MORAL REFORMERS SEE RED OVER BROTHELS ON ALEXANDER
Vancouver’s first red light district was on Dupont (now East Pender) in Chinatown. But in 1911, it shifted to the 500 and 600 blocks of Alexander Street in Japantown.
In the 1913 Henderson’s directory, there were 27 female names listed in the 500 and 600 blocks, including Lily White and Pearl Gray. Some of the madams were so successful they built their own brothels.
This did not sit well with reformers who had been trying to rid the city of vice. Among them was Minister Wright of the Kitsilano Presbyterian Church, who denounced the city’s laissez-faire attitude toward brothels from his pulpit on May 19, 1912.
The Vancouver World reported his sermon on “The Problems of Our City” the next day.
“In a certain district of Vancouver, buildings are being rushed up in feverish haste, the construction of which plainly tells that they are to be devoted to vice and shame,” said Wright. “Hundreds of lewd women are already established there.”
To Wright, allowing such sin to go unchecked “threatens to degrade our Canadian life below the level of the starkest heathenism.”
“It relates to body, nation, life, death and eternity,” he thundered. “The lives of our youth are being cursed by this sin, and in hundreds of our homes is found the bloody trail of this serpent of death.”
But Mayor James Findlay declined to shut down the red light district.
“I have given orders for the cleaning up of the town,” he said at a May 21 meeting. “This applies to rooming houses, blind pigs and Turkish baths, but not to Alexander Street. I say it without shame, gentlemen.”
A crowd of 200 hissed, cheered and groaned as Findlay argued with a variety of speakers.
George F. Gibson of the Good Government League charged that “women are coming into Vancouver at the rate of three to four a day ” from the U.S. to work as prostitutes. Findlay denied it, stating “only the other day we turned girls away from the city gates.”
Besides, Findlay said “if we close up the segregated district, where will the girls go? That is the problem that will face you.”
The following day, the Rev. R.J Wilson announced that the Vancouver Ministerial Association and the Good Government League would launch a “crusade to rid the city of the moral ulcer.”
Wilson said the reformers were prepared to spend $20,000 on the fight, and would keep up the battle for five years if needed.
Still, a Sun story on May 23 showed the problem extended beyond Alexander.
“That the life of Vancouver’s demi-monde is rampant in central portions of the city, despite protestations to the contrary, was amply and astonishingly borne out by the statements made before the police commissioners yesterday by a lady and two gentlemen,” the Sun reported.
“(The lady said) there was a house in the 500 block Richards Street where women of easy virtue practised their licentious calling quite openly at night.
“The lady went on to say that scenes of disorder occurred every night and often men had come into her house and made use of filthy remarks to her.”
Eventually, the moral reformers seem to have prevailed, because the red district petered out in 1914. In the 1915 directory, 17 addresses were listed as vacant, and only four had women’s names.
That said, prostitutes continued to work in the area, only not as openly.
“When neighbours complained, the police would shut down a series of de facto red light districts but after moving elsewhere for a while, they usually resurfaced in other nearby locations,” said a Historical and Cultural Review of Powell Street and Japantown prepared for the city of Vancouver.
“The location was convenient to the docks for sailors and the seasonal influx of loggers, fishermen and miners, an ethnically diverse group.”
Several brothels built during Alexander’s red light period are still standing at 500, 514, 610, 662 and 666 Alexander. Heritage Vancouver has called for the addition of the old brothels to Vancouver’s heritage register, which would offer some protection to the buildings. Only 500 Alexander is on Vancouver’s heritage register.