The Best Little Movie House in Vancouver

Photo Credit: The only example of the Imperial Palace in Beijing in Vancouver; The Leung house on Fremlin Street in Oakridge

NOSTALGIC VANCOUVER Faye Leung was about to undertake her first major housing development in 1960.

“An opportunity was knocking on my door KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK and I wanted to be a part of it, a big part of it, so I taught myself how to do it. I built affordable houses: big, small, medium, red, brown, beige, I didn’t care. I developed them all over Greater Vancouver, except in Coquitlam and Maple Ridge because no one was doing it out there yet. All of a sudden, it was one-stop shopping. I would sell the property (usually to a family in those days), make a contract they could understand, hire the best builder, get a mortgage, (at a reasonable rate with TD or Prudential), employ the best tradesmen, set up an account for the client, record the finances and hope it all worked out in the end which it usually did. I was building houses, and I got my hands into everything. No one told me how to do it. Well, they may have tried, but I never listened to them. You could always find someone willing to tell you anything.

Then, as quickly as it started, it finishes. Then come the roses, the gardenias and the chrysanthemums and tulips; then brilliant sunlight, shining through the rain and happy people smiling from head to toe as they take possession of their new homes. That’s when I truly realize I am in the housing business. Vancouver has Grouse Mountain; it has land, it has space, it has parks, it has water; it has trees. What I was in the middle of wasn’t even mentioned on the radio. There was one construction site after another as far as the eye could see. Tiny houses all lined up in a row costing under $100,000. We were all in the middle of a wild new thing, a building boom the likes of which Vancouver had never seen. Arthur Erickson, Geoffrey Massey, Fred Hollingsworth, Ned Pratt, Bing Thom and the toughest of them all, one of the fastest builders in Vancouver history – me! Faye Leung!

My first big project was developing the Canadian Pacific Railway land around Oakridge. CPR announced,
“We’re going to subdivide our large parcel of land extending from Cambie Street to Oak Street and from 41st Avenue to 49th Avenue.” There were stories about how every day in the early 1960s I would be down at City Hall getting a building permit. That’s probably a fable because there were so many down there getting building permits that it would have been hard to pick me out. David Shepherd, CPR’s manager who was in charge of the sale and his wife, became excellent friends with us over the years.
“Which properties do you want?” David would ask. I would tell him the ones I wanted and get to work. It was me specifically though who was responsible for developing ninety percent of the land at Oakridge. -excerpt from It Ain’t Over Until Faye Leung the Hat Lady Sings.