16 November 2024 – I enjoy walking this ‘hood, this part of Fairview. It’s a quiet stretch of older wooden homes, all very human scale and welcoming, with their front porches and front gardens.
But this street, indeed this whole area, is adjacent to the Broadway traffic artery and lies within the ambit of the comprehensive Broadway Plan — which, for all its consultations and talk of public space, is focused on intensification.
Land Assembly billboards have become commonplace.
The future is on its way.
I’m with Graffito Guy. It’s gonna be ugly.
On a happier note!
The Very Large Waterfowl I showed you in the previous post has been identified.
In her comment on the post, Lynette d’Arty-Cross was cautious enough only to say she was “reasonably certain,” but that’s good enough for me. We’re looking at a juvenile trumpeter swan.
Thank you, Lynette.
Do the rest of you know her blog (In the Net! – Pictures and Stories of Life)? If not, click here. You’ll be glad you did.
12 November 2024 – It’s definitely a leaden sky up there, but down here there’s lots to look at. Plus there’s a rain jacket in my backpack. I am equipped.
Colours pop against all that grey.
Bright autumn leaves snagged in a still glowing shrub…
seed pods tawny against yellowing foliage…
seed pods cascading from their vines…
and a small tree, starkly elegant against its stone & brick backdrop…
all of them my companions, as I walk my way north down Scotia Street, flanking the east wall of…
the Brewery Creek Building.
Not its original name! Even “Fell’s Candy Factory,” still visible above the brass lettering, is not the original name.
Built c. 1904 as a storage cellar for Vancouver Brewery Ltd., this building was later (among other things) a candy factory, a creamery, a grease works and a stucco manufacturing plant before the restoration and renovations that, in 1993…
transformed it into a collection of live/work condos in a Class A heritage building.
New-builds are now springing up all around. It more than holds its own.
Though I like some of the sassy newcomers.
Especially ones that prove modest building materials can also hold their own — when deployed with bold colour and strong, clean lines.
And this is the back-alley view!
A bit farther north, I’m still caught up in the old/new mix that is Mount Pleasant these days. Low vintage buildings and early (2017 or so) Vancouver Mural Festival artworks mark East 3rd and the alley just off Main Street..
but behind them to the south rises one of the sleek new eco-conscious work facilities that are now reshaping the area, East 5th in particular.
I’m headed in the opposite direction, north & west to the east end of False Creek. My route takes me past Mountain Equipment now-American-Company-not-Canadian-Coop. I consciously Don’t Go There; I instead enjoy the exterior of this mass timber building. Including the corvine slogan under one pillar’s footing…
and droplets sliding down the water course built into the Quebec Street façade.
You see? It has rained, it will rain, but at the moment, it is not — not quite — raining.
I’m closing in on False Creek…
but it’s not the geodesic dome of Science World that catches my eye. it’s the runaway red balloon down there against the railing.
And then I forget all about the red balloon.
I can hear chimes & gongs & cymbals & whistles, and I know how to interpret them. They tell me that the glass tower by the Science World entrance, sadly silent during a long restoration, is once again in glorious, ridiculous, delightful, full-tilt operation. It has no name that I can find, but if ever any 2024 contraption deserved the name Rube Goldberg Machine — this is it.
Things clank, whiz, fly around, spiral and drop, tip and tilt, climb and do it again. A woman grins at me over her children’s heads. “The kids are the excuse. I could stand here all day.” I nod.
But we eventually move on …
I, past the reclining question-mark outside Science World’s creek-facing west wall that invites us to consider our daily choices, all of which affect the environment.
Question-mark nicely suits what happens next. I find myself in an impromptu focus group of SeaWall pedestrians — diversified in our demographics, but united in our conclusion.
Despite much conjecture among us, we remain puzzled. Goose? Swan? We settle for Very Large Waterfowl. We also agree that he/she is gliding over a sunken boat (the hull gleams greenish-white, the mast protrudes). Pleased with ourselves and each other, we go our various ways.
By the time I reach my Cambie Bridge cross-over point, the threat-of-rain has become really-rain.
I stand under bridge ramparts, exchange forecasts with a guy also pawing his backpack for a jacket, and watch a young woman toss her red umbrella aside so she can kick up her heels on one of the playground swings.
Jacketed & be-hatted, all zippered up, I climb my way up onto the bridge and head out over the water. I am so charmed by this graffito on the railing…
that I stand here until a ferry obligingly comes along, to include in the picture. (The wait gives me time to compile a Glad They Exist list, ferries being just one item. I find it a helpful exercise, very soothing, a counterbalance to all that I wish did not exist.)
And then I put the camera away, because, good grief, this is now serious rain.
And I then I take it out again, one last time.
Here at West 8th & Yukon, a living demonstration of the slogan back there under the MEC pillar.
Crows know! This crow knows he is very wet. And he is telling us all about it.
5 October 2024 – A theme that has unexpectedly imposed itself, and yes in places it’s a bit of a stretch, but you’ll work with me on this, won’t you?
First up, a photo from a few days ago, taken not with any tribute in mind, but simply as a cityscape moment: the dome of a heritage building against a lowering sky, framed by tram wires and traffic lights.
But I can pull it into the tribute theme. It is a tribute (A) to the Carnegie Foundation capital grants that sparked the creation of public libraries all over the world, including, in 1903, this one at Main & East Hastings in Vancouver; and, (B) to the City of Vancouver that restored and revived the building and reopened it in 1980 as the Carnegie Community Centre, a new name and new breadth of services for the same core purpose — respect, support and more opportunities for people who need them.
Today’s outing had no theme in mind. Well, none beyond visiting two parks on the eastern edge of the city — one for the first time — and then walking residential streets back home.
And if I must, I’ll defend this bucolic shot of Trout Lake in John Hendry Park…
by saying, “Yah, well, it’s my tribute to a weeping willow doing what weeping willows do best, plus look at the fancy trick it plays with its trunk!”
(You are, however, allowed to roll your eyes.)
It’s en route the next park — Clark Park (second-oldest in the city and, official blurbs point out, “the only one that rhymes”) — that, still unbeknownst to me, the tribute theme starts to gain traction.
I’m on East 14th, moving right along because I’m eager to cross Commercial Drive and set foot in the Park-That-Rhymes for the very first time.
And I stop.
This is odd. Where some previous tree trunks have twee little “fairy houses” as adornments, this one has two mugs.
Deliberately there, pushed into place.
I lean in.
I don’t know if this is a tribute from Mike & Ella, or to Mike & Ella, but tribute it surely is. I am ridiculously pleased that, on July 23, 2022, such a good time was had by all.
Next tribute, the other side of the Park-That-Rhymes, and the other side of its other street boundary at that, on East 15th.
It is a tribute to graffiti. By a developer. Really.
Conceptually, I am totally in favour. Aesthetically, I wish the resulting murals were more interesting.
And then I run into busy Knight St., and it’s horrible and crowded and there’s no near-by traffic light to get me to the other side and suddenly trying to continue west seems like a bad idea. So I stomp north on Knight for a bit, and catch a bus to take me even farther north, where I’ll jump off and go walk through Strathcona for a while.
Off a bus at Clark & William, and I wander north-westish for a while and suddenly know where I am.
I’m on the edge of freight train tracks and if I follow them, I’ll slide in behind Parker Street Studios, a wonderfully delapidated collection of buildings that manage to stay upright and house lots of creative studios.
Yes, look! A mannequin at the door, and train tracks beyond.
These buildings and everything in/on/around them — all a tribute to creativity. (And survival.)
Lots of art up and down the outside walls, as I walk along the tracks-side of Parker Street Studios, but this free-standing tripod creation is my favourite:
Finally across the tracks and a bit farther north & west, and I’m in Strathcona. I zig and I zag and I stop for some lunch and much-needed glasses of water at the Wilder Snail café, and then I straight-line it across Keefer Street, heading for Main and a bus uphill to home.
I’m deep into Chinatown, practically at Main, when my eye is snagged by one more mural, in the alley just before the intersection.
Yucho Chow, yes.
I remember watching a documentary about his life and work, the city’s first professional Chinese photographer who, from 1906 to 1949, documented not just the lives of Chinese immigrants but of many other ethnicities as well — people who weren’t comfortable going to white photographers, given the power structures of the day. This link takes you to a portal page about Yucho Chow, because the page includes lots of video options as well as text websites, and shows his importance to our records of life in this city.
I keep reading the alley wall, and realize that one tribute leads to another.
Bottom left corner of the photo above, you’ll see the words “Time for changes” and a name, the name of the artist who painted this mural. The name is in black, hard to read: Smokey D.
I take a few steps farther into the alley, just past that wooden utility pole, and find the next tribute.
By Smokey D. to the city. (I later learn online that the City, in return, paid tribute to him by proclaiming March 11, 2023, his birthday, as Smokey D Day, honouring his artistry and activism on behalf of the Downtown East Side community.)
There’s one final tribute in all this, don’t you think?
30 September 2024 – I expect lots of water, given my general plan for the day, but I do not expect a torrent of words. Yet, late in my walk, there it is: “a slow wet meander…” of words, albeit one closely allied with yet more water.
You’ll see.
It all starts when I hop off the westbound #19 bus, right there at the Georgia St. entrance to Stanley Park, with the waters of Coal Harbour visible on my right, and my immediate target, Lost Lagoon, not yet visible at all.
What is visible, is the 2010 sculpture by Rodney Graham, Aerodynamic Forms in Space, that marks this park boundary. Truth is, I like disaggregated bits of it better than the sculpture as a whole. This bit, for example.
I salute it, and then slide on by, down the steps, under the underpass, and onto the city-side path around the Lagoon. The path soon winds close to the water…
and offers Park and distant mountain views northward across the Lagoon…
close-ups of exotic ducks (un-exotically named Wood Duck)…
some Lost Rivulets, off-set from the Lagoon…
and a definitely Lost Footbridge…
which is even more drowned and inaccessible on the far side than it is right there.
Pretty soon I am exactly where the “You are here” bubble says I am…
namely, just steps from the Seawall at Second Beach.
The tide is wonderfully low.
Like many others, I leave the Seawall and walk right out to water’s edge. In places it is rock-strewn…
and, elsewhere, it offers long stretches of firm, wet sand.
Out there, orange-hulled freighters awaiting their turn to carry on down to the Port; here on shore, orange-shirted girls running into the waves.
The scene is happy, and there is an important message of hope and optimism in these shirts, but they commemorate something dreadful and dark: the abuses of the Indian [sic] Residential School System. These abuses battered the children physically and emotionally and, in more than 4,000 documented cases (2021 stats), caused their death. In 2015 the non-profit Orange Shirt Society was formed in Williams Lake, B.C., and began marketing tees that proclaim “the enduring truth that EVERY CHILD MATTERS, every day and everywhere.”
The inclusivity of the slogan invited, and has won, widespread acceptance. You now see the shirts on people of every ethnicity, of every age, and as every-day apparel. Today the shirts are especially appropriate. Today, 30 September, is Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a day to honour “the children who never returned home and survivors of residential schools, as well as their families and communities.”
All of that is now part of all of us, as it should be. I take it with me as I continue my walk.
On toward English Bay, past more sand and rocks and squealing children and tail-wagging dogs and, up there on separate Seawall tracks, cyclists and pedestrians. Finally, I head for the Seawall myself. I am ready for a city component to this walk and, I realize, more than ready for something to eat.
Out to Beach Avenue, with the A-Maze-ing Laughter sculptures in Morton Park in the middle distance, and Doug Coupland’s soaring mural on a refurbished vintage apartment tower just beyond to the right, and, closer than all that and of more immediate interest to me…
the red & white striped awnings of a hot dog stand.
Hot dog or Bavarian Smokie, it’s all 100% Alberta beef, says the hand-lettered signage, and the Calgary Girl in me nods approval. I eat my Smokie on the beach, and then…
turn down Denman St. for a latte in Delaney’s Coffee House. My front-window seat gives me the inspiring view of this pigtailed cyclist, surely damn near my own age, who is not even breathing hard as she locks up her bicycle.
Next comes a zig-zag through West End Vancouver: I’ve had water & nature, now for pavement & city. A few blocks on Denman, then right turn onto Comox and I stomp right along — until I get to Broughton.
I’ve walked Comox before, I’ve passed this building before and I’ve noticed the thumping great sculpture at the street corner before: Triumph of the Technocrat (Reece Terris). What I’ve never noticed is the curling channel of water along Comox that connects with the sculpture…
and, especially, the words incised into the channel wall.
Thanks to an article and overhead photo in The Source (issue 27 Jan – 10 Feb 2015), I can not only show you the entire channel with its pool at one end and Terris sculpture at the other…
I can also tell you the channel is the work of Vancouver landscape architects Durante Kreuk, and the text is by Vancouver artist Greg Snider.
Snider’s creation is a whole bravura torrent of words, and I want it! So I inch my way along the channel, taking pictures as I go, just in case the text is not available online.
And it is not. Or, not that I can find. So here we go, I am about to put it online — all but the bits I couldn’t catch because they are obscured by particularly vigorous lavender bushes. You’re not word-crazy? Skip the next paragraph. You are word-crazy? Settle in for the ride.
“A slow wet meander along stoned plaza of frenetic urban structure toward the demiurge of public art, the fiscal trace of exacting development moving with pythagorean acuity the eart [lavender bush…] objects of our collective culture through the bureau of civic demand, the spirit of heavenly smoke spirals from the burnt wood of transcendent aspiration over the long marsh of pantheistic decor as the seemly secular rises around us and art sluices down a crafty pipe — sleepy second [more lavender bush…] arch, techtonic upscaled for perpetuity’s long view (fifty years max) in a device for reflection called triumph of the technocrat.”
My own slow, not-wet meander now complete, I walk on. I pause one last moment on Comox, just before I turn onto Bute, for a cheerful and timely bit of sidewalk art.
Buoyed by that, I carry on — north & east, east & north — to Burrard & West Pender, where I catch a # 19 bus, and ride on home.
22 September 2024 – Time & place. Time & places. Places, through time.
Two recent days, that have me noticing the play of time across place.
Friday, I’m walking back along north-shore False Creek after a downtown lunch with a friend. I stop to read one of the railings that mark a stretch of informational glass & metal way-stations near Coopers Park.
“Look across the water,” it says, so I do. Eastward across the smooth, bright water alive with pleasure boats, ferry boats and a couple paddling their kayak.
This is 2024 False Creek, much transformed over the millennia.
Coast Salish people once fished here, in clean waters…
but the 19th c. brought sawmills, small port operations and, after the 1887 arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway, a booming demand for railway-related services and support. The shoreline and waters were very busy…
with piles of materials and with hand labour…
but the waters were no longer so clean.
Incised words on metal panels remind us of the range of activities, of purposes, of people, across all that time.
Next big transformation: the mid-20th c. shift in industrial patterns and the post-Expo ’86 drive to restore and repurpose False Creek. Today it is recreational, and residential, and the waters are a whole lot healthier than they used to be.
I learn more about all this the very next day. Saturday morning, I am once again on the north shore of False Creek, freshly delivered to the Yaletown Dock by ferry, to join a downtown walking tour run by the AFBC (Architecture Foundation of British Columbia).
We pass the now-repurposed CPR roundhouse and walk through adjacent Yaletown, named for the small BC community where the CPR first had its construction equipment & repair shops, before relocating work to the more convenient Vancouver location.
Spare, functional Victorian industrial architecture still lines several Mainland Street blocks. The buildings now host restaurants, condos, artisan boutiques, and design and other creative small firms — but their Victorian bones still show.
Some of these structures are rightly celebrated by their current owners/tenants — for example, by Engels & Volker, whose website honours the history of this elegant former factory and warehouse at 1152 Mainland, built in 1912.
We walk on, our group weaving its way past other examples of old made new, and also of ghosts-of-old replaced by new. Layers of time, laid upon place.
Late in the tour, we stand under the canopy of Telus Garden which, when it opened in 2015, had brought a whole downtown block into the mixed-use trend then gathering civic strength.
It was a project born of love as well as commerce: both men native Torontonians, and both grateful to the AGO because, modest as it was at the time, it introduced each of them to art and helped shape both their lives.
The AGO did a lot for me as well. As a volunteer I spent many hours in its rooms, soaking up the art and learning about things. Like glulam.
(You wondered where I was going with this, didn’t you!)
The soaring Galleria Italia, stretching 450 feet along Dundas Street, is a vaulted dance of glued laminated Douglas fir and glass.
I always loved doing a shift out on the Galleria Italia, seeing — and hearing — visitors’ reactions when they first stepped into the space. Adults politely gasped. Schoolchildren on tour, especially when coached by their guide, agreed it looked like an overturned canoe. (Though one little girl was having none of that. “It’s an armadillo,” she announced firmly.)
My favourite reaction? The little boy who barrelled through the doors well ahead of his mother. He screeched to a halt, swivelled his head in stunned amazement and then, just as his mother caught up with him, leapt in the air, arms flung high. “WOW!” he yelled, his fists punching the air.
3 September 2024 – Yesterday, Monday, was the pivot.
Holiday Monday, Labour Day, and good-bye to summer. One season ends; a new one begins — kiddies go back to school, organizations launch fall schedules, our clothing is suddenly no longer / once again appropriate.
I do myself a Monday loop down around my end of False Creek. Me plus half the city. We are at play!
Cyclists stop to buy yerba mate from a tricycle-based vendor…
a lone kayaker veers toward the Creekside Paddling Centre…
a busker sets up shop outside Science World…
but, oh, not everybody has a holiday.
These two are hard at work…
turning the white railing white again.
Over at Plaza of Nations, Batch (a pop-up shipping container bar) is closed for the day…
but right opposite, on the other side of the Seawall pathway, Alien E-Bike Rentals is open for business.
Locals may depend on their own bikes, or their own two feet, but visitors like what the six-language website tells them: rent a bike for two, or three, or even five hours, and loop your way around the whole Seawall.
Any day, the basketball courts in Coopers’ Park resound with the thunk of bouncing balls.
Sometimes — as in, a moment from now — they also ring with yelps of triumph, when someone sinks his shot. Look slightly above & to the left of the net. See? That ball is on its way.
It’s not just humans, pivoting from one season to another. We only do it because nature leads the way.
As I climb the incline ramp at the north end of Cambie Bridge, I look between the levels, and there it is…
colour! Our very own Trooping of the Colour.
It’s not yet officially fall, here in Canada. That arrives with the Fall Equinox, this year at 8:43 a.m. on Sunday, 22 September.
So: officially, no. But viscerally, in our bones, in our blood, in the quickened rhythm of our day? Oh yes.
26 August 2024 – A full-colour day that starts in monochrome. With A Monochrome Journey. Italicized like that because it is the short form of a long exhibition title at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and that’s where I start my day.
I haven’t come to the VAG specifically for this exhibition. I plan to look at some of whatever is on at the moment… and then… see what happens next.
What catches my attention, right there on the ground floor, is the dramatic entrance to this dramatic Monochrome show: +100 works by +50 artists, all from the permanent collection, exploring “the enduring appeal” of black and white and everything in between.
In the room devoted to black…
I am struck, not just by the works, but also by the way ambient lighting can throw shadows that play with the image — here adding dimensions and tones to Untitled (Black Books), by Rachel Whiteread (1996-96).
More shadows in the room devoted to white…
but this time intentional, the result of precise lighting for the acrylic installation Untitled, by Robert Irwin (c. 1965-67).
It is only an hour or so later, as I finally turn to leave the show, that I realize the impact of my immersion in monochrome. I look through the doorway, and I don’t read it as pragmatic way-finding…
instead, I see an art installation. I see myself about to enter an immersive greyscale experience.
But then I walk out the door into Robson Square, and I return to the full-colour world. I am walloped by it!
Colour in the acrylic letters of art overhead…
colour all around, in the vivid Marché signage and the foodstuffs and crafts that fill the participants’ booths…
and emotional colour also, let’s call it — the laughter and energy of people enjoying the possibilities of a late-summer afternoon.
There are free hugs on offer, here in the Marché area…
and an impromptu exercise class just beyond, tucked into one corner of the lowest level of Robson Square…
all safe and sound thanks to the gigantic red Spring (Alan Chung Hung, 1981) that apparently holds the upper level in place.
Thank you, monochrome.
The calm austerity of that earlier focus has me hyper-alert to everything that surrounds me now: colour, shapes, sounds.
The verticality of Hornby Street, as i start my way back cross-town…
the horizontality of False Creek, once I’ve reached its Seawall…
and the pop-up exuberance of this grand finale in David Lam Park.
It is the end of the two-day Cascade RSVP 2024 bike race — as in Ride Seattle Vancouver Party; as in ride from Seattle to Vancouver and then party. They’ve had the RSV; P is imminent.
I stick with the Seawall for a while longer, then cut up through this mews…
21 August 2024 – I am metaphorically at my wit’s end, as I step down from Brentwood Town Centre onto a busy street…
and, it turns out, geographically at WITT’s end as well.
This Burnaby shopping mall is the south end of Willingdon Linear Park, which the website tells me runs 13 blocks along Willingdon north to Hastings Street. I only later learn it is also a WITT project — a Walking Infrastructure To Transit project, part of a civic program to improve pedestrian access to public transit.
I might have enjoyed the pun, had I known it at the time.
Nahhh. Much more likely, as I turned the corner onto Willingdon Ave., that I would have simply continued to feel at wit’s end (“confused, uncertain what to do next”).
Does this look like any kind of park to you? No signage, just a double-wide sidewalk.
Well, okay. I head north.
And it begins to improve.
Some undulations, some landscaping, some diversions.
I begin to see bright side panels…
eco-sculptures…
and micro-parks, one with a fountain and generous seating…
The bus stops have marshland scenes etched into the glass…
and utility boxes are photo-wrapped with artwork.
City workers are out in force…
though, while I applaud civic clean-up, I do wonder about the utility of simply blowing leaves from one place to another.
One last side panel, its blue curves echoing the curves of the Coast Range mountains beyond…
and I’m almost at Hastings, northern end of the park.
A final amusement.
I do like this! Mad puppy-dog biplane pilot careening through startled geese: thank you Emily Zimmerman. Created in 2010, her mural long predates the linear park. It’s also a lot more fun.
I think about it later, the lack of fun. And yes, maybe I am over-thinking. It’s just that… I find I am still at wit’s end about this experience. It was so lifeless! I bet you noticed that, in my photographs.
I did meet other pedestrians, people did walk and roller-blade the pathway, but nobody paid any attention to it, or its amenities. The fountain was turned off. No child bounced in the climbing sculpture. Nobody sat on a bench. It was emotionally inert. Chilly.
Mad puppy-dog biplane pilot was a relief, up there at Hastings: it warmed me up again.
17 August 2024 – Nothing as grand as the slippery nature of abstract nouns is on my mind. Not even the nature of heritage, within that slippery world.
I’ve simply decided to go look at the very specific, very tangible, very proper-noun Barclay Heritage Square that I’ve just noticed to the right of the caption WEST END on my Downtown Vancouver Walking Map. My route develops from there. I continue down Nicola to English Bay and along the Seawall to (bottom-centre of map) the David Lam Dock on False Creek.
It’s only after all that, that I have my moment of linguistic/philosophical fuss about the meaning of words.
Back to the beginning.
I’m at Broughton & Haro, north-east corner of Barclay Heritage Square, an enclave designated under the National Trust for Canada that preserves 12 Edwardian-era homes and woods in combination with an adjacent City park.
The houses are lived in…
and the woodland now contains a children’s playground, used by residents…
as well as families from the modern condo towers you can see in the background — the kind of towers now increasingly dominant in the West End environment.
For no particular reason, I make Nicola my route on south to the water. It rewards me immediately. I’m already a fan of Little Free Library kiosks & their unofficial equivalents, so I gurgle happily at the sight of this Pet Food Pantry, just past Barclay.
Wet & tinned dog & cat food are welcome donations, ditto dog & cat toys and accessories, but please nothing large and nothing for other small animals: “We don’t have the space.”
One more block, and here’s the Vancouver Mural Festival 2020 tribute (by Annie Chen & Carson Ting) to Joe Fortes, the City’s first official lifeguard.
In 1986 he was also named Vancouver’s Citizen of the Century by the Vancouver Historical Society, and for good cause — a Trinidadian immigrant, Fortes spent years unofficially guarding the beach and rescuing people before receiving the official appointment.
The Nelson-to-Comox block down Nicola is friendly underfoot…
and bright with flowers on vintage apartment balconies overhead.
The day grows steadily warmer. I am ever more appreciative of the shade offered by street-side trees, sometimes combined with lush ferns, as in this display near Pendrell…
and sometimes high over bare earth, as in this half-block interruption of Nicola’s vehicular status between Pendrell and See-em-ia Lane.
Yet even barren like this, it is a welcome space, a little spot just for people, very neighbourhood. The lane title is part of the charm: like other area lanes, it honours area history, in this case Mary See-em-ia, granddaughter of Chief Joe Capilano and a Squamish Nation matriarch.
A reminder as I cross Davie Street of real-estate trends…
and later a reminder, down at Harwood, of developer/cultural handshakes, here in the form of this Beyond the Mountains mural commissioned by the builder from Heiltsuk artist KC Hall.
On downhill to the water. I’m now at the foot of Nicola, about to emerge onto Beach Avenue, bordering Second Beach.
Apartments of various eras face the water, dozing in the afternoon sun…
and “open-air museum” installations, courtesy of the Vancouver Biennale, are as much part of the beach scenery as flowers, palm trees and sand.
I first pass Dennis Oppenheim’s Engagement…
and then, as I walk east along the Seawall…
I come to my all-time favourite, Bernar Venet’s 217.5 Arc X 13.
Not much shade, here on the Seawall.
I pause under handy palm trees to cool off, agree with a bemused pair of Austrian tourists that outdoor palms are somehow not what we expect to see in Canada…
loiter under the next cluster of friendly palms to watch a mother finally tear her toddler away from these lifeboats and lead the child on down to the water…
and then buy myself a rum & raisin waffle cone at the Sunset Beach concession stand…
and find yet more shade in which to enjoy it.
I even manage to eat it all without dribbling any down my arm. (Live long enough, and you acquire a few Life Skills.)
Enough blazing sunshine. I forsake the Seawall to climb uphill to Beach Ave. and the shade offered by its trees. It gives me a distant view of Squamish artist Chrystal Sparrow’s mural on the Sunset Beach sport court, currently being repainted…
and a close-up of the mossy walls of the Vancouver Aquatic Centre as I carry on east.
But then, somewhere between George Wainborn Park and David Lam Park — bottom-centre of that first Walking Map image, if you care to scroll back up — I return to the Seawall and False Creek.
Where I am first amused by this tiny, very unofficial, birdhouse hanging from an official Seawall tree…
and soon afterwards hopeful of a ferry ride home from the David Lam Dock.
Look at this: two ferries converging on the dock (left & right, the rival Aquabus and False Creek lines respectively), eager to pick me up.
But, no, we are at cross-purposes. I want east; they are both headed west to Granville Island.
They assure me an east-bound boat will come by soon. One does. It then steers a slow zigzag route, meeting rider needs — which gives me time to think about “heritage.”
What counts, what doesn’t? In today’s walk, did only the very official and historically designated Barclay Heritage Square count? Or all of it?
The online Cambridge Dictionary gives me the answer I realize I want: heritage consists of “features belonging to the culture of a particular society.”
Yes. With that kind of latitude, it all counts.
From the designated Edwardian homes to the Fortes mural to “hi” on a sidewalk and a Pet Food Pantry; from ice cream and real-estate trends and Biennale art to lifeboats and palm trees and a silly little birdhouse and rival ferry lines.
15 August 2024 – Only later do I realize I have been offered a Dr. Seussian experience, right here at the corner of East 7th & Main.
It will have me chanting my rewrite of the tag line from his 1968 Foot Book: “One foot, two foot, red foot, blue foot.”
But not yet.
At the moment, as I approach Main on East 7th, all I notice is the message tacked to an aged wooden telephone pole. It catches my eye because, one, it is the only message, and, two, it looks polite & quiet & official & totally unlike everything else that bombards us from utility poles.
So I take a closer look.
I am charmed! This is surely the most polite “Post no bills” warning in the entire universe. Not just polite, but whimsical… and successful. This weary telephone pole is being allowed to rest in peace.
I am sufficiently intrigued to read the small print, and resolve to look up City of Vancouver Ordnance [sic] #17-B-9883 once I reach home. What are the official rules for postering, I wonder.
As Mr. Google points out, this very polite notice is marked by a typo, as well as by whimsy. “Ordnance” = guns, artillery & the like. Accept the suggested revised spelling, and all is well. “Ordinance” = a piece of legislation enacted by a municipal government.
Even then, missing “i” firmly in place, I still can’t find #17-B-9883 online.
But I do find a cheerful discussion of the City’s poster cylinder locations, complete with a handy map. No need to abuse wooden poles any longer! Tape your announcements to a purpose-built metal cylinder instead, with the City’s blessing.
I navigate the map, and discover there is an official poster-pole right next to the wooden pole at E7th & Main.
Screenshot
I zip back out in the fading light to have a look.
And there it is. The approved, yes-you-can, post-all-you-want pole, covered in notices.
“One pole, two pole,” I chant. “Don’t pole, do pole!”
"Traveller, there is no path. Paths are made by walking" -- Antonio Machado (1875-1939)
"The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes" -- Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
"A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities" -- Rebecca Solnit, "Wanderlust: A History of Walking"
WALKING WOMAN 