NARRATOR

By the 1930s, the Yale Hotel pub had developed a reputation for providing what other entertainment establishments didn’t always serve at the time: beer. Vancouver big-band leader Dal Richards remembers liquor runs to the Yale in the 1930s.

DAL RICHARDS

Well, I have an odd memory of the Yale. There used to be a ballroom, a Trianon Ballroom on Granville Street, right across the street from the Yale Hotel. And uh,  I had a band there for a period in the 30s. Uh, liquor laws were completely different in those days. There was no beer or spirits of any sort sold in a ballroom.

But the Yale had their beer parlour. So at intermission, the whole crowd of maybe three or four hundred people, it seemed, swept across Granville Street over to the Yale, and were gone for about half an hour while they had their beer, and then they’d come back and finish dancing in the Trianon Ballroom.