Hogan's Alley: The Black Neighbourhood Vancouver Razed for a Viaduct

Stand under the Georgia Viaduct at the southeast corner of Main and Union, looking east toward Jackson Avenue, and the traffic overhead is loud. That noise is part of the stop. It is the sound of what was built on top of the neighbourhood that used to be here.

What ran here

An alley called Park Lane ran between Union Street and Prior Street, from Main east to Jackson. The neighbourhood took the unofficial name Hogan's Alley. For roughly half a century it was the centre of Vancouver's small Black community, described in the City of Vancouver's 2017 Hogan's Alley Working Group report as the first and last neighbourhood in Vancouver with a substantial concentrated Black population. The Hogan's Alley Society estimates the Black population peaked at around eight hundred. It is the only established Black neighbourhood Canada has documented.

Its anchors were a church and a restaurant. The African Methodist Episcopal Fountain Chapel, founded in 1918, was the first Black church in Vancouver, originally at 823 Jackson Avenue. Vie's Chicken and Steak House at 209 Union Street, run by Vie Moore from roughly 1920 to 1970, drew touring jazz musicians when they passed through the city.

Nora Hendrix

The neighbourhood's best-known resident was Nora Hendrix, born Zenora Rose Moore on 19 November 1883. She arrived in Vancouver in 1911 with her husband Ross, a Dixieland vaudevillian, by way of Chicago and Seattle. She co-founded the Fountain Chapel in 1918 and sang in its choir, lived in Hogan's Alley from 1938 to 1952, and worked for years at Vie's. Her grandson, the musician Jimi Hendrix, visited her here as a child. In 2014 Canada Post issued Black History Month stamps featuring Hogan's Alley residents, Nora Hendrix among them.

The demolition

Beginning in 1967, the city demolished the western half of Hogan's Alley to build the Georgia Viaduct, under the era's language of "urban renewal" and "slum clearance." The viaduct opened in 1971. The community was scattered.

This was the first phase of the freeway plan that Vancouver is otherwise proud of stopping. The Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association, organizing out of the Chan house kitchen, stopped the second phase before it could cut through Chinatown. But the first phase came through here, and nobody stopped it. The Chans saved Chinatown. Nobody saved Hogan's Alley. That asymmetry is the hardest fact on the whole walk.

The reclamation, in progress

Restitution has been slow and is unfinished. In 2014 the Hogan's Alley Society incorporated as a Black-led non-profit and has curated most of the corridor's contemporary history. In 2019, supportive housing named Nora Hendrix Place opened on the 200 block of Union, and in 2021 the city approved Nora Hendrix Way, making her the first Black woman with a Vancouver street named for her.

The Society's larger proposal is a community land trust, anchored in Black ownership and Black-led governance, on the redevelopment blocks opening up as the Georgia Viaduct itself comes down. The city's 2018 Northeast False Creek Plan committed to removing the viaduct; when it comes down, the question is what gets built on the ground it leaves. The land trust is the community's answer.

The contrast with Chinatown is pointed. Vancouver formally apologized to the Chinese community for past discrimination in 2018. There is no comparable apology yet for Hogan's Alley. A community demolished in 1967 was named back into the street grid in 2021 and is organizing now for the ground itself.

Where this sits on the walk and in the city

Hogan's Alley is the fifth-through-sixth stretch of the Chinatown and Hogan's Alley tour, and the specific harm done to these blocks is examined further in the neighbourhood piece on what displacement did to Vancouver's Black and Chinese blocks. It is also the single clearest instance of the pattern the city thesis traces across all four districts, erasure and reclamation. Stand under the viaduct, listen to the traffic, and you are standing on the erasure while the reclamation organizes around you.