Fortunes were made on the
stock market and in the
province’s natural
resources, and, for a select few, in the rum-
running business —
satisfying America’s thirst for liquor
during Prohibition. With
the opening of the Panama Canal
in 1914, Vancouver had
emerged as a key port in global
trade, an ice-free harbor
that could ship Canadian grain and
timber not only to Asia but
also to Europe. Prairie grain
was increasingly flowing to
the West Coast for export, and
by 1924 Vancouver boasted
that the port’s wheat exports had
surpassed that of Montreal.
Credit was easy to come by and
Granville Street’s
theatres, cinemas, and garish electric signs
exemplified the city’s
material progress and affluence.
The city had continued to grow. By 1925 the
population
of just over 125,000 was
expanding east along Kingsway to
Burnaby and New Westminster
and west into Kitsilano.
The neighboring municipalities of Point Grey
and South
Vancouver — closely
connected to Vancouver by the
B.C. Electric streetcar
lines — were also developing and
amalgamated with Vancouver
in January 1929. Overnight
the city mushroomed to
242,000 people living on forty-four
square miles.
However, for all its seeming prosperity,
Vancouver had
a dark underbelly. For many
residents, the decade was a
time of poverty and
destitution. In 1922, Hastings Park was
home to three thousand
unemployed men and three years
later, eighteen hundred men
were still on relief, getting fifty
cents a day to live on. The
city remained racially segregated
— anyone not of white,
Anglo-Saxon stock had little chance
of prospering. By 1923,
federal laws prohibited immigration
from India, China, and Japan.
Asian residents in Vancouver
found themselves largely
excluded from civic life, denied the
right to vote or seek post-secondary
education, and for the
most part confined to
menial jobs.
Not a pristine city, Vancouver at times
seemed
overwhelmed by the hundreds
of industrial enterprises that
had taken root.
“In downtown Vancouver . . . the air was
grime and soot
as boats and trains,
sawmills and flourmills, breweries
and food-processing plants,
shoe factories and clothing
factories belched clouds of
heavy black smoke . . . . The
city was now held fast in
the toils of industry — industry
constantly expanding to
satisfy the apparently insatiable
demands of the export
markets.”22
The inhabitants’ commitment to the arts and
philanthropic
ventures was noticeably
absent. The city lacked a museum,
and the public library and
art gallery existed in rundown
buildings. In 1929, Duff
Patullo remarked that of the city’s
eighty-three millionaires,
not one had been known to make a
gift to or sponsor a civic
enterprise.23
The Capitol Theatre in 1921. Vancouver Public Library
VPL 16393
