Speaker: Jak King – The Drive: A Retail, Social and Political History of Commercial Drive
DATE: Thursday, January 26, 2012
TIME: 7:30pm
LOCATION: Museum of Vancouver, 1100 Chestnut Street. Enquire at the Museum desk for directions to the room.
ADMISSION: Free
These days East Vancouver’s Commercial Drive is a fiercely independent, wildly entertaining, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-sexual district with a reputation to match. But how did it get that way from when natives sold its Grandview elk meat to settlers in Vancouver and a skid row running roughly along the present-day path of Commercial Drive below Hastings dumped disgorged huge trees into Cedar Cove?
The area’s great view, which gave it the name “Grandview” and its idyllic surroundings became a magnet for settlement. However, the elimination of the ward system in 1935, which many locals thought was the end of the world and the loss of their community, forced a different and informal type of governance and commitment from residents along Commercial Drive.
From that point on for the next twenty years, it became the story of families and individuals creating their own sense of community, particularly difficult when transit corridors were planned according to industrial corridors. The sense of community survived the elimination of streetcar tracks and grew with the changing multicultural demographic after 1956. This fierce independence continues in “The Drive” today.
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Jak King, author of The Drive: A Retail, Social and Political History of Commercial Drive, Vancouver, to 1956, has lived on the Drive for more than twenty years. Now retired, he has devoted many years to the study of the Drive’s retail, social, architectural and political history.
