HASTINGS PART II
Decline and shift
 

BILL PECHET
A street is an environment, much like a river is, or a pond. And if you cut off its lifelines or its access to rejuvenation and resources, then you end up with a sick river or a sick pond.

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HASTINGS PART II
Decline and shift

NARRATOR
Hastings Street was ablaze with neon signs in the 1940s and 1950s. The street bustled with people, entertainment, and businesses. But when the Interurban streetcar stopped running in 1958, people who used to come downtown by way of Hastings Street changed their route.

The same year, the head office of the BC Electric Company moved west from Hastings to the Granville area and other businesses followed suit. Gradually, through the late ‘50s and ‘60s, Vancouver’s commercial focus shifted to Granville, leaving Hastings in the throes of a slow downward shift.

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John Atkin, civic historian

JOHN ATKIN
The cumulative effect of all of that activity was about 15,000 people a day disappeared from the streets of the Downtown Eastside. Any streetscape that suffers that loss of pedestrian traffic is going to suffer. All of your walk-in shops, your hat shop, your barber shop your coffee shop, et cetera, is going to see a decline in business.

NARRATOR
As the neighbourhood started losing its commercial footing, people began to associate the decline with the neon signs left behind. By the 1960s, newspaper columnists were slamming what they called Vancouver’s grotesque neon jungle.

JOHN ATKIN
Opinion is shaped into not celebrating what we actually have but getting rid of it. Where suddenly, people are condemning the mess of billboards, the mess of signs and things like that, which then opens the door to the 1974 sign bylaw.

NARRATOR
In response to shifting attitudes towards neon signs, Vancouver city council passed a sign bylaw that restricted or eliminated signs across the city.

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Judy Graves, advocate for the homeless, City of Vancouver

JUDY GRAVES
We’ve seen pictures of other cities where urban planners have decided to strip all of the stores of their ethnic signs. So you’re in a neighbourhood and you just don’t know where you are. The neighbourhood has no character. And it was like that when they started taking the neon away.

NARRATOR
The bylaw allowed a handful of older neon signs to be grandfathered in. But life on Hastings Street was never the same.

JOHN ATKIN
The Blue Eagle Café down on Hastings, that’s actually an interesting place because it encompasses very much the history of coffee shops and cafes on Hastings. We start to see a shift in any number of dynamics in the neighbourhood, and we start to see that downward spiral, one of the places that suffered greatly were the coffee shops. And the life at the Blue Eagle at the end was pretty sad because it was a shadow of its former self. And at some point it wasn’t even safe, in many ways, to go into the place.

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Bill Pechet, architect and designer

BILL PECHET
If the Downtown Eastside became abject, you know, it’s not only because it’s an area of drug use. That would be a too-simple way to think about it. It’s because its lifelines were removed. And so suddenly, another kind of social condition took over from that.

NARRATOR
By the 1970s, Hastings Street had changed dramatically. In place of the tourists of former years, men who worked seasonal jobs in the resource industry lived in the Hastings Street hotels. The neighbourhood started to cater to them and to other sojourners looking for escape in the bars, the illicit drug market, and the sex trade. The street in that period was a magnet for political activism, and, by extension, Vancouver’s burgeoning punk movement.

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Joe Keithley, punk musician, DOA

JOE KEITHLEY
It was an odd invasion to have these white suburban kids come in and make this sort of their home away from home, which is what happened with the Smiling Buddha. And the police didn’t like it because it wasn’t like the regular crew that lived down there. These were punks with political views that uh, didn’t agree with the way society was being run and they were really outspoken about it.

NARRATOR
Compounding political, economic, and social change in Vancouver and in Canada set the stage for Hastings Street to become the Downtown Eastside we know today. Through the ‘80s and ‘90s, the combined health impacts of an illicit drug market and a national housing crisis became increasingly visible in the Downtown Eastside.

In 1993, the Woodward’s Department Store closed. It was the end of an era for a beloved neon icon. It was also one of the final blows to a troubled neighbourhood already suffering from the effects of longstanding commercial decline.
 

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