Kristin Hardie, VPM’s Curator, told me that such groups have become fairly routine in her museum. They were on a field trip from China with the overall purpose of learning English, and I couldn’t help wondering why their teachers thought Chinese teens would benefit from learning about Canadian crime. In each room Chinese students were sitting around bored with many trying to take naps. I was far from alone as I went through it. Built in 1932 to “investigate unusual deaths” and provide space for coroner services, it was used until 1980. The Vancouver Police Museum (VPM), North America’s oldest, is not too far from Gassy’s saloon in a heritage building that was once the city’s morgue and crime lab. After visiting the Vancouver Police Museum, I understood why its first building was a saloon, not a church. Burrard Inlet became Granville, which became Vancouver, Canada’s excellent West Coast city with a surprisingly seedy past. Burrard Inlet was a prospering, boisterous settlement in the 19th century when Jack Deighton, nickname Gassy, started its first business–a saloon.
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