The Visual History of the Smilin' Buddha

The Visual History of the Smilin' Buddha Cabaret

    The title of this project is “The Visual History of the Smilin' Buddha Cabaret.” This does not mean that I intend to simply tell the story of the Smilin' Buddha through photos and video, but that I want to understand the way its story has been, and is being, told through photography and film. While I want to keep the Smilin' Buddha as the focus of this visual history (or history of visuals), it will, at times, be necessary to discuss the larger history of the Downtown Eastside (DTES) and the City of Vancouver to add to the “thick description” of the Smilin' Buddha story. The images that represent the memory of the early-Smilin' Buddha should not be considered accurate representations of the way people saw or thought of the club at the time. While these images provide a different perspective of the past, their importance has largely only been recognized within the last decade as shows at the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) and Museum of Vancouver (MOV) have highlighted under appreciated aspects of Vancouver's history through exhibitions on its neon heritage and the street photography of Fred Herzog. These neon signs and photographs are, like the Smilin' Buddha, part of Vancouver's cultural history, but they are also part of an effort to redefine the club, the DTES neighbourhood, and the larger city. In this way, the significance of the visual history of the Smilin' Buddha is not in how the images represent the past, but how they are used in the present.

It is not clear when or why the Smilin' Buddha Cabaret closed for good. Several sources suggest it closed in 1987, others place this date as late as 1993 when a fire gutted the club, ¹ but it hardly seems to matter. As far as I can tell, there was no eulogy for the end of the Smilin' Buddha. By the late-1980s the Vancouver punk scene was either dead or had moved on from the club at 109 East Hastings Street and it doesn't appear that anyone else came to fill their place. When the Smilin' Buddha reappeared in a 1993 Vancouver Sun article, it was to announce that the large neon sign (seen at the top of this page) could be purchased for $3000 from a neon company in Burnaby.² That the band 54-40 purchased the sign, named their 1994 album after the club, and used the sign as a backdrop on tour is an important, if well-told, part of the Smilin' Buddha story. But perhaps more importantly for the legacy of the club, the band donated the sign to the MOV in the mid-2000s where it is now on permanent display in the You Say You Want a Revolution gallery.

Fred Herzog

Fred Herzog "Hastings at Columbia 2" 1958

Fred Herzog "Hastings at Columbia" 1958

      The MOV says that the Smilin' Buddha “was at the centre of Vancouver's changing entertainment scene for decades [and] in the 1950s . . . was a symbol of Vancouver's post-war prosperity and bustle as captured in the photographic work of Fred Herzog,” most likely referring to two photos taken in 1958, both titled “Hastings at Columbia.” While the “bustle” in these photographs is evident, it is questionable what exactly the Smilin' Buddha represented at this time, or how this bustle in the photo relates to the Smilin' Buddha beyond its proximity within Herzog's frame. Since these photos are taken in the late-afternoon on a Sunday (judging from the shadows and the newspaper in the second photo), this would mean that it was hours before the Smilin' Buddha's nightly entertainment would begin. Like most of the East End clubs, the Smilin' Buddha was still a bottle club at this time--an unlicensed cabaret that attracted patrons with entertainment and sold food, ice and drink mixes while the patrons brought in their own booze that they kept hidden away in case of raids by police or liquor squad detectives.³ Without entertainment, beer, or liquor sales (unless sold illegally) it is unlikely that the club would be open at the time of Herzog's photo.

Fred Herzog "Hub and Lux" 1958

      The MOV's sentence should probably read, “the Smilin' Buddha has become a symbol of Vancouver's post-war prosperity” since this signification appears to be the result of the preservation, stories, and myths that have sustained and amplified the memory and legend of the Smilin' Buddha, rather than with any idea actually expressed in the 1950s. Next to the MOV's own photos of the Smilin' Buddha's neon sign, Fred Herzog's photos have probably become the most frequently reproduced images of the club. Herzog must have been attracted to the sign, since it features so prominently in both “Hastings at Columbia” photos, yet it is questionable whether it held the same iconic status for him as it appears to hold for many people today. Both “Hub and Lux” also taken in 1958, just one block west of the Smilin' Buddha, and “Arthur Murray” taken in 1960 from the corner of Hastings and Cambie, show scenes more closely focused on the neon signs of Vancouver, taken at night when their effect is more fully realized. Add to these some of Herzog's many photos of the Granville strip, and the image of the Smilin' Buddha place as “the centre of Vancouver's changing entertainment scene,” becomes questionable unless the emphasis is placed on the changes in entertainment at the club.

Fred Herzog "Arthur Murray" 1960

        As much as Fred Herzog's photos have come to represent 1950s and 60s Vancouver today, it is important to recognize that his work did not receive widespread recognition at the time.  It was not until 2007 that his first book of photographs was published and he received a career retrospective at the VAG. Part of what makes Herzog's photos distinctive today is the same thing that kept his work from being considered “serious” art and more widely reproduced at the time he was taking them: his use of colour.  Not only was colour film harder and more expensive to print, it was also considered kitschy, vulgar, and both “distorting” and “too damn real for its own good.”⁴ On one hand, Claudia Gochman explains that because the medium of photography was thought of “as a window to the world, possess[ing] an intrinsically documentary value, [it] had a duty to maintain a sense of seriousness” that, for whatever reason, colour could not maintain.⁵ On the other hand, New York Times photography critic, A.D. Coleman, cited in Grant Arnold's introduction to Herzog's Vancouver Photographs, wrote that “the abstraction inherent in black-and-white photography . . . makes possible layers of meaning which are beyond the reach of color photography."⁶

Fred Herzog "Arcade" 1968
Taken from the Northwest corner of Main & Hastings.

The debate about the value and use of colour in photography from the 1950s-70s has shifted to debates about the value and use of street photography today.  In Unfinished Business: Vancouver Street Photographs 1955 to 1985, Bill Jeffries writes “street photographs are powerful social documents dense with information, almost always open to conflicting interpretations, and conflicting attributions of 'quality.'”⁷  That Herzog's photos are so frequently used to represent Vancouver's past suggests their aesthetic value, but it doesn't consider what his artistic vision was.  Helga Pakasaar, for instance, writes that Herzog's photos “are vulnerable to a nostalgic reading, yet [he] avoids any glorification of the past or desire for historical continuity;”⁸ Stephen Osborne, similarly, writes that “appearances in the city beckon to the camera in the present tense, and the camera responds.  Hence there is no posterity presumed in these photographs, no rhetoric of preservation or glorification.”⁹  Yet, Herzog says, “I pictured myself having to show what the city looked like to people maybe 50 or a hundred years from now.”¹⁰

Fred Herzog "Man With a Bandage" 1968.

In interviews, Fred Herzog describes his style as “photo-realism:” a photographic equivalent to writers like Dos Passos and Flaubert. Grant Arnold describes this style as a “realism that value[s] detail and objective description over explicit authorial commentary.”¹¹ In his own words, Herzog says “the photo-realist hopes to discover unseen treasures, picturesque disorder, over-the-top nasty disorder, naive art by housewives and gardeners, decay of all descriptions and the multicoloured results of misdemeanour, if not crime.”¹² In this way, Herzog's descriptions of his own work appear to support contesting interpretations and uses of his photographs today.  His photos are intended to be both realistic documents of a time and place showing “city vitality,” and an attempt to capture the “picturesque disorder” of these places.¹³

Fred Herzog "Howe and Nelson" 1960

    The question is, do these ideas of vitality and disorder contradict each other?  This is an important question given the way popular narratives describe the DTES as a once vital part of the city that has decayed into a spectacle of homelessness and drug addiction.  Michael Turner interprets Herzog's second “Hastings at Columbia” photo to represent Hastings Street's transition from city centre to “war zone,” noting that “the shadow over the Columbia street sign is telling, though nothing compared to those better-dressed long coats retreating from Herzog's camera.”¹⁴ While Herzog's other “Hastings at Columbia” photo doesn't lend itself to this anachronistic interpretation, the MOV similarly reads history backwards into these photos by suggesting that they show the Smilin' Buddha as a symbol of Vancouver's post-war prosperity.  For Herzog, vitality doesn't seem to be linked to economics, but it is not clear if his photos, like “Howe and Nelson,” taken in 1960, show a “romanticism for an earlier Vancouver . . . scrubbed raw by 'wear, decay, and abandonment,'” as Michael Turner suggests,¹⁵ or whether he trying to offer a more substantive critique of modernism.  Whatever the case, Herzog appears to lament the loss of “old” Vancouver to the encroaching modernism of Vancouver architecture exemplified by the civic planning initiative that led to the production of the 1964 short documentary To Build A Better City.

   Bev Davies

Bev Davies - Black Flag at the Smilin' Buddha

     While Herzog's “Hastings at Columbia” photos may be the most reproduced images of the Smilin' Buddha, Bev Davies has, by far, the largest collection of photos of the club, and as far as I have seen, the only interior photos.  Davies has few photos showing the exterior of the club or the atmosphere on Hastings Street that are comparable to Herzog's work, as her focus was the punk scene rather than street scenes. Where Herzog's photos represent “prosperous” Vancouver, Davies' photos represent the late-1970s and early-1980s Smilin' Buddha when the club was “ground zero” (to use the MOV's words) for Vancouver's punk scene.  This choice to describe Smilin' Buddha as “ground zero” suggests an image of the club as, both, the centre of the punk movement, and as a disaster area—an idea that the punk scene also cultivated at the time.  An advertisement for a weekend of DOA performances at Smilin' Buddha in the Georgia Straight from April, 1979 proudly states the club's location as “On Skid Row.”¹⁶  

Bev Davies - Smilin' Buddha Cabaret

    In their essay in Stan Douglas' Every Building on 100 West Hastings, Jeff Sommers and Nick Blomley note that the term “skid road” has been used to describe the DTES since at least the early 1950s in newspaper articles.¹⁷ The term comes from the time when log roads were used to “skid” trees to the mill, but also came to apply to the bars, hotels, and bordellos that sprang up around logging camps.¹⁸ While today the “skid road” area of Vancouver has been rebranded the DTES, it is not exactly clear what “skid row” meant in the area surrounding the Smilin' Buddha in the late-70s and early-80s, but Davies' night photo above (taken sometime between 1980-84), and this Vancouver Transportation Department photo taken in the early to mid-1980s suggest a different picture of the DTES than the one we have today.  Sommers and Blomley suggest that rebranding of skid road as the DTES was an attempt to connect the neighbourhood and its residents to the area's working-class past, rather than with the drugs and criminality that often defines the neighbourhood.¹⁹ Yet, by proudly asserting their place within skid row at the time, and in current narratives about the punk scene, people like Joe Keithley and John Armstrong seem to be appropriating this working-class identity to lend a sense of authority, toughness and wildness to the punk scene and to their legacy.²⁰

Bev Davies - Smilin' Buddha crowd

     Many of Bev Davies' photos contribute to this image. Shot in black and white, these images show the energy, excitement, chaos, and weirdness of the early punk scene (while others, suggest that punk has always been the domain of nerdy, misfit kids). If Herzog's photos show the vitality of the DTES through bright colour photographs, then Davies' photos could represent the area stripped of its vibrancy, an apocalyptic “ground zero” taken over by strange kids with nothing to lose.   Of course, while the punk scene may have been most commonly associated with the Smilin' Buddha, this was not the only place where bands played in the city.  This photo shows the K-Tels, who played the first punk show at the Smilin' Buddha on March 24, 1979, at Gary Taylor's Rock Room (661 Hornby St.) in the heart of Vancouver's downtown nightclub district.  Like the Smilin' Buddha, this room was a strip club before hosting punk bands, as the mirrored walls in the photo suggest, but unlike the Smilin' Buddha, it has not become an integral part of the punk scene's identity.  This is likely because punk bands did not have the same level of control at Gary Taylor's as they did at the Smilin' Buddha, but also because its West End location is not conducive to the same stories of toughness and hardship.

After the Smilin' Buddha

Steve Addison - Hastings at Columbia 2012

     Images of the Smilin' Buddha since the punk scene moved on from the club (or faded away, depending on your perspective) emphasize the decay of the building and the neighbourhood. The image above, taken in 2012 from the same location as Herzog's photo more than 50 years earlier, is from a Vancouver Police Department blog titled, “Eastside Stories: Diary of a Vancouver Beat Cop.” The photo, suggestive of a different sort of “bustle” than Herzog captures, is part of post titled “Hastings and Columbia – then and now” (tagged “history lesson”) which laments that “those gorgeous neon signs have been replaced by empty storefronts and tattered awnings [and that] the live music venues and pool halls [have been] replaced by the drug injection site, a sex shop and a marijuana dispensary.” Without dwelling (too much) on Officer Addison's strange chronology where Insite, opened in 2003, could be responsible for replacing businesses that closed fifteen years prior to that (or the fact that someone put an empty storefront where a neon sign once was), this narrative suggests that live music and pool have been replaced in this area by drugs and drug addicts.  This ignores the fact that bands continue to play in the area (I've played the Balmoral, Brandiz, and at least one gallery on the 100-block of East Hastings alone), and that the businesses, like the Smilin' Buddha, that the officer uses to contrast Hastings then and now, were subjected to arcane liquor laws and heavy police scrutiny because they were considered a social and moral problem.  The neon signs, too, were subject to a campaign by Alderman Warren Kennedy and the Civic Arts Committee to remove and restrict neon signage in the city, which was seen as tacky, crass commercialism.²¹

 

The Smiling Sports Cafe - Still from Heroines

      Through the 1990s and 2000s, the DTES has been subject to numerous projects documenting problems in the neighbourhood.  Films like the National Film Board's Through a Blue Lens (1999), with footage shot by DTES beat cops; Stan Feingold's Heroines (2001), documenting Lincoln Clarkes' Heroines photo project; Corey Ogilvie's Streets of Plenty (2010); and Josh Laner's Wastings and Pain (2010), run the spectrum from challenging to shamefully exploitive. It is impossible to understand what life is like for people with drug addictions living in the DTES—this is why I am uncomfortable with Susan Musgrave's poetry, told from the perspective of a drug addicted woman, that accompanies Lincoln Clarkes' photography in Heroines—but whether these films are intended to serve as cautionary tales, find answers to the problems in the DTES, or simply document the “reality” of life in the neighbourhood, they all tie into an idea of the DTES as a vortex of desperation and support the narratives of the decline of Hastings Street from city centre to urban blight.

     While the interest in the photographs of Fred Herzog and Bev Davies, and the preservation of DTES buildings, suggests that Vancouver is acknowledging the value of the history of the DTES, there remains an uneasy peace between preservation, commemoration, and gentrification. The building at 109 East Hastings, once home to the Smilin' Buddha Cabaret, has recently reopened at the SBC Restaurant—an indoor skatepark and cafe. Because this space has become a symbol of the history of the DTES, it is also the site of conflict over the definition and narration of this history that is fought, at least in part, over the images that represent the past. So, while Raphael Samuel argues that heritage preservation “gives materiality to the idea of history,”²² the question remains, whose history is it and what does it mean?

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<sup>1. Keith McKellar, Neon Eulogy:Vancouver Cafe and Street (Vancouver: Ekstasis Editions, 2001), 27.↩
2. John Mackie, "Hey Buddha, Got a Spare $3000," The Vancouver Sun, (10 June 1993): C2.↩
3. Becki L. Ross, Burlesque West: Showgirls, Sex, and Sin in Postwar Vancouver (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 50-72.↩
4. Claudia Gochman, "Fred Herzog: In Colour," in Fred Herzog: Photographs(/i> (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2011), 2; Grant Arnold, "Fred Herzog's Vancouver Photographs," in Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2007), 5. ↩
5. Gochman, 2. ↩
6. Arnold, "Fred Herzog," 5.↩
7. Bill Jeffries, "Bystanders in Terminal City: The Street Photograph in Vancouver 1955 to 1985," in Unfinished Business: Vancouver Street Photographs 1955 to 1985 (Vancouver: Presentation House Gallery, 2005), 3. ↩
8. Helga Pakasaar, "Fred Herzog," in Fred Herzog: Locations (Vancouver: Equinox Galler, 2009), 6. ↩
9. Stephen Osborne, "Cities Disappear," in Unfinished Business: Vancouver Street Photographs 1955 to 1985 (Vancouver: Presentation House Gallery, 2005), 2.↩
10. Stephen Waddell, "Fred Herzog in Conversation with Stephen Waddell," in Fred Herzog Photographs (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 181.↩
11. Arnold, "Fred Herzog," 8.↩
12. Grant Arnold, "An Interview With Fred Herzog," in Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2007), 27. ↩
13. Arnold, "Interview," 29.↩
14. Michael Turner, "Fred and Ethel," in Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2007), 142-143.↩
15. Turner, 138.↩
16. The Georgia Straight, April 27-May 2, 1979, p.6.↩
17. Jeff Sommers and Nick Blomley, "Every Building on 100 West Hastings," in Stan Douglas, Every Building on 100 West Hastings (Vancouver, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002), 33.↩
18. Sommers and Blomley, 30.↩
19. Sommers and Blomley, 38.↩
20. See John Armstron, Guilty of Everything (Vancouver: New Star Books, 2001); Joe Keithley, I Shithead: A Life in Punk (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003).↩
21. See, Katherine Hill, "Our Neon Nightmare: The Role of the Civic Arts Committee in Dismantling Vancouver's Neon Sign Jungle, 1957-1974," in British Columbia History 46 no.3 (2013), 5-14; Glowing in the Dark, Documentary (Moving Images Distribution, 1997).↩
22. Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London: Verson, 1994), 351.↩</sup>