This story is the 17th in our series on the hidden history of Vancouver’s neighbourhoods. Read more.
In 2001, Vancouver Sun reporter Doug Ward conjured the heady changes happening in Mount Pleasant in one zesty description of an expensive launch party for a high-end furniture store on Kingsway: “A skeletal fashion model, her androgenous breasts exposed under a gossamer designer top, strides down the runway, looking through the A-list people below like they’re complete scum.… She and other models are the entertainment at one of the year’s greatest bashes. They’re watched by people with stock portfolios, luxury cars, personal trainers, great hair and clothes blacker than on Sex and the City…. A rumour circulates that actor Eddie Murphy is going to show up.”
At the turn of this century, the gentrification of a working-class area was well underway with renovated heritage homes, vintage-clothing shops, and coffeehouses popping up in the blocks around Main and Broadway. In the years that followed, the Fox Cinema, the friendly neighbourhood adult cinema, would soon become a cabaret for DJs and bands, and Reno’s, the diner below the Lee Building, built in 1912, would make way for a more refined place for a hangover breakfast. That change is still ongoing. In the near future, the site of City Centre Motel, built in 1954, will end its short tenure as an artist studio and transform into a development with rental highrises, retail units, and an art-production space.
At various times, condo marketers and business improvement associations wanted it rebranded as SoMa or Uptown. However, Mount Pleasant—demarcated by Great Northern Way and False Creek to the north, 16th Avenue to the south, Cambie Street to the west and Clark Drive to east—has clung stubbornly to its homely moniker and its long history. In reality, the area didn’t need a facelift so much as a new perspective, its barely remembered seediness conferring not only an ironic tinge to its anodyne name but also a little edginess to the city’s crash pad for cultural creatives.
Before the European settlement, Mount Pleasant was forested land with trout- and salmon-bearing streams and beaver-inhabited creeks running through them, all of it used by Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people. European settlement came in earnest around 1890, when streetcar expansion brought Vancouverites out of the downtown peninsula to build homes and start businesses there. Jane Fortune Kemp, the wife of a land speculator, H.V. Edmonds, who had bought huge tracts of land in 1869 and sold them during this time of growth, christened the area after a place in Ireland, where she was born.
According to Christine Hagemoen’s concise yet extensive guide to the neighbourhood’s heritage architecture, Mount Pleasant Stories, the J.F. Clark building from 1892 is the oldest surviving commercial building from when the area was a self-contained village centred around Westminster Avenue and Ninth Avenue (Main and Broadway). Formerly the site of a hardware store, it was also, until a 2022 fire, the long-time home of Nirvana Restaurant. The Depencier House, a Victorian family home built in 1889 at 151 East Eighth Avenue, became the space for many restaurants, including Eight 1/2 and, currently, La Cantina de Don Porfirio.
One of the area’s creeks, running north from the Tea Swamp east of present-day Main Street around East 16th Avenue, became known as Brewery Creek due to brewers that included San Francisco Brewery and Vancouver Breweries, the makers of Cascade Ale—later honoured by a present-day area hangout, The Cascade Room. Like other city creeks, Brewery Creek was eventually contained in a culvert and incorporated into the city’s sewer system, but its name has been repurposed by a local liquor store.
As the 20th century dawned, Mount Pleasant was integrated into the growing city. At the base of the forking roadway that splits into Kingsway and Main was a covered bandstand for Sunday performances from the Mount Pleasant Band in the 1900s. (The site is presently a tiny plaza that honours the memory of a Musqueam chief, Gertrude Guerin.) In 1907, at Main and 13th, British Columbia Electric Railway opened a depot for its fleet of streetcars, which ran until 1955. Stately brick apartment buildings like the Lee Building, as well as Wenonah Apartments and The Frontenac, both on East 11th Avenue, were built in the 1910s. Farther south on Main Street, an overly large Beaux-Arts-style post office, which included a clock tower, was built in 1915. After a stint in the 1960s and ’70s as a RCMP office and a period of disrepair, the building known as Heritage Hall is today a popular site for weddings and craft fairs.
The 1920s and ’30s saw Mount Pleasant’s working-class identity established as employees of the mills and shipyards at the northwest end of the neighbourhood crowded the area. Some of the larger single-family homes were divided into apartments. Meanwhile, Lion Valet, a dry-cleaner run by a Japanese Canadian family on 155 East 10th Avenue, and two Chinese Canadian laundries on the 200-block of East Sixth—sites referred to as “missing heritage” in Hagemoen’s book—also attest to the nonwhite settler presence in Mount Pleasant.
On the wealthier southwestern quadrant of Mount Pleasant, Mayor G.G. McGeer established city hall to celebrate the recently expanded city, which had absorbed Point Grey and South Vancouver in 1929, in a central location. Opened in 1936, the stately, moderne-style structure was built on the site of Strathcona Park. A posthumous donation from the land developer and former parks commissioner Jonathan Rogers allowed for a replacement park in the area to be built in his name in 1958.
The 1970s saw the establishment of a couple of enduring neighbourhood institutions. For the aesthetes, there’s the Western Front, which started in 1973 when eight artists pooled their resources to establish a venue and live-work space in a half-century-old social hall built for a fraternal organization, the Knights of Pythias. For the lowbrows, there’s Kingsgate Mall, built on Vancouver School Board land (the site of Mount Pleasant school) in 1972 and revered for its ungentrified, anything-goes vibe. In 2012, city reporter Frances Bula celebrated it as a place “where you can still buy a pair of glitter-covered platform shoes with six-inch heels. And plastic flowers. And terrible, awful, hideous Canadian-made furniture. And a real bad-for-you hot dog, filled with nitrates, not one of those German things handcrafted by some retired investment banker.”
Mount Pleasant’s toughest reputational stretch came in the 1980s, when the Shame the Johns campaign pushed street-based sex work from the West End into the neighbourhood. In 1989, the body of Frances “Annie” Grant was found behind a Mount Pleasant rooming house, one of six sex workers victimized by a serial killer who was never found.
And yet Mount Pleasant’s revitalization came on the back of its distressed conditions. In the 1970s and ’80s, the Davis family lovingly restored seven heritage homes in the 100 block of West 10th. Coffee shops with names like Lugz and Soma appeared on Main Street in the ’90s. In 1997, R&B Brewing returned the area to its beer-making origins. (In 2013, licensing changes that allowed for tasting rooms led to the present-day ubiquity of brew pubs north of Broadway.) It was only a matter of time before rents rebounded.
The 2006 movie Mount Pleasant captures the awkward time before gentrification’s chokehold had taken full effect. In its trailer, a woman announces that she’s bought in the area. Moments later, we see her daughter find a used syringe. Then, we see images of unhoused people and street sex work.
Whether it’s the Dude Chilling Park sign or the discovery of $400,000 in Depression-era banknotes hidden in a deli-turned-tavern, Mount Pleasant holds onto its strangeness despite the sheen of wealth running through it like the creek water flowing underground.
