3 November 2023 – A mild but changeable day.

The morning’s rain still sparkles…

as fickle afternoon sunshine throws shadows on Main Street Brewing Company, at East 7th & Scotia.

The location is not incidental. Main Street Brewing occupies a Mission-style building that began life in 1913 as a storage warehouse for Vancouver Breweries Ltd., one of a cluster of breweries (and tanneries) in the area, all drawing their water from Brewery Creek, which crossed what is now East 7th & Scotia to run north into False Creek. The building later served as an auto body shop & repair garage before being restored in 2010 and returned full circle to life as a brewery.

I walk north on Scotia, more or less tracing the now-sewered creek’s path toward False Creek itself. I pause at East 5th, to admire these pebbles so delicately placed on a street-corner rock…

and continue north-north-north, down-down-down, to East 1st, where I turn left.

My brain expects my body will walk straight on (yet again, I grant you) to False Creek. My feet decide otherwise. Two snappy right turns — and here I am at Industrial Avenue & Western Street, on the edge of False Creek Flats.

The capital-F Flats — like Scotia Street — exist because the City decided to reshape nature. The tidal flats at the eastern end of False Creek were filled in, 1917-1925, and tributary creeks were contained & covered. False Creek Flats became a 450-acre industrial and transportation hub. It still is, in many ways, though City documents tell us its +600 businesses and 8,000 workers are now engaged in digital, health-care and creative activities as well.

I think of it as home territory for the first-ever, the 2016, Vancouver Mural Festival. Some of the murals are still in surprisingly good shape — and still relevant. The largely red one you see above, on that blue wall, by Nevercrew…

depicts a polar bear trapped in a pop bottle. If only it were not so relevant!

The area has a simple grid.

• Two north-south streets: Western on the west & Station on the east.
• Three east-west streets that march from Industrial Ave. north to Terminal Ave., and have geographically self-evident names: Southern, Central, and Northern.

The view northward from Station and Southern is a good capsule of Flats’ history: another 2016 mural on the corner (by Katie Maasik); a stretch of old warehouses disappearing from view to the left along Southern; Pacific Central Station (completed 1919) gleaming at the far end of Station St…

.and, right across the intersection, one of the area’s new health-care businesses.

Stemcell Technologies, founded in 1993, has locations around the world but is headquartered here in the Flats. (I confess I am distracted by the sight of the Hello Kitty decal on this car’s steering wheel.)

There’s a whole stretch of 2016 murals along Southern St. — but there’s also this pair of wonderfully rusty old buildings at the far end, over at Western Ave. They may or may not currently be a wood-working co-op, I can’t quite get a fix on that, but I don’t care, I just like all that rust.

And I tantalize you with the edge of another 2016 survivor, a mural by Peter Ricq. (For the whole 2016 VMF collection, click here.)

But 2016 wasn’t the start of street art in the Flats. Central Street is still one long gallery of earlier works, perhaps all or mostly done in 2007. That’s my guess, since that’s the only date I see on the relatively few murals that are signed.

This one makes me think of Borobudur, the 9th-c. Buddhist temple in Central Java.

Despite the obvious, and multiple, differences between the two, they do share a common theme: each illustrates, either with paint or in architecture, humanity’s spiritual ascent.

I rejoin Station Street, walk north to Northern, pass the still-busy CNR tracks…

and cross Terminal Ave. for a brief visit to Pac Central.

How could I be in the area, rich with railway history, and not say hello to the train station? So I greet the lion at the imposing doorway (there are always lions, in our colonial-reference buildings)…

and — finally!! — head for False Creek.

Because even if my feet vetoed the plan originally, they agree that — just like Pac Central — the Creek deserves a moment’s hello.

As I climb the Creekside Park berm toward the water, I see that other feet are already paying a visit. Even though they are dangling, not walking.

I skirt the bench, nod to the view…

and let my feet walk me home.