VANCOUVER FROM 1900 TO 1990: An Afternoon of Nostalgia at the Vancouver Museum

I visited the Vancouver Museum at Vanier Park on the weekend, mainly to see the neon exhibit, but was pleasantly surprised to find an excellent display of artifacts and settings from  Vancouver 1900 to 1990. What fun to take this trip down memory lane, and to see how the early pioneers lived here as well as the more familiar but almost forgotten eras of the city.

From the 1900's when the city began to be settled, there were displays for each time period that showed the life of the people at that time.  A mother pushing her baby in a pram on the street, and a wealthy woman from Shaughnessy dressed in her expensive gown, to reflections of 50's and even the hippie era.

There were displays of toys, old cars, furniture, a beautiful gold plated cash register from the old Europe Hotel, and displays from the Chinese community and the internment of the Japanese.

 

Look at the golf clubs!

Toys and Childrens garments

Bathing suits were rented out at the beaches!

There were rooms set up with furnishings including working TVs for various periods of times.  Here's a typical 1950's living room.

But my favorite of all was walking into a 1960's-70's hippie house.  There was even a closet of hippie clothes you could try on.  The bookshelf had all the books popular at the time.  There were all sorts of memorabalia around from the time of the Flower Children including a coffee table with all the hash pipes, rolling papers and pamphlets about LSB and marijuana.  Now that was a real trip!

Hippie clothes.

pot smoking paraphanalia





Hippies loved music!

One of the things that I really found interesting was a wooden shack that was an example of shacks built by homeless people under the viaduct.  It was a much more 'sophisticated' structure than the homeless usually have these days.  Apparantly in the '70's there was a whole 'settlement' of them living under the bridges and viaducts.

homeless person's shack

It's well worth a visit to the Museum of Vancouver to see these displays along with the neon signs that used to decorate the city.  It's a real piece of our city's history!