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Sensational Vancouver (Anvil $24)
As a social historian who doubles as a sleuth for secrets, Eve Lazarus is happy to let the world know that the mansion called Canuck Place in Shaughnessy is the former headquarters for a Vancouver chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
She likewise uncovered an original building where painter Emily Carr had lived, while preparing Sensational Victoria: Bright Lights, Red Lights, Murders, Ghosts & Gardens: Tales from the Capital City (Anvil 2012).
Now Lazarus has risen again. In Sensational Vancouver (Anvil $24), she delights in exposing how Vancouver was once a hotbed for bookies, brothels, bootleggers and unsolved murders.
Canada's first female cop, Lurancy Harris, patrolled the houses of ill repute on Alexander Street and the city's opium dens and gambling joints were the purview of Detective Joe Ricci-but it wasn't all film noir skulduggery.
Sensational Vancouver also celebrates entertainers, artists and remarkable women such as Elsie MacGill, mountain climber Phyllis Munday, novelist Joy Kogawa and Nellie Yip Quong (1882-1949), easily the most unusual of Eve Lazarus' discoveries.
Including a walking tour map of Strathcona and Chinatown, Sensational Vancouver spotlights Nellie Yip Quong's residence at 783 East Pender-hyped as the home for the city's "first inter-racial marriage.";
That's a bit of a stretch. First Nations women had been co-habitating with European newcomers for decades. But for a white Roman Catholic woman to take the surname of a Chinese husband in the year 1900 was most certainly extraordinary.
Nellie Yip quong was born as nellie towers in Saint John, New Brunswick in 1882. Educated in the U.S., she was an English teacher in New York City when she fell in love with a successful jeweler from a little town called Vancouver. This was Charles Yip Quong, nephew of wealthy Yip Sang.
[B.C. history buffs know about Yip Sang. An orphan with no prospects, he managed to save enough money to make an 80-day journey from China to San Francisco in 1864, at age nineteen. He found work in a restaurant and gradually taught himself English. At age 36, he put his belongings on a cart and trudged north through Oregon and Washington, eventually reaching Vancouver where he sold sacks of coal door-to-door. As outlined in Frances Hern's Yip Sang and the First Chinese Canadians (Heritage 2011), Yip Sang, at age 37, was hired as a bookkeeper and paymaster for Lee Piu, who oversaw the hiring of Chinese labourers for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Yip Sang was soon elevated to the position of superintendent, organizing as many as 7,000 Chinese workers who comprised as much as 75 percent of the CPR's workforce. Later successful with an import/export business, he built the two-storey Wing Sang building in 1889. Designated a heritage building in 1999, the oldest remaining building in Vancouver's Chinatown, at 51-69 East Pender Street, is now owned and renovated by 'condo king' Bob Rennie, who operates a private art gallery on the site.]
When Nellie Towers married Charles Yip, her parents disowned her and she was spurned by the Catholic Church. After the pair lived in China for a few years, they returned to Vancouver in 1904 and were afforded refuge by Yip Sang in his Wing Sang Building.
The young couple shared lodgings with Yip Sang's three wives and their 23 children.
Yip Sang had allocated one floor per wife-or one wife per floor-and one for a classroom. Yip Sang's lack of formal schooling was counter-balanced by his Confucian values, such as self-improvement. He sponsored the Oy Kuo School for adult education and served as its principal for ten years. He wanted his own children to attend Canadian public schools for integration purposes but he simultaneously hired private tutors from China and Hong Kong to teach them Chinese.
It was from this environment that Nellie was able to master five Chinese dialects. She soon became a vital and outspoken link between two vastly divergent cultures.
"Nellie fought on behalf of the Chinese,"; Lazarus writes, "She challenged the justice system and shamed the Vancouver General Hospital into moving non-white patients out of the basement. When the White Lunch restaurant put up a sign saying 'No Indians, Chinese or dogs allowed,' Nellie made them take it down. She arranged care for the elderly, brokered adoptions, acted as an interpreter, and became the first public health nurse hired by the Chinese Benevolent Association.";
The Wing Sang Building also served as an opium production facility. Nellie and Charles Yip Quong moved six blocks away from the Wing Sang Building to 783 East Pender Street in 1917, where her husband did most of the cooking and gardening. Nellie proceeded to deliver an estimated 500 Chinese Canadian babies.
The bi-racial couple adopted numerous children, including Eleanor (Yip) Lum who has visited the present owner of the house, Wayne Avery. She described for him one of her favourite memories of Nellie-as a large imposing woman, wearing a wide hat, with a feather in the side and reading a Chinese newspaper on the bus.
According to Lazarus, during renovations, Wayne Avery discovered his house has also served as a bootlegging joint and a brothel. "He found old Finnish newspapers beneath the floor, cartons of cigarettes stashed in the ceiling, booze in a secret hideout in the garden, and locks on the inside of the bedroom doors,"; she writes.
As well, Sensational Vancouver reveals that tenants of the house prior to Nellie and Charles Yip Quong included Nora and Ross Hendrix, the grandparents of Jimi Hendrix.
Eve Lazarus previously examined the social histories of heritage houses in Greater Vancouver for At Home with History: The Untold Secrets of Heritage Homes (Anvil 2007). She "blogs obsessively"; about houses and their genealogies at www.evelazarus.com
978-1-927380-98-7
She likewise uncovered an original building where painter Emily Carr had lived, while preparing Sensational Victoria: Bright Lights, Red Lights, Murders, Ghosts & Gardens: Tales from the Capital City (Anvil 2012).
Now Lazarus has risen again. In Sensational Vancouver (Anvil $24), she delights in exposing how Vancouver was once a hotbed for bookies, brothels, bootleggers and unsolved murders.
Canada's first female cop, Lurancy Harris, patrolled the houses of ill repute on Alexander Street and the city's opium dens and gambling joints were the purview of Detective Joe Ricci-but it wasn't all film noir skulduggery.
Sensational Vancouver also celebrates entertainers, artists and remarkable women such as Elsie MacGill, mountain climber Phyllis Munday, novelist Joy Kogawa and Nellie Yip Quong (1882-1949), easily the most unusual of Eve Lazarus' discoveries.
Including a walking tour map of Strathcona and Chinatown, Sensational Vancouver spotlights Nellie Yip Quong's residence at 783 East Pender-hyped as the home for the city's "first inter-racial marriage.";
That's a bit of a stretch. First Nations women had been co-habitating with European newcomers for decades. But for a white Roman Catholic woman to take the surname of a Chinese husband in the year 1900 was most certainly extraordinary.
Nellie Yip quong was born as nellie towers in Saint John, New Brunswick in 1882. Educated in the U.S., she was an English teacher in New York City when she fell in love with a successful jeweler from a little town called Vancouver. This was Charles Yip Quong, nephew of wealthy Yip Sang.
[B.C. history buffs know about Yip Sang. An orphan with no prospects, he managed to save enough money to make an 80-day journey from China to San Francisco in 1864, at age nineteen. He found work in a restaurant and gradually taught himself English. At age 36, he put his belongings on a cart and trudged north through Oregon and Washington, eventually reaching Vancouver where he sold sacks of coal door-to-door. As outlined in Frances Hern's Yip Sang and the First Chinese Canadians (Heritage 2011), Yip Sang, at age 37, was hired as a bookkeeper and paymaster for Lee Piu, who oversaw the hiring of Chinese labourers for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Yip Sang was soon elevated to the position of superintendent, organizing as many as 7,000 Chinese workers who comprised as much as 75 percent of the CPR's workforce. Later successful with an import/export business, he built the two-storey Wing Sang building in 1889. Designated a heritage building in 1999, the oldest remaining building in Vancouver's Chinatown, at 51-69 East Pender Street, is now owned and renovated by 'condo king' Bob Rennie, who operates a private art gallery on the site.]
When Nellie Towers married Charles Yip, her parents disowned her and she was spurned by the Catholic Church. After the pair lived in China for a few years, they returned to Vancouver in 1904 and were afforded refuge by Yip Sang in his Wing Sang Building.
The young couple shared lodgings with Yip Sang's three wives and their 23 children.
Yip Sang had allocated one floor per wife-or one wife per floor-and one for a classroom. Yip Sang's lack of formal schooling was counter-balanced by his Confucian values, such as self-improvement. He sponsored the Oy Kuo School for adult education and served as its principal for ten years. He wanted his own children to attend Canadian public schools for integration purposes but he simultaneously hired private tutors from China and Hong Kong to teach them Chinese.
It was from this environment that Nellie was able to master five Chinese dialects. She soon became a vital and outspoken link between two vastly divergent cultures.
"Nellie fought on behalf of the Chinese,"; Lazarus writes, "She challenged the justice system and shamed the Vancouver General Hospital into moving non-white patients out of the basement. When the White Lunch restaurant put up a sign saying 'No Indians, Chinese or dogs allowed,' Nellie made them take it down. She arranged care for the elderly, brokered adoptions, acted as an interpreter, and became the first public health nurse hired by the Chinese Benevolent Association.";
The Wing Sang Building also served as an opium production facility. Nellie and Charles Yip Quong moved six blocks away from the Wing Sang Building to 783 East Pender Street in 1917, where her husband did most of the cooking and gardening. Nellie proceeded to deliver an estimated 500 Chinese Canadian babies.
The bi-racial couple adopted numerous children, including Eleanor (Yip) Lum who has visited the present owner of the house, Wayne Avery. She described for him one of her favourite memories of Nellie-as a large imposing woman, wearing a wide hat, with a feather in the side and reading a Chinese newspaper on the bus.
According to Lazarus, during renovations, Wayne Avery discovered his house has also served as a bootlegging joint and a brothel. "He found old Finnish newspapers beneath the floor, cartons of cigarettes stashed in the ceiling, booze in a secret hideout in the garden, and locks on the inside of the bedroom doors,"; she writes.
As well, Sensational Vancouver reveals that tenants of the house prior to Nellie and Charles Yip Quong included Nora and Ross Hendrix, the grandparents of Jimi Hendrix.
Eve Lazarus previously examined the social histories of heritage houses in Greater Vancouver for At Home with History: The Untold Secrets of Heritage Homes (Anvil 2007). She "blogs obsessively"; about houses and their genealogies at www.evelazarus.com
978-1-927380-98-7
Submitted on August 26, 2014 in By David.
