette and water, greenery and other natural elements became an integral part of the streetscape. Building heights were restricted by “view cones” designed to preserve the elite West Side’s views of the North Shore mountains. The best example of this era’s mentality is Arthur Erikson’s 1980 Robson Square complex, a long, low-slung development covered in vegetation and water, which creates the impression of a downtown reclaimed by the rainforest.
Vancouver rejected its urbanity in more sinister ways, too. The art gallery’s exhibition includes a chronology of Vancouver’s history that explains how its only black neighbourhood, Hogan’s Alley, was demolished in the early 1970s for the Georgia Street Viaduct. (Plans to demolish part of Chinatown for a waterfront expressway were luckily quashed.) Over the course of the 1970s and 80s, Vancouver’s old retail core, the Downtown Eastside, was gradually abandoned as the city’s centre of gravity shifted west. Now the most architecturally spectacular neighbourhood in the city is also home to some of Canada’s worst human despair.
Recently, however, there has been a shift in mentality. Vancouver is actively restoring its old neon signs and encouraging the proliferation of new ones (albeit only in a specific set of retail corridors). The old Woodwards department store, long the heart of the Downtown Eastside and abandoned in 1993, is being transformed into a huge development with a mix of condos, social housing, offices, retail space and room for community and non-profit organizations. The famous neon ‘W’ that sat atop the old department store will be restored. Bit by bit, Vancouver seems to be re-embracing some of the cheeky urbanity Herzog so memorably captured.
Jackpot (Pacific National Exhibition), 1961
A sense of nostalgia—longing for a time I never knew—overwhelmed me as I left the Vancouver Art Gallery and wandered back onto Robson Street. But there, standing in front of Arthur Erikson’s geometric forest, I looked around at the Thursday afternoon crowds. A trolleybus rattled past; a hot dog vendor watched over customers as they garnished their food with mustard and onions. People sat on the gallery’s steps, overlooking the street and soaking in the sun. Bits of conversation in Cantonese, Korean and English drifted towards me. There was an energy in the air, a sense of being in the city.
Maybe, I thought, maybe Fred Herzog’s Vancouver hasn’t been lost. Maybe it has been there all along, just waiting to resurface.
Tags: Photography, Streetlife, Vancouver
factotum says:
Very interesting. Is there an exhibition catalogue?
February 25th, 2007 at 8:08 am
Christopher DeWolf says:
Yes, the VAG has co-published a book with Douglas & McIntyre. I’m not sure if it can be bought online or only at the VAG, though.
February 25th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
fever says:
Chapters: Fred Herzog Photographs
Thanks for this. I still haven’t made it down to see it.
February 25th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
grant says:
Takes me back to early childhood in Vancouver, for me the 70s. There was a salty attitude to the place and the people then that is hard to find now since so few Vancouverites today have been in the city a long time.
Nice prose Chris.
February 26th, 2007 at 8:29 am
Rossana Tud0rz says:
I am in love with this stuff!!!
March 2nd, 2007 at 1:11 am
Joseph says:
Wow! Thanks. I will definitely check out the exhibit . . . loved your writing about it. Made me a little misty-eyed ; ).
January 15th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Joseph says:
Ah, how sad. I just realized I stumbled upon a post from last year : ( . . .had been searching for something else. Maybe I can find the book . . . I’ll ask at the gallery.
January 15th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Christopher DeWolf says:
It’s too bad you missed the exhibition, but the book contains all of the photos that were shown, plus some good essays. The VAG should have some copies; if not, check Chapters across the street.
January 15th, 2008 at 3:59 pm