WHEN THE GOING GOT ROWDY
Exhibit examines unrest in city
Generally speaking, Vancouverites are a gentle, peace-loving lot. But there is another side to our civic soul — an angry one.
Vancouver has a long history of political protests and labour strife. And for some reason, every few years, we have a big riot.
“The hockey riots of 1994 and 2011 weren’t the first time,” says researcher Kate Bird.
“The very first time the Grey Cup was here in 1955, there was a riot. There was another one in ’58, and ’66. Rioting has been going on for years and years — it’s not a new thing.
“There were always park rumbles, Halloween riots, all kinds of things going on in the ’50s. In the ’40s as well.”
As a former librarian at The Vancouver Sun and Province, Bird came across countless photos of the protests, strikes and riots that have taken place over the decades.
Last year, she put some of them into a book and exhibition at the Museum of Vancouver, called Vancouver in the Seventies.
“There were so many protests in the ’70s, I thought, ‘Oh, there could be a whole book just on protests,’ ” she said.
Now there is: City On Edge, A Rebellious Century of Vancouver Protests, Riots and Strikes (Greystone). And once again, it has spawned an exhibition at the Museum of Vancouver (opening Sept. 28).
There are some fabulous photos in City on Edge, such as a shot of hundreds of UBC students occupying the unfinished Science Building on UBC’s unfinished Point Grey campus during the Great Trek of 1922. (The students marched from downtown to the Point Grey campus to try to shame the province into finishing the university.)
Most people today probably don’t know that hundreds of unemployed men occupied the downtown Post Office (today’s Sinclair Centre) for several weeks in May and June, 1938. City on Edge has some starting photos from the day the RCMP stormed the post office to evict the protesters, including a shot of a bloodied Steve Brodie, the 26-year-old who led the sit down.
In 1971, a couple of thousand hippies descended on Gastown for a smoke-in to protest Canada’s marijuana laws, and the many local pot busts. The police used force to break it up: there is a wild picture of an officer on horseback riding into a throng of terrified protesters taking cover in the entrance to a building.
Naturally, there are several great photos of the Stanley Cup Riot in 2011. But if you had to pick one shot that captures the spirit of protests, it’s a Ric Ernst photo of an NDP supporter arguing nose to nose with a Liberal in 2008.
Other photos are less intense, like a shot of a cyclist wearing only flowers and a peace symbol at the Naked Bike Ride in 2007, which was staged to promote nonpolluting modes of transportation.
Then there is the 1947 photo of a bunch of kids protesting a threecent increase in the price of chocolate bars. “We don’t care the price of a car!” reads a sign. “We want a 5¢ candy bar.”
Museum curator Viviane Gosselin and designer Amir Ofek added heft to the images by projecting them onto screens so that they are life-size, or even larger than life. (Most of the screens are eight feet by 10 feet, but one is 16 feet by 20 feet.)
“We want to give you an idea of being in the street, being in the protest,” said Gosselin. “We saw street demonstration as a form of expression, and performance. The performers are the demonstrators, the stage is the street, and the protest is the performance.”
The images rotate every few seconds, which makes it much more dynamic than a conventional photo exhibit.
“We kind of thought of this as the Times Square room, this bombardment of images,” said Bird.
The book is arranged chronologically, but the exhibit is arranged around six themes — labour, environment, government, First Nations, social justice and hooliganism. The exhibition also features more photos, 650 as opposed to 120 in the book.
Visitors will no doubt be struck by how many of the protests of yore address issues that we still deal with today.
“Things like homelessness and the affordability of homes are a big issue now,” said Bird. “But in 1946, returning soldiers from the Second World War took over the old Hotel Vancouver because there was no housing. Demolition of heritage has been an issue for 50 years.”
Almost all the images in the show are from The Sun and Province photo library. Gosselin says access to a private archive like this is invaluable.
“We tend to see the same images from public archives, so it’s so refreshing to see images we haven’t seen,” she said. “They were filed away, never to be seen again. The museum feels very privileged to show this, because they’re treasures.”
The book has been in the works for a while. But releasing it at this particular moment in time was quite prescient.
“I agreed to do this book before Trump,” said Bird. “But protest demonstrations are growing, so it’s very timely in a way, just by accident.”