Black History Month collectors coin commemorates Vancouver’s lost Hogan’s Alley neighbourhood

A still from Jamila Pomeroy's Union Street, a film on the history of Vancouver's once-thriving Hogan's Alley.

The tenure of Hogan’s Alley as a Vancouver community might be brief, but the historical mark that it left behind and the contribution the neighbourhood brought to the city’s melting pot nature still lingers decades on.

As Black History Month gets underway, the small, southwestern corner of Strathcona is being recognized for the space it gave the Black community from the early 1900s up until the 1960s. Hogan’s Alley, an unofficial name for the Park Lane alley running from Main Street to Jackson Avenue, was a strip where Black businesses, families and the city’s only Black church thrived.

Earlier this month, the Royal Canadian Mint announced it would be paying tribute to the lost neighbourhood with a new, silver collectors coin depicting a number of iconic Hogan’s Alley figures.

Among them, a cook; from one of the famed women-owned chicken restaurants, a choir; in a nod to the African Methodist Episcopal Fountain Chapel, a Black railway sleeping car porter; two dancers; and a pianist, a saxophonist and a singer, representing the nightclubs’ and speakeasies’ vibrant conveyor belt of musicians.

The members of the community surround an engraved Pacific Dogwood, British Columbia’s provincial flower.

The collectors coin, retailing at $119.95 and with a mintage of 5,000, illustrates the “spirit and vitality” of Hogan’s Alley, says the Royal Canadian Mint’s Pascale Poulin.

“Hogan’s Alley is an inspiring and important part of Black history in Canada,” says Poulin.

“We hope that our coin will help preserve their memory and help people living across the country understand the history of Black settlement in Canada, and its role in shaping our country’s diverse and shared identity.”

In the 1960s, the majority of Vancouver’s original Black community was displaced when the City of Vancouver issued housing redevelopment plans, bulldozing Hogan’s Alley to make way for the Vancouver viaducts.

Director Jamila Pomeroy, whose 2023 film Union Street centres on the neighbourhood’s history, says Vancouver’s Black community continues to feel the effects of this displacement through the city’s lack of cultural community space and continued, centralized Black community.

“There is, sadly, no resurrecting Hogan’s Alley,” she says.

“There is nothing that is going to bring back the business and artists, and there is certainly no easy fix to repairing the multigenerational trauma and financial turmoil this cultural erasure and displacement caused, and continues to radiate to this day,” she says.

The lost community can, however, have its legacy honoured by future city planning that authentically co-creates with the Black community, and by acknowledgments such as the one by the Royal Canadian Mint. Pomeroy says Hogan’s Alley being recognized via the coin makes her feel hopeful – we might not be able to change the past, she says, but “we can and will create a bright future for Black Vancouverites.”

“B.C. Black history has (been), and continues to be, excluded from broader historical conversations in our schools, universities and institutions, and I hope that this coin will encourage more conversation and trigger deeper learning,” Pomeroy says.

The coin marks the seventh the Canadian Mint has issued since it first began honouring Black History Month in 2019.

The ongoing series celebrates the notable moments and figures in Canada’s Black history and their role in shaping Canada’s shared national identity, with previous acknowledgements given to activist and businesswoman Viola Desmond, and the NHL’s first Black player Willie O’Ree.

Edmonton’s Amber Valley community has also featured, alongside designs that honour The Black Loyalists, The Underground Railroad, and the No. 2 Construction Battalion.