Fifty years ago, when the Georgia Straight launched its first publication, our arts landscape looked very little like the thriving scene that’s attracting world attention today.

In 1967, we were a relatively small city, the mountains isolating our artists from the rest of the country. On the theatre front, the Vancouver Playhouse operated out of a new civic stage at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre Plaza, while the Arts Club was still a grassroots troupe working out of an old gospel hall on Seymour Street. The Firehall Arts Centre was still a firehall. And as far as dance? There was no Ballet BC, and the Anna Wyman School of Dance Arts was just about to open. The Vancouver Art Gallery still sat at a small location at 1145 West Georgia Street, but art renegades like Michael Morris and Glenn Lewis (both of whom helped come up with the Georgia Straight’s name over beers with Dan McLeod at the late Cecil Hotel in 1967) were stirring up the gallery scene in radical new ways. Not only was there no Video In, there was no video. UBC’s Museum of Anthropology did not yet occupy the windswept point on the University Endowment Lands. As for classical music, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra was going strong, but still didn’t have a permanent home; it provided accompaniment to Vancouver Opera, which didn’t have its own orchestra yet.

How times change—often in unforeseeable ways.

Who would have guessed that we’d become home to a major summer Shakespeare series in Vanier Park? Or that the Arts Club would later expand to encompass several theatres? Or that we’d become seen as the birthplace of photoconceptualism? Or that we’d host a parade of arts festivals every year, from the cutting-edge PuSh International Performing Arts Festival to an Eastside Culture Crawl that draws tens of thousands. Amid all that, we’ve watched our indie arts scene surge, against the odds of astronomical real-estate prices and ever-tightening government funding.

Here are some, but absolutely not all, of the momentous events—for better or worse—that have made Vancouver’s cultural scene what it is, 50 years later. These are just the major companies and milestones; what’s missing are the innumerable festivals, indie companies, artist-run centres, and DIY shows that define the arts here.

What the timeline does show is that, while we’ve suffered some losses along the way, we’re clearly not just a bunch of upstarts on the other side of the mountain anymore.

Vancouver East Cultural Centre opens, 1973

In the early ’70s, the historic building at Venables and Victoria was a former Methodist church that had been converted into offices for an umbrella group called Inner City Services. The tiered balcony was hidden by office partitions and plywood flooring. There was no seating, and the Gothic stained-glass windows were broken. But Cultch founding director Chris Wootten saw the need for a midsize theatre in the city, and began fundraising to turn it into a venue. Although it would be unthinkable in these cash-strapped times, Wootten quickly secured funding from three levels of government. Furnishing the theatre was another matter.

On the Cultch’s 25th anniversary, in 1998, he recalled to the Straight that he and his helpers found curtains and signs in the Strand, an old vaudeville house at Granville and Georgia that would soon be demolished. They bought old metal theatre seats stored in the basement of a seedy Downtown Eastside hotel for a dollar apiece. As for the broken windows: “We were also lucky, because we found a guy, sort of a hippie craftsman, who replaced all the stained glass.” And so the Vancouver East Cultural Centre opened with a performance by Anna Wyman Dance Theatre on October 15, 1973. “It was a wonderful time,” Wootten remembered. “We didn’t get paid anything, of course, but it was more of a family—a total team effort.”

Many shows and concerts later, the Cultch received a major, $14.5-million renovation by Proscenium Architecture and Interiors in 2009. “You wonder: will they do it right? And they did. It’s very gratifying to know that the building is going to be around for a long, long time,” Wootten told the Straight at the time.

Cultch executive director Heather Redfern—who’s gone on to bring the renovated York Theatre, Vancity Culture Lab, and Greenhouse under the Cultch umbrella—said at the time: “There was trepidation until I could start to show people around, and people said, ‘It’s still the Cultch—only better.’ ”

Arts Club Opens Granville Island Stage, 1979

These days, Arts Club Theatre artistic director Bill Millerd oversees three major venues. But in a recent interview with the Straight, announcing his retirement after next season, he remembered his time as a stage manager at the Arts Club in 1969. Back then, it was a small but thriving troupe based out of the late, historic 150-seat Seymour Street venue in downtown Vancouver. “It used to be an old gospel hall where they put up plays. And of course, the beginning is always tough, but that’s because it’s the beginning and you’re young,” he said. “We had no funding, just a small grant from the province back then. So we had no money.”

Taking the helm in 1972, he steered the company into year-round programming at a new venue amid the multi-use-development experiment called Granville Island, a former industrial site. The rest is history: the company has gone on to become the largest theatre company in Western Canada, renovating the heritage Stanley Theatre into another venue in 1998, and opening the shiny new BMO Theatre Centre in Olympic Village in 2015.

Vancouver Art Gallery moves to old courthouse, 1983

In a land exchange between the province and the City of Vancouver in 1974, the city acquired the 1906 neoclassical courthouse at Robson and Hornby streets. The space was earmarked for the Vancouver Art Gallery, which was running out of room at its old facility at 1145 West Georgia Street. Vancouver-based Arthur Erickson Architects renovated the courthouse into a new gallery, part of its massive Robson Square project. It boasted a restaurant, a gift shop, and more than 41,400 square feet of exhibition space—enough to showcase the collection of Emily Carr paintings, to allow a record 95,000 people to pass through its doors during the 2010 Olympic Games, and to host regular FUSE parties well into the wee hours.

Three decades later, the gallery has outgrown its site again, and has launched plans to move to a new building at Larwill Park, on the corner of Cambie and Georgia streets. In 2015, Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron surprised the city by unveiling a bold concept design for a gallery almost 10 times the size of the courthouse site—a highrise clad entirely in wood. “We’re in a context with a lot of highrises, but if you take this building out of its context it’s really big,” Christine Binswanger, partner in charge of the project for Herzog & de Meuron, told the Straight. “So the wood softens it. It’s unexpected. This kind of institution is not normally out of wood.…To a degree it is a shocking recall of the past.”

Bard on the Beach pitches its tent, 1990

When a Shakespeare-loving Brit named Christopher Gaze led an Equity co-op production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Vanier Park that first year, the troupe had to perform in a rented 250-seat tent. The performers had no backstage; they had to run from their crammed costume tent to the main stage with umbrellas in the rain. But in four weeks, 6,000 people showed up to the production. Scott Bellis, who was then a 24-year-old actor, once fondly described to the Straight the DIY nature of it all: “We used to have to take turns sleeping there overnight for security. We had insurance for the equipment we had borrowed, but the insurance was only valid if someone was on-site 24 hours a day.…We would just roll out a sleeping bag on-stage,” said Bellis, who has gone on to act in and direct many more productions. “I used to run out at intermission and sell T-shirts at the gift shop—in costume.”

Bard on the Beach has since grown into one of the city’s largest festivals, drawing around 90,000 people a year, seating 742 in its main-stage tent and 240 more in a studio tent. Its grounds are like a thriving tent village, and it presents four shows per summer. “I didn’t read any book about how to be a good artistic director,” Gaze told the Straight during the fest’s 25th anniversary, in 2014. “I couldn’t divine the future, but I just believed that if I did it steadily and slowly, it could succeed.”

Bramwell Tovey takes the podium at the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, 2000

“Bramwell Tovey, artistic director of the Winnipeg Symphony for the past decade, has signed a five-year contract with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra,” the Georgia Straight news story read. “He will take up the baton in September 2000, succeeding Sergiu Comissiona, who is scheduled to step down next spring at the close of the 1999-2000 season. The announcement ends nearly two years of speculation.”

Comissiona was a highly respected conductor; some were dismayed at his departure, and all eyes were on this British newcomer who was taking the baton. According to the Straight’s late, great classical-music reviewer Douglas Hughes, Tovey made a huge impression in his season-opening concert: “Brandishing his baton with sweeping flourishes, raising and lowering his arms to demand tonal nuances that ranged from whispering pianissimos to shattering fortissimos, and occasionally punching the air to maintain tight rhythmic control, Bramwell Tovey made it forcefully clear in a performance of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D major—the so-called Titan—that he has come to town to pull nothing less than titanic music-making from the members of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.”

What Hughes could never have known, and sadly never lived to see, was that Tovey would go on to become the VSO’s longest-serving music director, overseeing the launch of the Spring Festival, supporting the work of new composers, and opposing threats to music education at our local schools as recently as this week’s Music Monday celebration. Tovey has announced he will continue through the 2017-18 season, when he’ll mark 18 years with the orchestra. In February, the VSO named Dutch conductor Otto Tausk as his replacement, starting in July 2018.

Scotiabank Dance Centre launches, 2001

Building up from a 1929 bank exterior, Arthur Erickson and Architectura helped design the wavy-glassed hub for dance in this city. Walk in today, and the building is buzzing with activity, its bright, airy studios housing everything from classical Indian to hip-hop to ballet rehearsals—by troupes that were often relegated to marginal, back-alley spaces before the new facility opened.

“It’s pretty exciting,” Dance Centre executive director Mirna Zagar told the Georgia Straight, after moving in. “I would like to believe the spaciousness of the building itself will contribute to change in the community, and will add to the creative momentum for artists working here. I have had the honour of watching some rehearsals already, and you can just see it in the dancers’ faces: they feel elevated.”

Ballet BC finds its feet again, 2009

It’s hard to believe today, but in December 2008, things did not look good for our ballet company. In fact, it was the worst year in the history of the troupe formed back in 1986 by Jean Orr, David Y. H. Lui, and Sheila Baggs. Just before Christmas 2008, Ballet BC filed a proposal with the official receiver under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act. One of the major factors was that the costs of mounting original productions had not been recovered through ticket sales. Costumes, sets, scores, and choreography accounted for an accumulated deficit of $600,000 over the preceding three years, according to the filed proposal.

Looking back, you can trace much of the dramatic turnaround for the company back to July 2009, when Ballet BC appointed one of its former dancers, National Ballet of Canada and Frankfurt Ballet alumna Emily Molnar, as interim artistic director. “I’ve always believed that some of the most trying times provide very special opportunities,” Molnar told the Straight optimistically at the time. “With all of the major transitions in my life where something was not going to work out, opportunities arose that I may not have seen before. I apply that with the company. Whenever something challenging comes up, it’s an opportunity to reevaluate and look at what you’re doing.…That’s the beauty of this situation: we can ask ‘What do we do well, what do we need to work on, where are we going, and how do we do it?’ It’s the beginning of something new.”

New, indeed. The company has regained audiences, built a hot international reputation, and attracted the work of big-name choreographers like William Forsythe, Cayetano Soto, Vancouver superstar Crystal Pite, and Batsheva Dance legend Ohad Naharin (for its upcoming Program 3). Recent milestones have included standing ovations at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival and touring to the U.K. and New York City’s Joyce Theater for the first time. Reflecting on the hard but rewarding journey of rebuilding the company during Ballet BC’s 30th anniversary in 2016, Molnar said to the Straight: “I was given an opportunity at a time for the company where we either try something and really try to do it, we really try to be contemporary…or we don’t survive. And we know to just exist in Vancouver doesn’t make sense. If we’re going to make contemporary art, we need to move outside of our city. You need to have an international conversation and that does require a company to tour.…And our audience showed up for it. They didn’t say no, they actually went, ‘Oh, I had no idea that ballet and now dance in general could look like this.’ ”

Vancouver Playhouse Theatre company shuts down, 2012

In March of that year, faced with a mounting debt approaching $1 million, the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company ceased operations after 49 years. The stage community was shocked to its foundations. But there had been some signs of trouble: the city had to bail the company out of financial trouble the previous year. At the time of the bailout, Coun. Heather Deal told the Straight the company was too important not to help: “All arts organizations are important, but when one this large, that has production space that many other people use—it has young actor programs, it has young theatregoer programs—it was just too important to let go.”

Artistic managing director Max Reimer, who joined the company in 2008, said in retrospect the onerous rental agreement with the city and other financial factors made the company unsustainable. There was a decrease in provincial funding for the arts, and a gruelling recession that saw corporate sponsorships and subscription sales take a hit. “Because I’ve sat on Canada Council juries [and company finances are part of Canada Council assessments],” he told the Straight, “it was pretty clear that this was the most challenging job in the country at the time. And I didn’t say no, but I didn’t say yes for many months, because it was possibly a fatal challenge.”

Still, the Vancouver theatre community refused to see the loss as a larger omen. “You’ve got the Arts Club thriving and Bard is thriving, so some large organizations are doing well here, and then of course we have this enormous small-theatre-based community,” Touchstone Theatre’s former artistic director, Katrina Dunn, told the Straight, a few months after the shutdown, on the eve of the Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards. “So there’s so much to be proud of.”

In the same story, Katey Wright, an actor and a cofounder and artistic producer of Patrick Street Productions, expressed a similar optimism for our scene: “I just can’t take what happened at the Playhouse as a sign of disaster for the theatre community as a whole... Certainly, it’s a terrible event and there are negative consequences for all of us, but at the same time I do feel that theatre is thriving in this town.”

And as our calendars fill with theatre events in 2017, it seems, for now, they were right.