One of the city's historic landmarks perished in Sunday night's fire on George Street.
The Shasta Cafe has been gone a long time as a business, but its bones were still within the walls of modern day structures like Something Old Something New, Mothers N More Maternity and the Copper Pig. Many of those bones are now broken forever.
The Shasta was more than just old. It was one of the most popular and largest restaurants in early Prince George and it became one of the most successful immigrant-based businesses of that era.
"The Shasta Cafe was one of the nicest restaurants in town. People would line up outside every day to eat there," according to the official documents of the downtown walking tour of historic Prince George.
It was founded in 1933 by William Mason who then sold it in 1946 to the brothers who would carry it on into modern times.
According to Citizen archives, Wayne and Henry Chow emigrated to Canada in 1923 from China. They arrived on the Empress of Canada steamship and landed in Victoria. Their father had been a cook in Barkerville during the gold rush, then stayed on as a cook for the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway construction crews.
Henry took up the culinary arts profession himself once in Canada, perhaps partially to be a responsible brother to Wayne who was 17 years his junior. The two, led by Henry initially, turned The Shasta into a magnet for the large contingent of Chinese nationals and their offspring in an era of federal government-prescribed discrimination against people from China.
"I can pinpoint the moment of our arrival in town," said Prince George writer and Order of Canada inductee Denise Chong in her recent book Lives Of the Family. "It's midnight on Christmas Eve, 1958. My father, in our 1949 Meteor, drives the deserted streets. We peer over snowbanks looking for 432 George Street...We find that cafe, the Shasta, but it's closed. My father sees staff at the back sharing dinner around a table, so he knocks at the door. The proprietors, Eleanor and Wayne Chow, whom we've never met before, exclaim how happy they are to see some Chinese people and welcome us inside."
"I am proud to say that my grandfather Henry Chow played a vital role in helping members of the Chinese community in establishing their roles and roots in Prince George during those discriminatory and abrasive times," said E.J. Chow to The Citizen in 2008.
Chow also clarified the address discrepancy. Chong was not incorrect in placing The Shasta in the next block south of the historic Shasta site, in what would be facing the current Ramada Hotel and near what was, at the time, the Prince George Hotel and the Panarama News - both now gone from the landscape.
"Prince George actually had two Shasta Cafs on George Street," Chow explained. "My grandfather Henry opened up the original Shasta, which much later on became Ming's. My grandfather, his brother Wayne and two others opened the second Shasta."
The move was necessitated by the building's owner wanting to use the space in which the original Shasta was located.
At the time of the move in the early 1950s, it was noted that a full course meal price at the Shasta was only 75 cents, toast and coffee was 15 cents, coffee by itself was five cents per cup, and when they raised it to 10 cents their patrons wanted to know if this was to help pay their way back to China.
On the contrary, both Wayne and Henry continued to operate The Shasta until 1972 when they sold it to Johnny Leong who carried it on until 1978 when it finally closed. Following the sale, the Chow brothers and their respective families continued to reside into retirement in Prince George.
Part of the Shasta legacy includes The Copper Pig BBQ House, which survived Sunday's fire.
