Kelowna’s most notorious street offers rich history
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.
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.Unlike Chinatowns in other cities, where ornate pagodas beckoned, Kelowna’s was more of a reflection of the community in which it was situated.
Sun Yat-Sen would go on to be known through history as the man who toppled the emperor of China, a historic marker that one would think would be trumpeted. A look at newsprint archives, however, shows exactly what the average Chinese man faced.That political force was depicted in local newsprint as little more than a cartoonish figure with little importance.
When the ‘70s rolled around, the Leon Avenue Kelowna is more familiar with today started to take shape. Hayes said it wasn’t a place where people would want to take children but it was lively, for a while. Anthony Beyrouti is the owner of Orchard Park Property Ltd., the development company that announced in 2020 plans to build three towers, one of which at 42 storeys tall, on the notorious strip. He, like Hayes, wants to see a bit of history acknowledged.
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