In 2009, I created Vancouver’s first crime history walking tour for the Vancouver Police Museum—a guided exploration of the city’s vice-soaked early years through its oldest neighbourhoods. The program emerged from a simple frustration: while giving historical tours of Chinatown, I kept learning material too good not to share—whispers of tunnels, opium dens, bootleggers, and murder—stories that were being reduced to titillating myths when the truth was often far more interesting.

The tour covered bootleggers and BC’s peculiar liquor laws, the Vancouver origins of Canada’s narcotics legislation, racial and labour tensions that erupted into riots, the shifting geography of the sex trade, and the city’s deep enthusiasm for gambling. I researched, wrote, and delivered it myself, drawing heavily on the museum’s extraordinary holdings and learning how to hold a group of thirty people’s attention on a busy street corner through pacing, narrative tension, and careful choice of detail.

What I didn’t fully grasp at the outset was how quickly audiences were becoming interested in darker, more uncomfortable histories. There was growing appetite for what would later be called “dark tourism,” and I was sitting on a gold mine of material. But I felt a strong responsibility toward accuracy, even when it crushed titillating preconceptions. The truth was usually more layered, more human, and ultimately more compelling than the rumours.

That commitment became especially important as the tour occasionally ventured into unwelcoming areas of the Downtown Eastside. History provided a lens to understand the present without exploiting it. The tour kept its eyes squarely on historical context, not contemporary struggles. Once, while I was mid-discussion about the evolution of Vancouver’s drug trade, a passing local helpfully interjected by holding out his hand and saying, “…and that’s what a five rock looks like.” The line stayed sharp, but the focus stayed historical.

The tour grew quickly and became a local institution—later imitated by other operators. Participants returned with contributions: a patron once donated a ping pong ball signed by the locally famous Mitzie Dupris after the “peeler” bar segment. It was my first time building interpretive programming from scratch—finding stories, shaping the arc, testing what landed. The success proved that audiences want complexity and will engage with difficult histories when you frame them honestly.