Vancouver's history gets a reality check

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      The past is often said to be golden, but the facts don't bear this out. Social, economic, and racial complexities arrived in the Lower Mainland along with pioneers from all kinds of cultures. This is why, with the benefit of hindsight, it's necessary to represent local history with something more encompassing than a genteel Edwardian drawing room in Shaughnessy. Curators like the Vancouver Museum's Joan Seidl have spent the last few years working toward more fully displaying our past, warts and all.

      This refreshing attitude shows in two new components of the museum's overhauled permanent exhibits about local history. Gateway to the Pacific and the other section, called Boom, Bust and War, span a time from the turn of the last century through World War II, incorporating both the positive and the negative. The violent 1907 anti-Asian riots in Chinatown? The Komagata Maru incident, in which Canada refused entry to an entire shipload of immigrants from India? The forced internment of “enemy alien”  Japanese Canadians after Pearl Harbor? All there, not so much in cold hard fact as in thoroughly textured reality.

      One piece remains missing: the story of the museum's location on land questionably taken in 1913 from a Native reserve. Discussions continue between museum staff and descendants of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh who lived there about how to portray that particular tale””and an empty space awaits.

      “People had this fantastic dream that motivated them,”  said Seidl, talking about Vancouver's city pioneers in a downstairs boardroom the day of the exhibits' VIP launch in early June. “These people were totally convinced they were still in the midst of a great colonial experiment. They were going to have a pleasant bungalow and raise a happy family in this new city. But when you look at it closely, that dream was tested in many ways.” 

      Despite the misguided intentions of the early residents, it's fascinating to get a feel for city life during its initial decades. A star attraction is an eight-minute film taken in 1907 from a streetcar that looped down Granville, along Hastings, up Carrall, and along then-residential Robson and Davie streets. The footage, shot by American William Harbeck (who later went down on the Titanic) for a kind of proto-virtual-reality attraction called Hale's Tour of the World, turned up about 10 years ago in Australia. From the dung on the streetcar tracks left in the wake of horse-drawn carts to passing bustled ladies to glimpses of facades still standing, it's a astonishing trip into the past.

      Another standout is the completely salvaged interior of Chinatown's Wing Sang Co. building, a multifaceted company whose shell is currently undergoing redevelopment into condos and an art gallery. The Yip family, descendants of unofficial Chinatown mayor/business tycoon Yip Sang, allowed the museum to take everything, from the floor-to-ceiling glassed cabinets and intricate wicket to a forgotten box of opium-pipe bowls. (The business would have imported opium paraphernalia while it was still legal.) “For me, it was startling to see how Chinese it is,”  Seidl remembered. “I realized I'd been in the same building in old shops in Shanghai and Singapore””the same proportions, the formality and symmetrical nature of that space. And that's a Vancouver interior!” 

      There are photos showing early-20th-century real-estate sloganeering on downtown banners and the subsequent crash (one large shot shows a house for sale “by owner”  that obviously hasn't sold in years), and a complete 1906 “French Front”  Runabout Oldsmobile, the 67th car registered in B.C. and the prized possession of lumber magnate John Hendry. Although the artifacts aren't as spectacular in the Depression and Second World War gallery, for obvious reasons, their wear-and-tear have equal poignancy. Trashed and used up, they lived through hard times along with their owners. Historic photographs help us imagine vanished realities, such as the image in a section called Uprooted, Looted and Interned of the Japanese man walking down a long road, having just delivered his vehicle to authorities in preparation for his relocation to the B.C. Interior.

      This amount of unsanitized history is still rare in civic museums, Seidl pointed out. But rather than just focusing on the sadness and hardship, she added, the new exhibits serve to celebrate the resilience of the many communities still vibrantly in place today. “We're not just following in the footsteps of the European explorers anymore,”  she said. “Now you can consider historical events from different points of view. As a city, I think you get flexibility and confidence, as well as humility and honesty, from that.” 

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