Zoning in the Age of Noir

Diane Purvey and John Belshaw came up with a terrific idea to portray mid-20th century Vancouver. 

Vancouver Noir tries a little too hard to appropriate the black-and-white world of crime scenes, shot on rain-glistened streets with Speed Graphic cameras, portrayed in the pulp magazines and Hollywood B-films in the 1930s and 40s.   Gambling and prostitution, gin joints and opium – sure, we had it all.  And the second largest Chinatown.  Corrupt politicians and police chiefs – guilty as charged (or not).   Murders, grisly accidents, blood-soaked sheets – you bet, with pictures.

But still, Vancouver was a small town back then, still an empire backwater trying too hard to maintain its British character, desperate for respectability but steeped in racism and anti-Americanism.  Too close to the bush to deny its frontier origins but promoting a vision of the Garden City in a natural Eden.

The authors really want to tell a story about the tension between the classes and the extremes of Right and Left that informed its politics.  And even its planning. 

There’s no doubt about where their sympathies lie.  For instance, in the story of the rezoning of Ward Two:

The zoning plan of 1925 was presented by the City’s own Planning Commission, a blue chip, blue-blood cabal of west-side gents and two society doyennes.  The new order proposed in the plan was less a prudent zoning proposal than a scorched earth policy.  It would permanently change the face of the downtown peninsula.  More than that, the plan signalled the beginning of an effort to erase from a City Beautiful what the middle classes viewed as a political and social blight.  From 1930 to 1960 it plunged part of the city, part of the life of the city, into shadow.

The most densely populated working-class community at the city core was known in 1925 as “Central School,” or “Ward Two;” these days it’s mostly known as “Yaletown.”  It stretched six blocks long blocks from the warehouse district on the north shore of False Creek across the lands now occupied buy the Vancouver Public Library’s main branch, the Queen Elizabeth Theatre and the Post Office on Georgia, and Vancouver Community College, which stands where the Central School itself once stood.

The wood frame houses were packed in tight, the eaves of one house only inches from those of the next.  There was hardly need for a tram system: most workers had jobs in the railyards and mills on False Creek or along Burrard Inlet docks.  People walked everywhere.  Much of life, despite the incessant drizzle, was lived in public spaces and large gatherings were common enough.  … It was a sturdy blue-collar neighbourhood …

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The 1925 Plan introduced “zoning.”  Ward Two was the first neighbourhood to be affected.  It was designated a “commercial” zone, a lethal change.  Commercial zoning effectively made it impossible for homeowners in the Central School area to borrow money to repair their homes.  Financing for a new roof was now out of the question.  In a neighbourhood where cedar shakes were being manufactured, this was a cruel irony.

More to the point, the zoning effectively made itimpossible for homneowners to sell their homes to anyone other than entrepreneurs who wished to operate a commercial business at the site, which to prove highly unlikely in the Depression and the war years that followed.

The effect on the neighbourhood was devastating.  The area framed by Seymour and Cambie, Davie and Pender Strerets began a long, irrevocable downward spiral. Those who could, moved out of Central School; those who could not, stayed and suffered.  Some homes were razed to make way for businesses but, more often, they were replaced with parking lots.

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There are only a handful of houses left now, but there were hardly more standing even by 1960, by which time the once busy cluster of distinctive blocks and sub-neighbourhoods had been repdued to a checkboard of gravel wastelands.

Was this outcome a matter of chance or design?  Who stood to gain by the death of Ward Two?  West-side wealth approved because, until1935, Vancouver City Council was based on the ward system.*  Each of the several distinct neighbourhoods elected their own representative.  Gutting the radical vote from the downtown peninsula would have tipped the political scales to the right; moving to an at-large system was a little more risky but it delivered the same effect a few years later.

At the same time, the zoning process was an early salvo in the middle-class struggle for citywide respectability.  Moving the local working class to airy and new east- and southside suburbs, it was hoped, would scrub clean to face of the city, free up room for more commerce and industry, and get the political troublemakers off the downtown streets.

All this preceded Harland Bartholomew’s 1929 plan, which reinforced the idea of the Central Business District  and a zone of six-storey residential/industrial/commercial development for additional growth – requiring, implicitly, the demolition of the Central School neighbourhood.  “Opposition to this vision was, not surprisingly, regarded on the west side of town as deviant and seditious.  Civic pride and a rationalized urban landscape demanded acquiescence.”

Bartholomew’s timing was awful.  His plans were mostly stopped by the global depression of the 1930s.  But his fundamental belief in a central business district survived and informed generations of city planners.

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* See John Mackie’s “This Day in History”  in the Dec 12th Sun for a description of the ward system, and the vote to change it to ‘at large’ in 1935.