Hogan's Alley (Vancouver)

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Hogan's Alley was the local, unofficial name for Park Lane, an alley that ran through the southwestern corner of Strathcona in Vancouver, British Columbia during the first six decades of the twentieth century. It ran between Union and Prior Streets from approximately Main Street to Jackson Avenue.

While Hogan's Alley and the surrounding area was an ethnically diverse neighbourhood during this era, home to many Italian, Chinese and Japanese Canadians, a number of black families, black businesses, and the city's only black church, the African Methodist Episcopal Fountain Chapel, were located there. As such, Hogan's Alley was the first and last neighbourhood in Vancouver with a substantial concentrated black population. A possible reason these families settled there was because of the close proximity to the train stations since sleeping car porters were predominantly black men.^[1]

Prior to 1935, Hogan's Alley was a red light district, owing to Mayor L. D. Taylor's "open town policy," which was that police resources would be concentrated on major crimes, not victimless vice crimes. As a result of this policy, illegal drinking establishments, brothels, and gambling dens operated here, as they did in various other non-white sections of town like Chinatown and Japantown. This policy also earned Taylor a reputation for being soft on vice crime and he faced accusations of corruption. This was the basis of his electoral defeats in 1929 and 1935. Hogan's Alley long outlived Taylor's career in civic politics until it faced demolition to make way for a freeway.^[2]

Most of Hogan's Alley was destroyed circa 1970 by the Vancouver City Council's construction of the Georgia Viaduct, the first phase of a planned interurban freeway originally intended to wipe out all of Hogan's Alley and to cut nearby Chinatown in half. The freeway was stopped by Strathcona community activists, but not before Hogan's Alley was effectively obliterated. Today, the block or so that is left of the alley itself bears no mark that there was ever a black presence there, having become part of greater Chinatown.