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...