‘The end of an arc’: Saying goodbye to Chinatown's Imperial Theatre

John Atkin remembers going to the Imperial Theatre, then known as the Golden Harvest Theatre, almost every Thursday while attending art school downtown in the late 1970s. “We’d [go to Chinatown] to watch really bad Hong Kong cop and robber films,” Atkin said. “It was just part of being in that area.” 

Anyone wandering through Main Street and East Cordova in recent weeks may have noticed demolition has begun where the shuttered Imperial Theatre has stood unused since it closed due to safety concerns in September 2022. 

As a civic historian and heritage consultant for the development that will take its place, Atkin is of two minds about saying farewell to the Imperial. He told Vancity Lookout he really believes in the project proposed for 319 Main Street; a mix of apartments, retail and even a new theatre, with the developers aiming to retain some of the spirit of the original site. 

On the other hand, the Downtown Eastside will have to say goodbye to yet another important relic in Vancouver’s rich entertainment history. 

The Golden Harvest Theatre was built in 1974 by Raymond Chow, a man often regarded as the “godfather of the Hong Kong film industry.” He had sights set on expanding Kung Fu films to a North American market, with Vancouver as his primary testing ground. “It was a rival chain to the folks over on Hastings Street, that is now the Rickshaw [Theatre],” said Atkin. 

The construction of these two theatres was in part the result of the general expansion of Chinatown throughout the 1950s, 1960s and into the 1970s. 

After World War II, immigration restrictions in Canada were lifted, including the repeal of the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act, which had essentially banned all Chinese immigration to the country for nearly three decades. By 1947, the first Chinese-Canadian citizenship ceremonies were held in Vancouver; by 1949, Chinese-Canadian families finally secured the right to vote in federal and provincial elections. 

“Vancouver had one of the largest Chinese populations on the West Coast outside of San Francisco,” Atkin said, noting that the augmented presence of Kung Fu theatres in the area was reflective of this growth. 

“This is where [companies like Chow’s] would premiere films outside of Hong Kong. If it caught on in Vancouver, then it would be shown elsewhere in North America.” The Golden Harvest was the first North American theatre to show world-famous martial artist, actor and director Bruce Lee’s films. 

The Downtown Eastside at the time was “very different from what it is today,” said Atkin. For starters, Chinatown was huge, extending beyond its modern borders along Pender Street and along the east and west sides of Main and Keefer. 

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Atkin recalled that Chinatown stretched to Powell Street and along Hastings, with bustling markets selling live fish and chickens, an active nightlife with giant neon signs hanging above packed restaurants like Ming’s (now the Fortune Sound Club), Foo Ho Ho's and venues like the Marco Polo club that would host bands like Sly and the Family Stone and the Mills Brothers. 

“It still had all manner of nightclubs and restaurants, and many of the hotels were tourist hotels. It was a very vibrant business district,” he said. 

But by the late 1970s and early 1980s, the golden era of Chinatown as a cultural hub had begun to dim. 

A number of complex factors set in motion decades earlier contributed to changes in the neighbourhood, said Atkins. 

Following the Great Depression, a series of urban planning decisions aimed at shifting the downtown core westward, as well as city hall’s move from the neighbourhood to its current location at Cambie and East 12th, hindered local businesses and gradually decreased foot traffic in the area. 

A hard-won fight managed to prevent a freeway system from being built through Chinatown in 1971, but not before nearby Hogan’s Alley, the primary hub for Vancouver’s Black population, was displaced. 

The 1980s and 1990s saw the closing of several mental health facilities across B.C., and a wave of mass evictions came for lower-income SRO tenants during Expo 86. 

In a way, the Golden Harvest has mirrored some of these challenges in the neighbourhood. From what Atkin can recall, the Golden Harvest remained largely dormant throughout the 1980s and 1990s, other than its occasional use as an event space. 

But a second chance for the Golden Harvest came in 2006, when it was bought by film producer Bill Vince for $215,000. Vince spent over $2 million transforming the former theatre into a deluxe screening room for Vancouver’s film community, complete with a 150-seat red leather boutique layout. 

However, when Vince died of cancer in 2008, his vision for the theatre, briefly renamed Cinema 319, was never fully realized. The space continued to be used as an event space throughout the early 2010s, occasionally showing independent films and adopting the name “District 319.” 

In 2018, the building was purchased by MRG Group, an entertainment company that owns the Biltmore and the Vogue, among other nightlife venues across the city. Other than a brief hiatus during the early COVID-19 pandemic, the Imperial enjoyed a nearly four-year-long resurgence, hosting myriad musical acts and other shows. 

While the loss of the Imperial marks the end of an era, Atkin said some odd features of the theatre ultimately made it less competitive.  

“It was actually a fairly plain sort of boxy space… it didn’t have that sense of interior presence that many other older theatres had,” said Atkins, noting that the stage, for example, did not have a rake, or a sloped floor that tilted away from the audience to improve visibility.

With the rise of video and the waning public interest in Kung Fu movies, Atkin said that both the Golden Harvest and the Shaw Theatre closed for a time in the mid-to-late 1980s. While the Shaw Theatre reopened as the Rickshaw in 2009, the Imperial “never really had the success that the folks who converted the Shaw Theatre into the Rickshaw have enjoyed.” 

However, for Atkins, a monumental loss for the city came in the demolition of a neighbouring theatre, the Pantages, in 2011. 

Like the Imperial, the Pantages was one of the Downtown Eastside’s most prominent vaudeville theatres. It was built by Alexander Pantages in 1908, his second ever purpose-built theatre and one of the oldest still standing in North America at the time.

At the end of its life, Atkin said the Pantages had a developer that was “more than willing” to maintain and restore the theatre in exchange for extra density from the city to build residential and commercial units. 

But before the site could be approved, the city required concurrence from all affected departments. At the time, Atkins said, someone working in the social planning department “wrote that the Pantages Theatre had no significant cultural value whatsoever” and refused to sign the report. 

As a result, the developer dropped the restoration project, and the Pantages was instead levelled to make way for condos.

Though Atkin said he does not often support many of the redevelopment projects that come through the city, he said that the proposal for the former Imperial site is a “very thoughtful and interesting project.”  

The site itself sits at a number of important crossroads, he added. Main and Cordova mark a culturally significant crossroads on Indigenous land; they are also at the edge of the Japanese and Chinese districts in the city and are part of the entertainment district.

As part of the city’s “living heritage” development approach, Atkin was tasked with delving into the site's history to incorporate as many values inherent to the previous building and the neighbourhood as possible.  “You look back to bring things forward,” he said.

Once completed, the building that will stand in the Imperial’s place will include 117 wood-framed housing units (47 market-rate and 70 for social housing), two stories of commercial and restaurant space on the first two floors, and a new, smaller theatre to replace the Imperial. 

“It’s a small gesture, but the existing [Cantonese] signage on the building is being saved as well and reinstalled on the new building, so that will be a reference point as well,” said Atkin. 

Some have characterized the rise and fall of the Imperial and other similar theatres as reflective of the demise of the neighbourhood's cultural relevance. But Atkin said he doesn’t think that’s exactly true. 

He pointed to a number of significant cultural events and spaces that still thrive in the Downtown Eastside today: The Heart of the City festival, a number of “secret” speakeasy-type spaces opening in Chinatown, the continued success of the Rickshaw, and nightclubs like Fortune Sound Club, to name just a few.  “There is still that cultural life there,” he said. 

If anything, he said the changes in the neighbourhood and the closure of the Imperial reflect a general “flattening” of Chinatown across the city. 

“The original purpose of the theatre was lost partly because of the wider spread and integration of [Chinese] folks into Vancouver,” said Atkin. “Chinatown ceased to be the center of the universe because of the way population shifts.” He added that areas like East 41st and Victoria, and stretches along both Main and Fraser, are now filled with Chinese-owned businesses. 

However, he added that the fall of the Golden Harvest, in many ways, does mark the end of a chapter in entertainment-world supremacy that Vancouver once enjoyed. 

In the 1950s and 1960s, “the who’s who of the entertainment world” flocked to Vancouver for its audiences, nightclubs and theatres, Atkins said. “In a way, the Golden Harvest is almost the end of that arc of Vancouver’s entertainment industry.”