21 March 2023 – Well, not exactly eternity. Still, when you’re standing on the Camosun Bog boardwalk, admiring a whole bouquet of moss presented on a tree stump…
your mind does expand beyond calendar dates.
The very next day, still motivated to walk by newly warm (& not-raining) weather, I’m prowling westward in my Mount Pleasant neighbourhood. My eye, unbeknownst to me at the time, is firmly snagged in 2018, because I fall captive to three wall murals in the area — all created during the 2018 Vancouver Mural Festival.
First up, a building at Manitoba & West 7th, its art beaming at us from both street-facing walls, the work of Madrileno Rubén Sánchez. I’ve seen it before, I love it all over again, both the Manitoba wall as a whole…
and its details. Go ahead, spread the image, do your own prowl. Here’s one detail I particularly like: the woman paddling her canoe right down that sidewalk.
Same street corner, now facing westward along 7th, and there’s a choice of views.
You can enjoy it via a parked car window…
or take it in with your very own eyes.
Detail upon detail, including that wonderful yellow pipe in the foreground, with its question-mark of black & white smoke. And, higher up, farther along, a light bulb.
And a happy flower, rising straight from the sidewalk.
I notice that because here we are, almost spring. I begin looking for more mural sidewalk flowers. And I find them.
There’s the detail in Colorado-born artist Bunnie Reiss’ mural just around the corner on Columbia…
and the bright crocuses at gravel’s edge in the alley between 6th & 7th, on Ontario Street. (Thank you Atheana Picha, both indigenous Fijean and of the Kwantlen First Nation.)
But there’s nature down here as well — even here, soaring trees. Reminders of eternity.
On Alberta Street, I stop first to admire this quiet door, so perfectly in harmony with the sentinel trees either side…
and then I tip my head back, back & back, to let my eyes soar up into the trees.
Even in the heart of a city, you can escape the calendar.
12 March 2023 – Off-the-street official art triggered this walk. Thank you Canadian Art Junkie for steering me to the Oh Canada exhibit, currently on view at the quirky, stimulating Outsiders and Others Gallery on E. Hastings in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood. American artist Amy Rice armed herself with vintage envelopes, mailed either to or from Canada, and then added her own embellishments.
Like this.
Read it any way you like. I only later notice the 1937 stamp and franking, both to commemorate the coronation of George VI — initially I am simply charmed by what I interpret as a snow goose flapping his powerful way across a couple of NWT hamlet houses in the “matchbox” style of early, bare-bones settlement architecture.
Back out on the street, I head south on Heatley Ave., tempted by mild weather to walk and walk and explore and explore.
The streets themselves are art, the energy of all those juxtapositions, all those opinions & all that activity, all that colour & line.
Also sassy signs.
I peer through the closed doors of a brew-pub and laugh out loud at what could be the kick-ass theme for post-menopausal women everywhere:
Then, just by that same door, this tender street-RIP for someone lost, and much loved:
You see what I mean about juxtapositions.
An alley, and a whole battalion of H-frame hydro poles! They’re old, outmoded, and iconic. Heritage, even. The art touch here — not that I need one — is that orange construction tarp, thrown like a great trailing scarf about the throat.
One of my favourite house fronts, at Heatley & East Pender; I am delighted that it is still so fresh and bright.
And then, at Keefer, a sharp left turn, to take myself to Hawks St. one block over, and lunch at The Wilder Snail.
Here, a high-flying snail shell…
and there, in the art studio doorway opposite, a low-flying crow.
South on Hawks, tracing my way through Strathcona Linear Park, & a pause at another street-RIP tribute. As tender as the one I saw earlier, as full of love & loss.
A whole trio of discoveries, one block after another, as I alley-walk my way west between Union and Prior streets. First block, a sparkling panel of stained glass, set into an outbuilding…
next block, a giant stuffed dog, adorable, but abandoned…
and, third block, the nostalgia of laundry hung out to dry in the afternoon breeze. Nothing else smells the same as air-dried laundry, and nothing else smells as good.
A hit of honest alley rust, as I near Gore Street…
and a clutch of beautifully restored and cared-for vintage homes. I anthropomorphize the scene, imagine them huddling together as they nervously eye their neighbour to the right. Will it be restoration? Or demolition?
Across the train tracks, and south yet again on Station St., with the imposing façade of Pacific Central Station to my left and a mix of shabby backyards, empty lots and some handsome new housing to my right.
Through a chainlink fence, a graffito I interpret as the loving depiction of two pregnant women…
an interpretation perhaps born of the poster on the balcony next door.
I nip into Pac Central (opened 1919 as the Canadian Northern Railway Station) for a quick eyeful of the restored grandeur of its Neoclassical Revival Style design. The clock surely cannot be of the era, but I think it works well with the calm angularities of that ceiling.
And then I walk the final few blocks uphill to home.
18 February 2023 – Three beholders, as we explore the SkyTrain construction site behind Emily Carr campus, and our eyes agree: this jumble is full of beauty.
Fine-textured bristles…
skeletal rust…
columnar rust…
lacework rust…
and even a whole line-up of high-contrast millimetres…
discarded, but still faithfully doing the job they were created to do, measuring the space where they lie.
5 February 2023 – Messy out there, because we are between seasons, even more messy because drizzly, but also mild and therefore easy to enjoy.
Everywhere, the messiness of not being firmly either one season or another.
Old leaves not yet gone…
and new spring blossoms not yet open.
Surprises, too.
I’m walking east on E 10th Ave, and as I cross St. George I look for the sidewalk community library — the take-something / leave-something wooden structure that was a fixture here long before I arrived in the neighbourhood. Well, it’s gone.
I am unsettled by this, feel my universe slightly creaking on its axis, and I am therefore relieved to see that the bizarre streetside attraction a few doors farther east is still in place. I’ve shown it to you before: a metal tub balanced on mannequin hips + legs, with assorted real plants and plastic ornaments — always including a clutch of tiny plastic naked babies, doing their best to escape from turquoise plastic clogs.
Though the babies are always there, the presentation varies slightly over time. Today there is a large, glossy horse chestnut balanced carefully atop the mass of babies.
I’m laughing so hard a young couple stop to see what’s going on. “Clever babies!” cries the woman, getting into the spirit of the thing. “They know they’ll need food for their travels.” We beam at each other; her boyfriend stares patiently into space.
A nearby gate bears this balloon, with its optimistic and timely message…
which you can only read if you stand on your head.
Then there’s the messiness of the construction site over at Fraser, as this vintage home is coaxed back to life…
and, in contrast, across the street the tidy presentation of a vintage home already restored. (Is it just me, or does that gate quite wonderfully resemble an apron? Wearing that would cheer me no end, preparing dinner…)
Messiness, no two ways about it, exuberant messiness is the calling card of any skateboard park — here the twin bowls in South China Creek Park near Clark…
watched over by a metal crow perched on a neighbouring balcony.
Mr. Crow is the start of a run of animal life.
There are salmon (plus frog plus ladybug) in the sidewalk mosaic at Commercial Drive…
and a dinosaur at Victoria & E 8th.
Of course there is.
Clever dinosaur, even more clever than those chestnut-toting plastic babies. And if you’ve never visited the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller, Alberta, home to this enlightened creature, then at least visit it right here, online.
This dinosaur, the other side of the tree informs me, has local friends.
Yet more information over on “The Drive” (aka Commercial) at E 4th.
Fascinated as I am, I am not in the market for a fade. I’d happily be in the market for a latte, but unfortunately every café I pass is full up, so I head home.
Where I remember that I picked up a horse chestnut for myself, right next to those enterprising tiny babies. I pull it out of my pocket, and tuck it in with some ferns on my balcony.
Twenty years from now there will be a towering great horse chestnut tree on this balcony, and only you, in the whole wide world, will know how it got there.
25 January 2023 – The W Story starts a few days ago, when my friend kicks her toe toward this battered old grate…
and cries happily, “Oh! The W! It’s still there!”
My reply is: “???”
She explains: this storefront, now the unisex 8th & Main retail shop at the S/W corner of (yes) 8th & Main…
used to be a Woolworth’s. Her father worked there; she had summer jobs there. Her voice trails off for a bit, rich with memory. As we move on again, she adds, “And now the old store safe is in Purebread, down on East 5th.”
And so, out for a walk today, I follow the “W” story to its other artefact, the safe in its new home. Once functional in a five-&-dime, it is now purely decorative in an artisan bakery, and looking very charming it is, too.
The young couple at the next table raise bright, curious eyes at me. I say this safe used to be in Woolworth’s, over on Main. They look blank. Not a brand they know. I say, “Now it’s 8th & Main.” They beam. That brand they know!
That’s the end of my W Story, and everything that follows, it turns out, is an O Story.
O-for-Ontario Street. Not that I plan it that way. Purebread is at the corner of Ontario, so I spend time on Ontario, and — as I discover — the street has a lot to say.
There’s the O’Neil House…
built in 1908 as part of early settler history here on the edges of False Creek, later witness to neighbourhood decline and — cf. its restoration in 2013 — subsequent rehabilitation.
Right next door, the rehab & reinvention continues, as another heritage house is brought back to life.
And on their own gatepost, a story of good citizenship. Somebody has dropped a key…
and here it is, neatly and prominently displayed, in the hopes its owner might find it again.
Next, there’s the Ghost Ivy.
Oh, the ghost ivy! I am surprised, and ridiculously pleased. The gate at East 6th is open, and I get to see full length what I could only peer at, back in July.
My Ghost. Busted!! post of 12 July was the triumphant follow — the end of the story — for an earlier post showing the delicate tracery left after the brutal removal of wall-smothering vines. An erudite botanist friend then studied the evidence, and identified the ghost: English Ivy.
I am happy to see this splendid imprint full-length, especially as I suspect it will be scrubbed away next summer.
Finally and wonderfully, an epic Ontario dialogue of stories, a call-and-response of stories across the street, stretching north from 7th Avenue. All epitomized by The Gaze.
One looks out from the west side of the street…
and the other, from the east.
Two gigantic wall murals, each covering some 3,000 square feet, each painted during a Vancouver Mural Festival, and each brimming with further stories.
On the east, the 2018 creation of Michael Abraham and fellow members of the Phantoms of the Front Yard collective.
Though Abraham doesn’t say so on his own website, I was told during a VMF art walk that the characters shown on that busy wall reflect local characters and are a tribute to those characters and all the other neighbourhood legends.
You can stand endlessly in front of the wall, and endlessly imagine what’s going on, right there before your eyes.
Just as rich a set of stories over on the west side, though the mural is visually much quieter.
Animalitoland (aka Brazil-born Graziela Gonçalvez Da Silva) created Presence for VMF 2020 — early in our pandemic confusion and isolation. Through direct conversation and via social media, the artist asked people which words best identified how it all made them feel. Then, from A to Z, she wrote those words around her radiantly calming central figure.
From “Abundance”, ‘way up there…
to “Zeitgeist,” right down here.
I love all this…
but I have to tell you, I am somehow relieved to pat a small dog on the way home and say “Snappy collar!” to his owner.
Y’know? Get myself back to one single story, in the right-here-and-now.
11 January 2023 – I suppose I am almost always in story mode, but at the moment in a more focused way than ever. I have just begun a six-week online course offered by SFU Continuing Studies called Object Biographies: Exploring the Secret Lives of Things. It posits that “the life stories of objects reveal who we are and how we live,” and I have this in mind during a walk that begins in the Punjabi Market neighbourhood (very roughly, around Main St. & East 49th).
It causes me to look… oh, not more intelligently, not more inclusively… but perhaps with more explicit questions (and more appreciation) as I hoof my way through this mild & sunny afternoon.
The Wall
An alley wall, just off that Punjabi Market intersection. With a mural.
Choose your story! The wall speaks to us of graphic design… or community identity… or local festivals… or perhaps of the vision, interests and travels of its creator, an artist named Jessie Sohpaul, formerly of San Francisco and now Vancouver-based.
Her title for this 2022 mural is “Kohinoor, Where Are You?” That question points us to a whole other story line, one whose three elements are so often intermingled: history, culture and politics. To answer the literal question in the mural’s title, the Kohinoor diamond is on display in the Tower of London. It is there as one of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom. The UK claims legitimate ownership through legal treaty; this stance is rejected by the governments of India, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, each of whom claims ownership.
Indeed. Choose your story.
The Fence
My feet and curiosity next lead me into Memorial South Park, a bit farther east and north, with its emphasis on providing amenities for the range of ages and interests to be found in that neighbourhood. I wander by tennis courts, kiddy playground, adult outdoor fitness circuit, the running/walking oval, even the pond surrounded by trees & benches and, in this rainy season, brimful of water with many happy ducks taking full advantage.
But it is the fence over by the Fieldhouse that has me wiggling with delight.
Story time!
Voices of South Vancouver, I later learn, was created by Langara College journalism students to share the photos and stories of South Vancouver residents. Scan those QR codes, and learn the stories of people like Rob…
Ram, Kim and Andre…
Sahil…
and Mitch.
What I love best of all — what I later share with my online SFU classmates — is the project’s decision to recognize non-humans as residents and to tell their stories as well.
Meet Bench…
and Ross Creek.
I love all this, and I am very pleased indeed, as I leave the park and make my random way back north and west.
The Yard
I meet this yard on East 41st, somewhere east of Main.
As an aesthetic story, it displeases me entirely.
But if I am willing to reframe, to consider other story lines, I am charmed.
The yard becomes the story of a different, but equally valid, sensibility… the story of personal enthusiasm and kicky good humour,… the story of sharing with neighbours and passersby… and also the story of motivating those neighbours and passersby to behave themselves. (A small card in the display politely informs us that we are under video surveillance.)
The Bench
Now I’m on East 35th, having just left Mountain View Cemetery and on my way to Main Street. I stop flat, to cock my head at a street-side bench. It is yet another street-side bench, something that residents in neighbourhoods like this often provide.
But I’d never seen one that looked like this.
It is a carefully constructed, highly lacquered bench, with selected objects dropped into custom niches and neatly sealed in place. It is a bench of stories — each item a story, all items collectively the uber-story. The air is thick with stories, and I don’t know what any of them are. The cues are everywhere, if only I could read them.
For example, insignia of the Vancouver Thunderbird Minor Hockey Association…
a coil of blue beads, and a deconstructed Rubik’s cube…
a soccer ball insignia (I think), a water pistol (I think), and a penknife (ditto)…
and even a very Grumpy Guy.
There is no plaque, no sign, anywhere, to explain any of it. I can see that these items are prized, and that for someone, or some group of someones, they speak and are cherished for what they evoke. But I not privy to any of it.
So, in the absence of their story, I must create my own. It could be a story of outrage, at being excluded… or a story of disdain, for the objects on display.
Nahhh. My chosen personal story is one of delight. Thank you, unknown story teller, for creating this! I have no idea what any of it means, and I don’t care. It matters to you, and you’re sharing it with us — and in the process you have snagged my eye, my brain and my heart with something visually stimulating and totally unexpected.
So, unlike Grumpy Guy, my mouth curves definitely upward as I walk on home.
1 January 2023 – All around me are reasons for the former; the latter — unexpected, vehement — lifts my heart. A life lesson in life’s juxtapositions, on an alley wall in the DTES, with the new year barely 11 hours old.
I had been elsewhere in the city’s Downtown Eastside, and I am now walking south on Gore Street before doubling back out to Main and a bus ride home. The area is… devastated. I have earned my living with words, and I have no adequate words for the DTES. COVID on top of the long opioid crisis, tent cities on sidewalks. No-one harasses or threatens me; I walk without fear but with an impotent mix of pity & frustration. What to do? What useful response? And, to which bit of which problem?
Then, between East Cordova & East Hastings, I walk down one half of one grubby alley, and I see something wonderful.
I see rage, and I see respect for one response to one bit of one of the problems.
Far end of the alley, down toward Main Street, is bleak and still. Crows scream insults; nothing else moves.
The near end, here at Gore, pulses with street art life. Really street — not juried, approved & curated into a festival. (I say this with no disrespect for the VMF, just in recognition that street-street is a different creature.)
This is the first of three images, all three raw with colour & line. The images are interspersed with text, and it is the text — the rage & respect of the text — that lifts my heart and fills me in turn with respect.
Text fills the wall, either side of that bald biker image. On the left, a nod of thanks to the East Van Art Crew…
and on the right, a message about the real problem. Which is not the drugz.
A big verbal smack upside the head, to treat each other right.
I move on, read on. Next, a whole doorway of text.
A big “265” at the top, okay, probably back door to something. And then a lecture, surely added later, about the people involved with “265” and how to treat them.
Later, I look it up. This is the back entrance to the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre, located at 265 East Hastings, founded in 1978, open 24/7, and “one of the few safe spaces within the Downtown Eastside for self-identified women and their children.”
There must have been some incidents. Kendra, author of this lecture, is on a tear.
Hat’s off to Kendra. All these workers & volunteers deserve respect, she says. “None of these women are obligated, forced or bribed 2 BE HERE! They are all here 4 all of us because they want to be…” She closes her tirade “with all my love & respect.”
(As I stand here reading the message, a slight, young hoodied figure slides past me, inserts a key, goes in.)
Next, on the wall, a woman’s face…
and next to her, more text. Another message about how to behave.
One more face…
and one last message of respect & gratitude.
Did you see the very bottom? Half-effaced, in ground-level dirt. Your work, it says, doesn’t go unnoticed.
I go home. I am shaken by all that is so desperately, pervasively, wrong in the DTES. But I am also moved and encouraged by the proof that good work is quietly, doggedly being done — and is appreciated.
Human nature, eh? The great both/and of good and evil.
21 December 2022 – I’ve shown you this photograph before; don’t care, here it is again, because — back in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods Park in November 2016 — it was some sidewalk artist’s tribute to the winter season, the season of the low-slanting sun.
And here we are, 21 December: shortest day, lowest slant of all; the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere.
Yet in Vancouver, this particular solstice, the story is not the slant of the sun.
It is the snow, and the cold: 32 cm right in the city itself, and a high today of -10C. This, of course, is nuthin’ in true snow country. Just ask two of my favourite bloggers: Sarah McGurk, the British veterinary surgeon living in Arctic Norway, or Lynette d’Arty-Cross, who backs & forths between British Columbia and Canada’s own high Arctic. They can tell you about snow and cold.
But here in the Temperate Rainforest, this kind of weather is unusual. Enough to make today’s solstice less vivid than the days leading up to it. Enough to give even fortunate residents of this city a war story or two, to exchange with friends.
Here’s mine!
Two days ago, as temperatures and snow both fell across the region, my until-now splendid building handed us a hat trick of problems: no heat, no elevators, and no electricity. I stuffed my jammies in a backpack, took transit & SeaBus across Burrard Inlet to North Vancouver, and fell into the welcoming arms of dear and generous friends.
Their property, halfway up a mountain, backs onto a provincial park. Just to look out the patio doors is magical.
Magical for the trees, magical also for the birds that flock to their feeders — thrushes, towhees, chickadees, jays, even non-migratory hummingbirds. I spent a restorative evening, night and morning with them, and then, alerted by email that my building was once again behaving itself, I made my way back home.
SeaBus back south across Burrard Inlet…
SkyTrain from Waterfront Station, its “snow alert” good warning for what proved to be a long wait for a train…
followed by the speedy arrtival of a holiday-happy #19 bus.
.Snow heaped all over my balcony, of course. Offering, if not the grandeur of snow-draped fir trees, than at least the oddly magesterial grandeur of a snow-draped garden chair.
And now, today, the shortest day — but a dazzling day.
12 December 2022 – Not yet Mount Pleasant Station, that’s still years from reality. Not the purpose of my walk either. But this block-long construction site neatly bookends my walk — a rectangular path that takes me purpose-driven south on Main to East 18th, then whim-happy west to Quebec and north again to Broadway.
The planned station so tidy on the map! It’s our local segment of the Broadway Subway Project — the 5.7 km extension of the Millennium Line west beneath Broadway to Arbutus Street.
And so appealing, so welcoming and soothing, in this early-stage conceptual illustration!
But in the reality of right-now, here at Broadway and Main, it looks like this.
Pedestrians scurry past. Only the mannequins in the vintage shop window opposite pay any attention…
and they are unimpressed.
I visit a few shops. I achieve my holiday-season purposes. Yay! So I am ready for amusement by the time I hit East 18th.
I think I am familiar with both visual treats at this corner, but I learn something new about each. (I only learn the somethings-new later, and that’s directly thanks to you, as it always is, because I look things up to share with you.)
This Vancouver Mural Festival project on the S/W corner, I later verify…
dates from 2020, the work of indigenous artist Steve Smith ~ Dla’kwagila.
And these great bendy arches in Sun Hop Park on the N/W corner, I later learn to my delight…
reference the drinking straws in the Palm Dairy & Milk Bar that stood here 1952-89. Nearby seats, I now realize, are bottle-top shaped, and everything is painted Palm Dairy’s signature bright red. (See what you cause me to learn? Bless your boots.)
Around the corner onto East 18th, and another treat: a surviving Vancouver Special. Arguably not a visual treat, but I think an icon worthy of respect — vernacular architecture from 1965-85 that helped address the housing crisis of the day and has continued to serve city residents with the flexibility that was always a core intention of the boxy design.
Another visual icon, at least of this Fairview/Mount Pleasant neighbourhood — street-side swings. So simple, so friendly, so… neighbourly. I am charmed, every time.
Right-turn north onto Quebec Street, and a great smack-up of colours: designer-red on that house opposite, nature’s own moss green up and down this magnificent tree and, beneath it, the careless gold of autumn leaves.
One block farther south, more of nature’s colour palette: black.
What you see when someone rakes up all those sodden leaves to reveal naked soil below.
Down at East 12th, yet more seasonality: St. Patrick’s Secondary School is in the Christmas tree business.
Then more trees, but street-side, and firmly rooted. I stand mesmerized by the play of colours and texture. (And that one stubborn leaf!)
Thump.
I am back at Broadway. West end of the Mount Pleasant Station site, and just as busy a jumble as the east end.
More fun, though.
All those leaping salmon in the mural (apparently climbing the wall, as real salmon climb a waterfall), and that silver bear, one paw raised in benediction. You’d think he’d be busy nabbing salmon for lunch, not blessing the street…
"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 