This story is the 14th in our series on the hidden history of Vancouver’s neighbourhoods. Read more.
In 2004, Vancouver’s Kensington-Cedar Cottage neighbourhood was at a crossroads—specifically, at the intersection of Knight Street and Kingsway. From its earliest days, there has been a tension between the area’s function as a conduit of traffic and the surrounding quiet. According to a Vancouver Courier report, the area “could be mistaken for a near ghost town if it weren’t for the 50,000 vehicles passing through each day.” Some residents bemoaned the loss of the local Safeway, which closed in 1993 after serving the area for decades, and a proposed mixed-use commercial and retail complex called King Edward Village was touted as a path for revitalizing the area.
Over 15 years after its completion, with a Save-On Foods replacing that long lamented Safeway, King Edward Village’s impact has been modest. Cars still rule over feet on the adjacent stretch of Kingsway. A rural oasis at its inception, Kensington-Cedar Cottage remains appealingly low-key, bounded by Nanaimo Street to the east, East 41st Avenue to its south, Fraser and Clark Street to its west, and East 16th and Broadway to its north.
Before the neighbourhood, there was the road. Kingsway, the commercial thoroughfare that slices diagonally across Vancouver’s Kensington-Cedar Cottage neighbourhood (and much of the city’s east side) was a walking path used by the Coast Salish peoples to get to gathering and hunting spaces. In 1860, European settlers turned it into a wagon road that connected downtown Vancouver to New Westminster.
By all accounts, the first European settler to make this area their home was Arthur Wilson, who started a nursery on 14 hectares of land in 1888. On the southwest corner of the property, where the intersection of Dumfries and East 25th Avenue is now located, Wilson built a home using wood from the site’s cedar trees. As with much of East Vancouver, the introduction of the interurban line connecting downtown Vancouver to New Westminster brought new residents. Located near the Epworth tramway stop, the cedar cottage soon gave the area its name.
Much of the area’s natural bounty came from Gibson Creek (part of the China Creek system that was integrated long ago with the city’s sewer network), where salmon could once be caught with a pitchfork. The creek was named for Moses Gibson, an Irish immigrant who sold his Gastown bar and bought a small dairy farm off Kingsway in the 1890s. (Earlier this year, the city opened a small park near Tyee Elementary School, unofficially named “Gibby’s Field,” on land Gibson once owned.) Founded around 1900, where Kingsway and Knight presently stand, Cedar Cottage Brewery used creek water to brew bottled beer, delivering it to homes and charging 75 cents per 12-pint shipment. Farther to the south and east, Chinese market gardens flourished.
While this area remained largely rural, a cluster of businesses on Commercial Street formed the business hub of South Vancouver in the early 1900s. This included a bank, a post office, a silent movie theatre, and even a rollercoaster. Lord Selkirk school, built in 1908, remains from that era.
Farther to the northeast, in a peat bog and home to beavers and salmon as well as its namesake fish, Trout Lake delivered water via flume to the Hastings Sawmill on Dunlevy. In 1926, after the sawmill closed, Aldyen Irene Hamber donated the land surrounding the lake as parkland with the stipulation that it be named for her father, John Hendry, one of the sawmill’s owners. The park’s community centre, built in 1964, and its farmers market now make it one of the city’s most popular gathering places.
The middle of the 20th century saw the residential settlement of working-class people in Cedar Cottage and, south of Kingsway, Kensington (which took its name from the upscale London area). In 1950, Gladstone Secondary High school was built on property that once served as a dairy farm—Ken Lum, the visual artist best known locally for his iconic celebration of the area’s defiant past Monument for East Vancouver, is among the school’s notable grads.
East Van Cross iconography notwithstanding, much of the vestigial reputation that East Vancouver holds as a tough place is derived from those who still remember the exploits of the Clark Park Gang. One of a number of Vancouver gangs in the 1960s and 1970s—Riley, Ross, Grays—that derived their names from the area parks where they met up and hung out, the Clark Park Gang was undeniably the toughest, mixing robberies and property crime with involvement in riots in Gastown and at a Rolling Stones concert. The Clark Park Gang members were known for wearing red mackinaw, or “mack,” jackets, sometimes under cut-off jean jackets. “We looked like quite a force,” local historian Aaron Chapman quotes a former member saying in The Last Gang in Town. “If you see 30 guys in mack jackets coming down the street, you don’t give them too much trouble. We protected our turf. Everybody in Vancouver knew not to come to Clark Park.”
The 1970s and 1980s brought an influx of residents to the area, earning the neighbourhood’s stretch of Kingsway the nickname “Little Saigon.” Not everyone was happy with these demographic changes. “Every second business is nails or noodles,” one pub owner says in the 2004 Courier article. “There is not a lot of diversity of stores.… We’d like to see different types of businesses.”
Much of this stretch of Kingsway is currently being demolished as residential highrises erupt across the skyline. “The building that once housed the Kitsch’s Brew coffee house is now gone,” noted writer and author of poetry collection Kingsway Michael Turner in 2021, “as is the one just east of it, where a meth lab technician was blown out of its upstairs window and found sprawled on the sidewalk, laughing.”
On Victoria Drive, we see other businesses that serve the ethnic makeup of the area, which has a larger-than-average representation of residents with Chinese, Vietnamese, and Filipino backgrounds. And on East 41st Ave, Duffin’s Donuts, the passion project of a Cambodian couple who arrived in Canada in the 1980s, outdoes Tim Hortons with a uniquely expansive menu that includes fried chicken, pupusas, chow mein, and tortas.
Duffin’s, like much of what you’ll find in Kensington-Cedar Cottage, is easy to drive past without stopping. But once you do, you’re already plotting your return.
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