Michael Turner
Former Location, Gladstone Inn, 2211 Kingsway
"when you feel like dancing
It’s been years since
They danced there
When they called it the High-Hat
Before that the Gladstone"
From poem “12”
Michael Turner, author of edgy Vancouver-based prose and poetry like The Pornographer’s Poem and Hard Core Logo, has a long and fond relationship with Kingsway. As described in his poetry book, Kingsway, here the Gladstone Inn was erected shortly after the Royal Engineers widened the First Nations foot path and subsistence trail now known as Kingsway in the mid-1860s. As an art critic and historian, Turner views this seemingly inauspicious location as the site of “the first post-European ‘contact’ structure” to be erected along the vital Kingsway thoroughfare connecting New Westminster and Vancouver. In 2015, the site was shared by Apollo Muffler and an ANAVets Legion, but it was many things before that. In 1937, it was a jazz joint called the Hi-Hat Cabaret. For more information, Turner recommends Major Matthews’ Mount Pleasant Early Days: Memories of Rueben Hamilton Pioneer 1890, City Archives, City Hall, Vancouver (1957).
