Joy Kogawa Historic House
While every now and then you hear of someone chaining themselves to a Doric column to delay the death of a heritage building, it’s not often someone will do the same for a story. And, old houses do have stories and it doesn’t matter if it’s a Queen Anne mansion or a miner’s cottage. Over the years they may have housed bootlegging joints or secret rooms or murderers or ghosts. And I’d argue that the social history of the house is every bit as important as its architectural chops when considering its importance to a city.
1450 West 64th Avenue, Vancouver
Writer Joy Kogawa’s childhood house at 1450 W. 64th Avenue in Vancouver is a great example. The modest wood-framed bungalow is one of the few original houses left in the area and featured prominently in Kogawa’s classic novel Obasan, considered one of the 100 most important Canadian books ever written. Obasan tells the story of the Japanese internment through the eyes of six-year-old girl who, in 1942, had her family ripped apart by the war.
The house is a physical reminder of the time when thousands of Japanese-Canadians were wrenched from their homes and interned at places like Slocan, B.C. during WW2.
In 2003, Kogawa, who lives in Toronto, drove past the old house while on a trip to Vancouver. She was stunned to find that it was for sale. “But the asking price was out of sight, over $500,000,” she told a Vancouver Sun reporter. “Still it was amazing that the house was still there, when all around it, the old houses were gone and replaced with new ones.”
When it looked like the new owner was set to demolish the old house, a group of writers and heritage die-hards formed the Joy Kogawa Homestead Committee and joined with the Land Conservancy to save the house from demolition. It is now has a writers-in-residence program and the plan is to make it a historical literary landmark.
