The Drive: A Retail, Social and Political History of Commercial Drive, Vancouver, to 1956

COMMERCIAL DRIVE is a retail-and-restaurant oriented street on the east side of Vancouver. The Drive, as the neighbourhood is universally known, is a wildly entertaining, multicultural, multi-ethnic and multi-sexual district with a repuation to match. But how did it get that way? The history in this book looks at a time before the Drive became overwhelmingly multicultural, a time before even the Italians were here in any numbers. Focused on the period 1935 to 1956, it looks at how local citizens turned a suburban backwater into a vibrant and important part of Vancouver by encouraging better roads, transit systems and community services. Culturally, this same period witnessed seismic changes in the private history of individuals and familes - from their choice of vacations to the pyschology of shopping, from music choices and food choices to the types of social recreations enjoyed. It was a period that saw women flood the employment market to replace the men who went off to war; and which saw another set of adjustments as the soldiers came home. By the end of the period, the first baby boomers are working their way through high school, and ideas about what a family needed by way of furnishings and appliances and services had rapidly matured. "The Drive" shows how Commercial Drive changed to meet those needs. 292 pages with more than 60 photographs

Author: Jak R. King
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 04/13/2011
Pages: 292
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.87lbs
Size: 9.02h x 5.98w x 0.61d
ISBN: 9781460933992

About the Author
Jak King has lived on the Drive for more than 20 years. Now retired after successful careers in film & TV production and marketing, he has spent many years researching and learning about the Commercial Drive neighborhood. This is the first in a planned series of books on the subject.

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