The Jimi Hendrix Shrine & Museum, at the corner of Main and Union, is an oddball, homespun tribute to a rock-music icon. Housed in an orange-painted brick building behind a student hostel, the museum contains photos and memorabilia of the guitarist and singer, who died in 1970 at age 27. Outside, visitors can enjoy the "shrine," a gazebo area laid out on Astroturf with potted flowers and a view of the noisy back lane.

As it stands, this amateur museum is the only reminder of Hogan's Alley, home to Vancouver's small, but significant black population whose men worked as porters in the nearby train station. The Hendrix Museum building was once part of Vie's Chicken and Steak House, a neighbourhood institution that employed Hendrix's grandmother, Nora.

"Hogan's Alley was a mixed, immigrant neighbourhood with Italian, blacks and Asians," Wayde Compton tells me outside the Georgia and Dunsmuir street viaducts. "It wasn't so much where every black person in the city lived, but the community locus. The church was here, as were chicken houses like Vie's."

A rough, working-class area, Hogan's Alley was demolished in 1967 to build the viaducts, part of an ill-considered plan by an NPA-led city council to construct an eight-lane freeway through Strathcona. "The idea was to gear the city to the car and people living in the suburbs," says Compton, a poet and essayist who's fought for a memorial to this lost community. "The NPA did this in an era before consultation. When they released their plans in 1967, people were horrified."

After a rancorous debate, a neighbourhood group that included Mike Harcourt successfully blocked the freeway but not the viaducts, whose fate is now under study by city council.

"The viaducts were part of a plan that was rejected. They now consume four city blocks and the legacy of the black community that was obliterated," says Vision Vancouver Coun. Geoff Meggs. "Are they a positive part of the future, or will they hold us back?"

Presently, the viaducts serve as a monument to the folly of "urban removal," a movement that was perceptively nicknamed "Negro removal" in the States. Already, some notable figures in the city, including architect Bing Thom, have advocated for the dismantling of these roadways. Their proposals include the creation of a park space built on the existing bridge, like Manhattan's High Line, or the construction of a new residential area on the city-owned land for approximately 7,200 new residents.

Compton and I walk up Union Street, opposite the viaduct on-ramp. As we pass the V6A condo development behind the Hendrix Museum, he points to the cobbles from the original neighbourhood's streets that have been exposed by the construction site. "I think we need more social housing. People are being priced out of the city," he says. "The fear is that we'll see more gentrification; in that case, it should be left alone."

According to Compton, plans for a Hogan's Alley Memorial are finally underway. I suggest to him a more fitting tribute would be to design another mixed neighbourhood in its place, one in which people of different ethnicities and incomes can co-exist. Today, the different demographics of the city--singles and families, poor and rich, native English speakers and people who have another first language--live too often without the daily co-mingling that gives a city its character, community and sense of mutual appreciation.

Perhaps the solution could lie in more social housing, combined with affordable developments, like Ian Gillespie's 60 West Cordova project, which eschews parking spots and discourages property speculation by forcing owners to reside in properties, and fill the dearth of un-detached family housing in the city. The future of the viaducts could possibly reside in its past.

"The lesson of those times," Compton says about the original neighbourhood's demolition, "is that people who live in the area should decide what happens there. They generally do what's best for the neighbourhood."

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(Allen Garr is on vacation.)