Chinatown and the city's oldest homes
Strathcona is Vancouver's oldest residential neighbourhood: colourful wooden houses, community gardens and quiet lanes, with Chinatown on its western edge. The bakeries and herbalists of Pender and Keefer Streets now sit alongside cocktail bars and some of the city's most creative restaurants.
From the late 19th century, railway and sawmill workers settled east of downtown: Chinese, Italian, Japanese and Ukrainian families, and a Black community around Hogan's Alley. In the 1960s, a freeway plan was set to flatten part of the neighbourhood and Chinatown; residents fought it until it was dropped. Hogan's Alley, though, vanished under the Georgia viaducts, built in the early 1970s.
