26 July 2024 – It’s a bright, breezy day and my target direction is Strathcona. I’ve just skimmed a newsletter reference to a week-long Eastside Arts Festival in Strathcona Park, and that’s motivation enough. Whatever the festival does or doesn’t deliver, this old residential neighbourhood is always worth another visit.

I set myself the mild challenge of getting there without walking north on Main Street. Main is a diverting parade of small shops farther south, but from here north it becomes a noisy downtown artery. My plan calls for a clever N/E zigzag — but that’s the beauty of feet! They sure can zigzag.

So down Scotia I go, with the now-sewered creek beneath my feet that once fed the now-infilled last stretch of False Creek. Left turn onto East 1st Avenue, with its contribution to new-build grit, part of the neighbourhood transformation…

and a right-turn onto Industrial Avenue.

Confession: this requires a quick ricochet off Main Street, where 1st and Industrial almost meet, but surely I can be forgiven that hairpin turn?

More grit, as I head north among the terminals and warehouses of False Creek Flats. There’s new-build activity here at well, with high-tech moving in, but that’s mostly farther east. This part, close to Main Street, is still yer actual old-fashioned rust & rolling wheels kind of grit.

But I like it, just as it is, and today it delivers me nicely from any more connection with Main Street. All I have to do is backtrack east to Station Street, then north to Terminal and across Terminal to the building that explains why Station and Terminal streets bear these names:

Pacific Central train station.

It’s more than 100 years old and still in use, with today’s power-washing just part of the regular TLC. This highly functional Old Build will soon be joined by that New Build lurking in the background — the new St. Paul’s Hospital complex, now under construction and due to open in 2027.

My avoid-Main-Street route takes me east on National Avenue, currently reduced to a narrow footpath bordering the hospital construction site. I gawk as I walk.

The area swarms with workers…

a reminder that, for all the machinery and high-tech of our age, every work site still depends on human effort and skill.

I have escaped Main Street!

I am now safely east, just in behind the construction site, where I can cut north through Trillium Park and enjoy my first fix of major greenery. There indeed is St. Paul’s, rising in the background, but here in the foreground…

we have green fields. Green fields both sides of this pathway, with kiddies on each side, busy learning the fundamentals of soccer.

This is all fine, but I keep walking because just to the north lies Prior Street, and that will take me into Strathcona neighbourhood. And then Strathcona Park! And then the arts festival!

A vintage wooden Strathcona house sits right smack on the corner at Prior and Jackson. It is much the worse for wear.

That’s also part of the story of this area — home to Coast Salish First Nations for millennia, and then, with the 1865 opening of the Hasting Lumber Mill, increasingly home to waves of working-class immigrants. The whole area prospered, declined, and is now in that tenuous urban mix of restoration, renewal, rebirth and inevitably destruction as well.

I walk east on Prior. Strathcona Park will be just ahead of me, but before I can quite fix on its location, I am diverted by the sight of an elderly couple with an exuberant grandchild emerging from a path in the woods to my right. I exchange grave nods with the couple, finger-wiggles with the child, and step onto the path they have just left.

Well. Look at this.

It’s just one tiny corner of a community garden, bursting with mid-summer proof of its gardeners’ devotion. I weave between beds, find the Garden’s tool shed and step close to read its signage. I’m admiring the trilingualism of it all…

when the door opens and I get to meet one of those gardeners. She has been a Strathcona Community Garden volunteer for ages, she says, and she’s not going to let a little thing like knee replacement surgery (points to the scar) keep her away.

Do I know about the Cottonwood Community Garden? she asks. No, I do not. Most people don’t, she says, because it’s so tucked away, but it’s amazing and you should go look at it. Where is it? I ask.

She leads me back to the edge of the Strathcona Garden and points the way: turn right here, then left there, along that line of trees, then keep looking to the right.

So I do.

As I walk, I realize I am now in one corner of Strathcona Park. Damned if I can see any sign of an arts festival. And damned if I care, because finding Cottonwood seems so much more interesting.

Right; then left; then keep looking right, into the trees. Oh yes. Signs of gardening in there.

And a sign very politely telling me to keep out. It explains this particular section is home to sacred medicinal plants, and asks anybody not involved in their care and rituals please to remain outside the fence.

An adjacent sign welcomes me in.

Even though invited to come on in, I feel shy about intruding. I stick to the external foot paths, and peer over fences as I go.

This string of garden plots lies in quite a narrow ribbon of land between Strathcona Park to the north and Malkin Avenue to the south. Looking south, I can see the tops of buildings, one of them marked Discovery Organics and, right here in front of me, the top of a mural marked Produce Row.

Framed by a gaudy arbutus tree on the right and a discreet birch tree on the left, my pathway disappears back into the woods…

and then, soon after, leads me out onto more open ground. Here the garden beds lie right next to the Strathcona Park playing fields.

I meet another gardener — this one a relative newbie, someone who comes from West Vancouver for the pleasure of digging in her very own patch of soil. She offers me a bag of lettuce. I explain I have so much fresh produce right now it would probably spoil. “Me too,” she sighs.

I wave good-bye and then stop at a park map, to get my bearings. Since I am dog-free as well as lettuce-free, the map’s primary purpose is irrelevant, but its coordinates interest me a lot.

Later online research tells me even more, makes these two gardens even more impressive — and suggests thy are under threat.

According to the Strathcona Community Gardens Society, which manages them, both Strathcona and Cottonwood gardens began through local activism: Strathcona on an unofficial dump site in 1985, winning a 25-year lease from the Park Department in 2005; and Cottonwood on an industrial waste site in 1991, still apparently without any legal status. Depending on what happens next to Malkin Avenue — perhaps expansion, to compensate for planned viaduct demolition — both Produce Row (the string of fresh food wholesalers on Malkin) and the adjacent garden might be bulldozed. (I can’t find dated, documented, recent data on this, hence my careful language.)

I don’t yet know all this, as I again walk north.

I am still kinda-sorta wondering about the arts festival, but I am easily distracted — and more distraction is soon on offer.

Who could resist Strathcona Linear Park? It leads me alongside Hawks Avenue, and splashes mid-summer foliage all over me, including this magnificent Mimosa grandiflora (thank you Pooker, for the ID).

Right under that pink splendour, some turquoise chalk on the sidewalk. “Free…” it begins, and I wonder which political cause is about to claim my attention.

Ahhh! I look around hopefully.

No cupcakes in sight. And still no arts festival, either. By now I totally don’t care.

I stick with the Linear Park, admire the False Creek mosaic as we cross the bike path at Union Street…

and walk one more block that now borders MacLean Park. It takes me right to where I next want to be: on the N/W corner of Keefer and Hawks, tucked up with some lunch…

in the Wilder Snail café, with its giant snail as a ceiling ornament.

It is finally time to head west, to start looping toward home.

Past the MacLean Park notice board at Keefer & Heatley, promoting everything from World Hepatitis Day (“free testing”) to evenings at the Dream Punk Piano Lounge, and then a quick detour across the street.

To view an entire residential community, right there on a single massive tree stump.

(Well, what would you call it?)

On west along Keefer to Princess, where I pause for another of the City’s sidewalk mosaics.

Nobody could accuse this mural of being happy-face PR! Look at that power shovel, knocking the end home to smithereens.

Happily, as I carry on west, I pass still-standing vintage homes. Including this one near Princess Avenue…

protected by its hedge of giant guardian Gunnera.

Once i cross Gore Street, I have changed worlds. I have passed from Strathcona into Chinatown.

I walk with that world for a while, then hop onto a Main Street bus, and go home.

Where, finally, I read the Eastside Arts Festival promotion more carefully.

And discover that (a) it consists of pop-up events at scattered times in scattered locations and, (b), this particular day, the only event is an evening urban-drawing workshop being hosted in a local brewery.

Good thing I didn’t go there solely for the art.

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