The Blue Eagle Cafe

“The Blue Eagle had changed names at least three times. It actually started off as the original White Lunch in Vancouver.

The Blue Eagle was interesting because it left the tile work of the original White Lunch, it added its own tile work in the expansion, and then it sat a tessellated pavement in the front entrance that said 'Blue Eagle Café' and the street address.

You had a number of coffee shops on Hastings, in fact, an extraordinary number. You had things like the Blue Eagle, the Golden Gate, the San Francisco, the Log Cabin, all in the same row all next to each other.

But we start to see a shift in any number of dynamics in that neighborhood. We start to see that downward spiral. Some of the places that suffered greatly were the coffee shops.

From a huge number of cafes and coffee shops along the street, by the 1980s we were left with the Blue Eagle, the Ovaltine, the Café Royal over in Chinatown, and a couple of others, but very quickly even those couldn’t survive.

And the life of the Blue Eagle at the end was pretty sad. It was a shadow of its former self. They tried to sell groceries in there as well as incredibly awful coffee, and at some point it wasn’t even safe, in many ways, to go into the place. So inevitably, it closed.”

-John Atkin, civic historian

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