Vancouver History: Blood Alley

While better known for crime, homelessness, and hardcore drug-abuse, Gastown is also home to a particular alley that gets a lot of play on historic Vancouver walking tours - Blood Alley! Located off of Carrall St. right next to Gaoler's Mews, Blood Alley is fairly stereotypical of a Gastown alley - there's brickwork lining half of the alley and nearby buildings; there are ornate aged lamps and railings clustered together at it's entrance; and there are homeless Vancouverites huddled together out of the rain. What makes Blood Alley famous is not it's aesthetic appeal, but that it is home to perhaps the largest amount of rumours, myths, tall tales, and outright fabrications in Vancouver history.

As with any place that has such a controversial past, trying to find information - especially correct information - on Blood Alley is slightly difficult. My first "fact" about Blood Alley came from a friend who told me that it was so named because unsuspecting ship-workers of the Granville townsite would walk through the alley after pay-day only to get murdered if they didn't surrender their cash. After a little fact-finding mission, I also learned that Blood Alley may have also been the site of the city's first civic buildings, butcher shops (who would toss blood into the alley at the end of the day), and public hangings. Simply trying to connect the dots on Blood Alley is a difficult task at best for the uninformed.

And that's where John Atkin comes in. John is a Vancouver historian who runs Johnatkin.com, and claims that Blood Alley is simply a tourist trap, created during the renovation and beautification of Gastown in the 1970's. John's research has focused on maps, attempting to chart the various locations of butcher shops, jails, and courthouses of the early Granville townsite and as far as he can tell, not much happened at Blood Alley. The name appears in no text prior to the 1970's, and Major Matthews (the city's first archivist) doesn't mention it in any of his writings. Indeed, a quick check into the Vancouver City website brings forth planning documents stating the amount of money used in the creation of Blood Alley and the cost of upkeep for it's lamps (installed in the 1970's) and other "historical" features. In a city that seems to disdain and destroy the past, we have become complicit in its fake revival for the sake of cool and a quick tourist buck.

So this newfound knowledge of Blood Alley brings us to an interesting question: Is it better to have a wild and varied history of Vancouver that is imbellished with fantasy and mistruths? Or is it more important to have an accurate depiction of our city no matter how bland or boring it may be?