Kelowna’s most notorious street offers rich history
Global News
'It really was quite magical.… You would not have known you were in Kelowna and it was only the south side of Leon. It was totally different.'
Bob Hayes sounds almost wistful when he casts his mind back to his earliest memories of what is now one of Kelowna’s most notorious streets.
“I remember I was in Grade 7, walking down (Leon Avenue) with some friends through Chinatown on our way to the park and it was a whole different world,” Hayes said Monday.
“It really was quite magical.… You would not have known you were in Kelowna and it was only the south side of Leon. It was totally different.”
That was around 1967 and what was then Chinatown was already past its heyday.
Hayes said many of the Chinese men who first started moving to the region nearly 70 years earlier found other places to live and there was a quiet that occupied the space that few from the greater community tread.
“There weren’t children around or dogs barking.… It seemed removed from the rest of the city,” he said.
The silence was remarkable, but the architecture was less so.
Unlike Chinatowns in other cities, where ornate pagodas beckoned, Kelowna’s was more of a reflection of the community in which it was situated. There were modest brick buildings, due to the factory that was once in the city, and other low-slung wood constructs.