Screening: Hogan’s Alley (1994)

221A invites you to a screening of Andrea Fatona and Cornelia Wyngaarden’s Hogan’s Alley (1994), on Friday, November 18 at 7pm. This event is part of a series of public programs for Rereading Room: The Vancouver Women’s Bookstore.

In the late 1960’s, the City of Vancouver laid out extensive plans for ‘urban renewal’, promising to radically transform the neighborhoods east of the downtown core. Central to this project was the construction of the Georgia Viaduct, a twinned overpass bridge that would connect Downtown Vancouver to Main Street. If carried through according to the proposed plan, the bridge would have displaced many of East Vancouver’s working class communities and ethnic conclaves, including what we know now as Strathcona, Chinatown, and Gastown. While these areas were ultimately saved from demolition through effective community campaigning, in 1970 the city proceeded in flattening Hogan’s Alley, a neighbourhood that had been home to Vancouver’s first and last predominantly black community.

Hogan’s Alley presents the oral histories of Pearl Brown, Leah Curtis, and Thelma Gibson Towns, three women whose narratives speak to the entangled complexities of class, gender, and sexuality, as articulated in the life and aftermath of the disappeared neighbourhood. The video not only serves as a record of Hogan’s Alley and the history of black life in Vancouver, but today takes on a renewed purpose in activating this history in the wake of the City of Vancouver’s recent plans to remove the Georgia Viaduct and redevelop the land for new housing and condominiums.

Cornelia Wyngaarden will be present during the screening for remarks and questions. The event will be followed by a reception.