All posts in category Walking

Grit & Greenery

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.

.

3 Comments
by icelandpenny on 26 July 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 26 July 2024

https://icelandpenny.com/2024/07/26/grit-greenery/

Hinged & Heated

4 July 2024 – I am again approaching False Creek. Again. Yet again. For the umpty-third time.

Even so, I expect not to be bored. I am reassured by the wisdom of Heraclitus and, some 700 or so years later, Proust, who observed (respectively, in translation): “No man ever steps in the same river twice” and “The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new lands but in having new eyes.”

My eyes, and my feet and everything in between, we all step off West 1st Avenue near Columbia Street to head north into Hinge Park. It is a wetland park adjacent to False Creek, named for the sharp kink, the “hinge,” in the traffic grid right about here.

The park features a run of train track and buffer stops close to its West-1st edge, which is both a tribute to the area’s railway heritage and a handsome installation in its own right.

(If you like rust and industrial artefacts.)

Still morning, but already very warm. It is summer! I am hinged & heated indeed. The bullrushes and other greenery have erupted all along the tiny rivulet that runs through Hinge Park, almost completely obscuring the thread of water below.

It’s only when I reach the little mid-point bridge that I can look back and see the channel.

I also see the distant figures (left side of the walkway) whose animated conversation briefly filled my ears as I walked by.

A lanky pedestrian, a keen birder, is chatting with two Park staffers, who pause in their clean-up duties long enough to talk wildlife with him. “Yes,” says the vivacious young female staffer, “yesterday I see the heron, also this morning, and yesterday I see the dogs but not today.” “The dogs?” repeats the birder, puzzled. “In the water?” The woman laughs, waves her hands. “No, no! I must be so careful to pronounce! I mean ducks.” She repeats it, heavy on the final consonants. “DucKKSS.” Turns out she is from Mexico, and still getting her mouth around the physical shape of English words.

A quick look forward, from this handy little bridge, tracing the channel on north into False Creek…

and soon after here I am, on the SeaWall at False Creek.

Hinge Park is behind me, Habitat Island is before me and a horde of excited kiddies are in the causeway between the two, being sorted into teams for whatever adventure is next on the schedule.

I right-turn myself eastward, surprised by the lowest tide I’ve ever seen between the park and this island.

Traffic in the Creek to entertain me, as I walk along: a trim False Creek Ferry heading west with canoeists and a paddle-boarder in the background for company…

and then a bright red Japadog food truck to lure me onward to Olympic Village Square.

I resist, but I am tempted. I thoroughly enjoy this Vancouver A to the Q: “What happens when Japanese sensibilities meet North American fast food?”

A chattering group of friends relax in the sunshine in the Square — and, look, they are obeying the sign. They are not climbing on the artwork! (The Birds, 2010, Myfanwy MacLeod.)

A necessary sign, I have to add: attempting to scale the birds had become A Thing To Do, and as a result both installations needed extensive restoration.

One last False Creek image, a bright Aquabus ferry loading passengers at the Olympic Village dock…

and I finally turn away from the water, to zigzag back home.

(P.S. Heraclitus and Proust got it right.)

6 Comments
by icelandpenny on 4 July 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 4 July 2024

https://icelandpenny.com/2024/07/04/hinged-heated/

Sunshine!

6 June 2024 – After a very long stretch of drizzle days, we have sunshine. Given the state of both wildfire season and our water table, I react to the sunshine with mixed emotions. To draw on one of Susan Sperling’s “lost words” that deserve to live again, I am feeling “merry-go-sorry.”

(And isn’t that more fun than mere “mixed emotions”? Go find Poplollies and Bellibones if you can, Sperling’s glorious 1979 celebration of lost words. It will also, for e.g., teach you the perfect epithet for a lascivious priest. He is a “smellsmock.”

(But I digress. Back to the sunshine.)

Yes, sunshine! So I walk myself down to the Olympic Village dock, to wait for the next False Creek ferry. My vague plan is to ride it west to Granville Island, and then walk my way back east to home.

Warmth + sunshine = other people also waiting for a ferry, several with toddlers and strollers.

One child, surely age four at most, turns into Boy Busker: he reinvents the popular children’s song as “The ferry on the creek goes round and round…” and then spins off into his own sing-song about up-and-down tides and repair boats and how you have to be quick-quick when the ferry arrives.

We applaud. He tells us sternly that he hasn’t finished. Abashed, we still our hands and wait for more. But then the ferry does arrive…

and everybody (including Boy Busker, turquoise helmet) climbs on board.

Not so very quick-quick. There are strollers to off-load first, and then three strollers to on-load, plus an unwieldy skateboard, and many questions for the patient ferry operator to answer. But it all happens, and away we go.

A lone canoeist skims by, just off Coopers’ Park…

and I admire yet again the multiple and largely smooth and peaceful uses of this public waterway.

We approach the Granville Island dock, welcomed as always by the Giants mural, spray-painted across the six silos of Ocean Concrete for the 2014-16 Vancouver Biennale. They begin to show their age, but I am cheered by the little banner announcing their upcoming “renewal.”

We climb up the long zig-zag ramp used at low tide, and pass by another inevitable welcome to the island: crows!

I’m almost tempted to tour market shops, but don’t. I’m here to start a walk.

So instead I turn south-east-ish into Sutcliffe Park, which wraps this side of the island, and head for the Seawall. My route takes me past an imposing piece of industrial-heritage equipment that I cannot explain, because there is no explanatory sign to be found.

But it is indeed imposing, is it not? Complete with raised scrollings that were either intrinsic to the original industrial purpose or are recent artistic additions, and I can’t explain them either.

But then… Something that explains itself. Lots of signage.

I’m at the Granville Island pavilion, here on Alder Bay, of the Trans-Canada Trail. It is just one dot on a Trail that runs 28,000 km coast to coast to coast throughout the country, and is, if this website claim is still true, “the longest network of multi-use recreational trails in the world.”

Off I go, happy with sunshine and a trail beneath my feet. As I pass the point where Alder Bay merges with False Creek, I am also happy with an official “view corridor.”

Back in 1989, City Council voted to protect specific public views and view corridors, to ensure that despite city growth, at designated spots we would still have a clear view through to the North Shore mountains.

See them? Back there through the towers toward the right?

There are lots of closer and unofficial views as well. This clump of Common Foxglove, for example, that has established itself in handy crevices in the Creek’s riprapping.

Every part of this plant is toxic, I later read. I knew anyway: it was the favourite poisoning device of all those Golden Era murder mysteries I used to read. (It is beautiful, though!)

Signage at Spruce Harbour Marina includes old photos of the Creek in its dirty, polluting, industrial heyday, when great booms of logs (here, 1912)…

covered the waters, waiting to be milled.

Look around now, and the waters are covered with boats.

But a more interesting collection of boats than I originally thought, for this marina is home to the Greater Vancouver Floating Home Co-operative. Most of these boats are permanent homes, though the marina also welcomes visitors.

Farther east, down by Charleson Park, I stare at the pond…

and contrast all this water with the dried-up mud flats I remember horrifying me, one year when we were in the middle of a category 5 drought. Look at it, the result of all our recent rain.

The signage patiently reminds us this is a seasonal wetland, and it is supposed to dry up periodically, that’s how it works. Got it?

Yah-but, I mutter to myself, meanwhile I’m happy to see all that water.

Finally I’m back to where I set off, Olympic Village. Or, to Millennium Water Olympic Village, in the official words of the plaque by this commemorative installation.

This immediate cluster of buildings, which initially served as the athletes’ village for the 2010 Winter Olympics & Paralympics, was North America’s first LEED Platinum community, and a catalyst for the reinvention/rejuvenation of the larger area.

The reinvention continues, and features considerable development of new residential complexes.

Like all these.

But notice also all that green space.

In the rear, a Pollinator Meadow, with species introduced for that purpose, and here in the forefront, a bioswale. ??? Fortunately, a bright blue sign tells me it is not just a ditch, it is a deliberate creation that collects one-third of all the rainwater falling on public spaces in Olympic Village, thus diverting it from the sewer system and mitigating any pollutants before the water empties into False Creek. (And if that makes you want to know more about the City’s rainwater strategy, click here.)

I’m about to weave between towers and head for city streets, but stop at one more bit of stubborn wild greenery. The City may be busy with planned & managed pollinator meadows and bioswales and all — and hurray for that — but nature keeps plonking herself where she wants to go.

Even smack in front of the next planned burst of exclusive waterfront residences.

(I know. Sigh.)


3 Comments
by icelandpenny on 6 June 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 6 June 2024

https://icelandpenny.com/2024/06/06/sunshine/

3 for 3 for 3

20 May 2024 – Three days of a holiday weekend; three outings; three images for each.

Friday, Sunset Beach, English Bay Seawall

We’re walking the Seawall along English Bay toward Stanley Park and stop — as always! — to admire Berard Venet’s Vancouver Biennale sculpture” 217.5 Arc X 13.

Thirteen arcs of unpainted corten steel, each curved, as the title explains, to 217.5 degrees. Entirely static, endlessly dynamic, always welcoming.

We watch this little girl explore the sculpture…

and then follow her lead, offering those 217.5° arcs our own 360° tribute.

By now the sculpture, acquired in 2007, fully illustrates artist Venet’s point re his choice of material:

unpainted, the steel “facilitates an interaction with the natural elements.”

At their centre, the arcs form an embrace. At their tips…

a continuing dance of call and response.

Sunday, outside Engine 374 Pavilion, Roundhouse Community Centre

I learned about this event during my recent crosstown walk on Davie Street, and here I am, happy to join the anniversary celebrations. On 23 May, 1887, steam engine 374 pulled the first scheduled transcontinental train past Port Moody, following the new track extension all the way to Vancouver. “Ocean to ocean,” at last.

The rest of the year, CPR Engine 374 sits inside her protective pavilion. But! Once a year! Once a year, on the anniversary of that first arrival, she struts her stuff outdoors.

Oh, she gleams.

All black and white and powerful moving parts…

and shining brass and dates and tiny details…

and lots and lots and lots of live steam.

Monday, Waterfront Esplanade, New Westminster

A wonderful long walk along this stretch of the Fraser River, at very low tide.

The intricate world of mud flats, plus the occasional tree trunk…

and old pier stumps and scavenging crows…

and… and…

a reminder that trains are still part of this country’s lifeblood.

Leaving the Esplanade for downtown New West takes only a moment — only the moment needed to cross one street. But that moment becomes many, many moments when we all have to wait while a thumping great tri-continental freight train (from Mexico on up) claims its right of way.

Fortunately, there is artwork, to pass the time.

6 Comments
by icelandpenny on 20 May 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Uncategorized, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 20 May 2024

https://icelandpenny.com/2024/05/20/3-for-3-for-3/

“Generosity is…”

14 May 2024 – Spring is busy admiring herself, everywhere you look.

Horse chestnut candles aflame in all those towering trees…

this lot white, but many red ones as well.

I’m enjoying the day, enjoying this walk in a favourite neighbourhood just south-east of my own — so like my old Hillhurst neighbourhood in Calgary, back in the 1970s. Wooden frame homes, generous front porches, neighbourly architecture creating a comfortable, engaging, neighbourly streetscape.

I am therefore delighted but not surprised to see a tree garlanded with messages.

And the theme…? I ask myself.

The tree tells me.

I circle the tree, reading some of the replies.

Among them, an earnest statement of a basic principle…

an example of that principle in action…

and a sweeping philosophic directive that, unpacked, could fuel much further thought.

It has captured my thought, in any event.

I find myself looking for examples of generous action, right here on the street. Just ordinary… everyday… components of the streetscape that, through this lens, translate as generosity in action.

The table & chairs in this volunteer-tended Green Streets traffic circle, for example..

and the beauty of this long stretch of gardening activity, bordering the sidewalk.

Individual homeowners are doing all this, yet they’re not the ones who see it. We, the passers-by, we’re the ones to enjoy the results.

There’s a felt heart tied around a tree trunk — no reason, just because…

and yet another streetside take-one/leave-one library.

This one, says the little plaque, is Lizzie’s Library…

and I admire not just the neatly stacked books on offer, but the freshly planted marigolds as well.

Farther along, a bench (beside yet another streetside library) for anyone who might like a moment’s rest…

and then a swing, for anyone who’d rather kick up their heels.

Judging by the worn path beneath, there’s been a lot of heel-kicking!

I’m not obsessively “theme-hunting,” mind you, I’m enjoying the whole walk just as it comes.

Heading back north on Sophia, passing Tea Swamp Park (home to “awesome,” remember?), I pay proper attention to the other side of the street. To the new-build, on the corner.

Which would be hard to ignore.

And I wonder idly if design elements like this, the prevalence now of bold graphics on new-builds, is at least in part the result of eight years of Mural Festivals. Powerful visuals now part of our street vocabulary…

Then my mind moves on, the way mind do, and i start to laugh.

Because I’ve just remembered another of the answers to the “Generosity is…” challenge.

Another suggestion about how to behave.

See? It’s simple.

4 Comments
by icelandpenny on 14 May 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 14 May 2024

https://icelandpenny.com/2024/05/14/generosity-is/

Davie, W to E

6 May 2024 – I’m as far W on Davie Street as you can be, sharing a joke with the A-Maze-ing Laughter sculptures in Morton Park. English Bay can be glimpsed between the statues, and the glory of Stanley Park lies beyond.

I turn my back on all that.

I am heading E, not farther W — east the full length of Davie Street, right from “You are here” in this handy signpost map…

to False Creek, where the street is once again stopped by water.

Just as those waters transform as they go — from the breadth of Strait of Georgia, into English Bay and then into False Creek — so too does Davie Street reflect city transformations.

This 4-km-or-so route is a crosstown slice of Vancouver’s past & evolving future. It leads us from still-vintage West End, through Davie Village (once simply “Gay” & now a more complex family of inclusions), into Downtown with its Entertainment District, and on to Yaletown, western terminus of the railway and the repurposed former hub of railway equipment construction and repair.

Barely underway, I detour onto Bidwell long enough to admire the volunteer garden at the corner of Pantages Lane, with a vintage building opposite.

Well…

I later learn that the vintage building is just a vintage façade. It is, a realtor’s website informs me, “a beautifully restored heritage entrance” to a spiffy new residential tower, “that returns the street frontage to its original character.”

Back out to Davie, where I head eastward on up the street. I do mean “up” — both climbing away from the English Bay basin, and also tilting my head at the towers that increasingly line the street.

A past-&-future moment, here at Davie & Cardero: the district’s future already visible there on the left, and a big blue “rezoning application” notice on the fence of the modest old apartment building on the right.

I see a lot more of these notices as I go, including ones on an apartment building also marked with a “sale by court order” sign.

But there is still lots to enjoy, lots of human activity and human-scale engagement.

Also canine.

He has appropriated this bench outside a barber shop / tattoo parlour, and his confidence is likely well-placed. A bearded man has just walked through that still-open door, his leashed French bulldog by his side. Inside, they are greeted by the statue of a bulldog.

At Broughton, a wonderfully ornate vintage apartment building, its paintwork perhaps a bit scruffy but no sign of any redevelopment activity.

The shops & services around here are not glossy and latest-thing. I like them very much.

Just before Bute, I see this slivered opening between buildings, complete with mural…

and I follow it to the laneway beyond.

Where I turn left, and then left again back to Davie Street, through the Event Zone of Jim Deva Plaza.

The plaza honours the man’s lifelong courage and advocacy. Deva, one of the co-founders of Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium, challenged Canada’s censorship laws in the Supreme Court, and also — with greater success — worked with Civic authorities to promote safety and quality in Vancouver’s parks and public spaces.

I don’t know all this about him at the time. While in the plaza itself, I notice more trivial things. Such as…

Corner of Davie & Bute, and we’re well into Davie Village by now. Here, for example, with a mural tribute to jazz greats behind the intersection rainbows.

I cross, check the mural, and decide I’m personally more taken with the four-legged acrobat and the skate-boarding raccoons on the utility box.

But to each their own!

I pass a nude unimpressed by Happy Hour offerings…

and a greengrocer laying out yet more spring plants on his sidewalk shelving…

and then stop at the hot-pink bus shelter at Davie & Burrard.

The colour echoes the Village, as does the long-established Davie Village Community Garden visible through the mesh.

By now I’m used to rezoning/redevelopment notices, but I am sad to see them posted on this mesh fence as well. I’d love this Garden to continue, but…

what I see right across the street may be its future as well.

At Granville Street, I’m into the city’s Entertainment District (per its tourism maps), where I once again nod happy recognition at the neon signage for Two Parrots Bar & Grill.

Scotiabank Dance Centre is a restoration/new-build complex on the far corner, and other towers abound. So far, the Two Parrots still perch on their accustomed corner, no redevelopment notice anywhere in sight.

The lane immediately behind the building pays tribute to their longevity.

Well, sort of! (Upper left.)

More visual tribute at Seymour Street, where Jill Anholt’s 2005 sculpture, Moving Pictures, honours Vancity Theatre (home of VIFF), which stretches on down the block.

Downhill toward False Creek.

I cross Seymour, pause to again enjoy the long slice of water tumbling through Emery Barnes Park…

and here I am at Hamilton Street, in Yaletown. Once home to railway equipment construction and repair workshops, the district is now repurposed into food, drink, entertainment, & residential delights.

I sidetrack myself along Hamilton for a bit, enjoy reminders of a mid-pandemic “I ❤️ Yaletown” mural festival…

then return to Davie and cross Pacific Blvd.

Roundhouse Community Centre is right here, an architectural link to the past — and nowhere more powerfully than in its CPR Engine 374 Pavilion.

Where, after long service, that steam-era pioneer is on display.

Engine 371 beat her from eastern Canada to Port Moody but, on May 23, 1887, Engine 374 pulled the first transcontinental train into the City of Vancouver. She continued to do just that, until 1945. Restored and gleaming, she now rests and accepts our homage. (Squealing kiddies all around me, especially the ones taking turns in the driver’s seat.) A volunteer urges me to return for the May 19 Anniversary Celebration, when she’ll make her yearly trip outside and be the centre of attention on the Roundhouse Turntable.

Now for the last few steps on Davie, on to the bit of track and sculpture in the traffic circle, with Yaletown Dock to mark water’s edge and my arrival at False Creek

I loop along the waterfront for a bit, then turn left into and through Steamboat Mews…

back to Pacific Blvd., where I hop a bus for home.

3 Comments
by icelandpenny on 5 May 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, Nature, photography, street art, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 5 May 2024

https://icelandpenny.com/2024/05/05/davie-w-to-e/

On the Bounce

18 April 2024 – A bright, gusty day and, I swear, you can practically see the sun’s rays bounce around in the breeze.

So I play that game, as I walk my Cambie Loop around the east end of False Creek. I watch the bounce of the sun, as it…

  • ripples across this disused West 1st Ave. workshop…
  • triangulates Science World’s geodesic dome…
  • transforms a boring building (L) into a darkly magic reflection (R)…
  • warms the backs of a newbie dragon boat team, intent on their coach’s mid-stream lecture…
  • sparkles a V-trail of diverging wakes, ferry eastbound but another dragon boat now veering west toward Cambie Bridge…
  • rolls across the spring-tidied plots of John McBridge Community Garden, beside the bridge…
  • and shoots silver into the sky from the fingers atop the Neighbourhood Energy Utility, also beside the bridge (where waste heat from sewers is recycled into heat & hot water for local use).

I drop down from the bridge and nod to the Community Garden on my way by. It’s a nod of fellow-feeling: my next stop is a garden centre.

4 Comments
by icelandpenny on 18 April 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 18 April 2024

https://icelandpenny.com/2024/04/18/on-the-bounce/

“Eyes On The Street”

9 April 2024 – A post title borrowed from a specific sculpture (you’ll see), but broadly applicable to pretty well everything else (as you’ll also see).

First, and more precisely: Eyes on the chain link. Two days ago I’m looping south-east of home, my attention caught by the bold line of graphics visible through chain link fence on East Broadway near Fraser.

Curiosity pulls me around the corner, into the lane, and onto that big rectangle of gravel. Bright graphics all right, but otherwise? One park bench, one dog bowl, no dogs, and one crow, who promptly flies away. That’s it. Yet a neat sign on the gate has the gall to declare this the Broadway & Fraser Dog Garden.

Please! I curl my lip. Later, online, I visit the Dog Garden website, discover a group called Community Garden Builders “transform vacant properties into temporary dog parks” … and uncurl my lip. I invite you to do the same.

Tail end (!!! unintended pun, but I’m gonna leave it) of that walk, I’m passing the mesh fence that keeps Guelph Park tennis balls inside the City courts, where they belong. A player has just stooped to retrieve one, but that’s not what I notice.

See? Our local yarn bomber has branched out. Not just crochet hearts…

but tassel hearts as well.

And now, my friends, the magic of the Historical Present Tense swoops us past yesterday’s rain into today’s bright sunshine. More streets to be walked. More places for my feet to lead my eyes.

Starting in a near-by alley at East 5th, where a whole passel of City workers are clustered around that venerable H-frame hydro pole.

I am relieved to learn that (A) while it is terminally non-functioning, (B) it will be replaced by another H-frame, not by some sleek 21st-c. interloper.

I’m still gleeful with that bit of news as I turn down another alley en route False Creek, and try for a more interesting way to look at Alex Stewart’s 2023 VMF mural, Vibrance Overgrown.

It dominates the alley side of a snazzy new eco-conscious build on East 4th and, viewed straight on… ummm…. I find it boring. Well-executed and bright, but no better than decorative.

Then I stop being cranky, lean into the wall, and look straight up.

Well, that’s more fun, and I resolve to spend more time looking for odd angles.

Next opportunity arises quickly in yet another alley — more properly, in the developer-groomed pathway between condo complexes close to the south-east end of False Creek. We’re in the area’s old industrial/railway footprint, so visual/verbal references abound. For example, in the street name just before me: Pullman Porter Street.

Right here, next to the water feature signposted as private property, I once again enjoy Eyes on the Street. The plaque tells me that the two forms in this 2018 installation by Marie Khouri & Charlotte Wall “mirror themselves & their surroundings,” and inspire us to think of our neighbours, ourselves and our surroundings, and to “consider the beauty of their interconnectedness.”

I go close. The form before me does mirror its surroundings…

and I find that I do then spend a moment considering the interconnectedness of all things.

False Creek at last, where I hook around to the north side, and head west. On past my usual turning point at the Cambie Bridge. Water on my left and, up above me along Marinaside Crescent to my right, one of the three shelter + chairs installations that comprise Lookout.

Created by Christos Dikeakos & Noel Best in 1999, the works feature carved & frosted words to remind us of the Creek’s heritage. I’m not often here, but when I am, I always pause long enough to read some of the words.

Yet farther west, foot of Davie Street, with boats anchored in Quayside Marina on my left and, at water’s edge, the six bronze I-beams of Street Light, by Alex Tregebov & Noel Best. According to the City’s online public art brochure for Yaletown-False Creek, the perforated panels atop these pillars align historic events with actual dates in fancy visual ways. Alas, I’ve never been here at the right moment to see any of that wizardry.

So instead, and as usual, I simply tilt my head up to enjoy some of the superstructure…

tilt my head down to read a few words on the plinth about False Creek Shacks in 1934, and…

level my head to look out across this bit of False Creek, on this very day in 2024.

Focus your eyes a bit above the railing near the cobblestones, and you’ll spot the Canada Goose enjoying the moment right along with me.

By the time i’m passing David Lam Park, my avian companion is a cormorant, not a goose.

There he is, posing atop Buster Simpson’s 1998 work, Brush With Illumination.

I have a very-much-favourite art installation in this park and — with apologies to Simpson (and the cormorant) — Brush isn’t it.

This is it.

Marking High Tide, like its companion pavillion Waiting for Low Tide, is the 1996 creation of sculptor and retired landscape architect Don Vaughan. The latter work is a contemplative circle of large stones in the Creek bed; this one honours the tides with an overhead 360° tribute of words: “As the moon circles the earth the oceans respond with the rhythm of the tides.”

Finally, I leave the water and take myself up to Pacific Blvd where, all along the block stretching east from Homer Street, my eyes are literally on the street.

Well no, make that: literally on the sidewalk.

Which, in this block, is dotted with Gwen Boyle’s 1994 selection of words to reflect the area’s long history.

Once, just once, she offers more than a word or two.

The exception is a longer excerpt from the poem I first noted in my 28 March post “The Beating Sea.”

“… the manstruck forest ..”

I stand there, stunned by the power of his imagery.

So thank you yet again, Earle Birney. You live with us still, in your words and, through the artists you inspire, on our streets.

4 Comments
by icelandpenny on 9 April 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Uncategorized, Vancouver, Walking

Posted by icelandpenny on 9 April 2024

https://icelandpenny.com/2024/04/09/eyes-on-the-street/

“The Beating Sea”

28 March 2024 – We do not photograph the Metz & Chew art installation near Coal Harbour that bears this plaque…

and we are here walking along False Creek in March, not November.

Warmth and brightness are therefore both gathering strength, not losing it.

But!

The sliding edge of the beating sea is always with us.

Thank you, Earle Birney.

3 Comments
by icelandpenny on 28 March 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 28 March 2024

https://icelandpenny.com/2024/03/28/the-beating-sea/

The Skunks of Spring

18 March 2024 – I’m in Stanley Park, along with half of all Vancouver it seems, ready to enjoy this weekend burst of double-digit sunshine.

More precisely, I’m off the bus, through the underpass, and poised at the south-west curve of Lost Lagoon…

about to walk counter-clockwise and follow the trail east along the lagoon’s north shore.

Everything trembles on the edge of spring, unfurling new growth. Trees overhead, trees weeping downward to the water.

And, down there in the water, in the rich muck of the wetland, most wonderfully of all…

the fluorescent glow of the Western Skunk Cabbage. My first of the season. Now I know it’s spring!

The eastern variety is a more modest creature, it seems, so I forgive myself for being entirely ignorant of this plant until I moved west and was smacked in the eye by all that gold. (And also educated by You-Know-Who-You-Are.) Now I look for it each year, and give a little wriggle of joy at the first sighting.

On across Lost Lagoon, and on and on and then, though still in Stanley Park, I’m in entirely another world. I’m in all the noisy facilities-rich hoop-la of Second Beach.

Right where this red button says I am:

I turn right, head up the Seawall toward Third Beach. (Thank you, I murmur to the universe. I am so lucky, to be right here, right now, in all this.)

Here we all are, in all this.

Runners…

and cyclists/loungers/kiddies/adults/impromptu tents/storm-thrown stumps on Third Beach…

and rocks and freighters just off Ferguson Point…

and a tree with a heart…

and a patch of Seawall with its very own Cat-Angel…

and — after I’ve walked myself back south out of Stanley Park and into Morton Park — four Vancouver icons. All on view without turning my head.

Background, the renovated Berkeley Tower with its Douglas Coupland mosaics; mid-ground, Yue Minjun’s Ah-Mazeing-Laughter sculpture installation; right mid-ground, a cluster of Windmill Palms; and, tucked in their foreground shadow, some Canada Geese.

The day has me in sensory overload.

Yet, with all that wealth of input, one image keeps coming back to mind.

The north shore wetland of Lost Lagoon, the dabbling duck above the mossy rock on the left, the Skunk Cabbage on the right, and all that tender new greenery shooting up everywhere in-between.

Spring.

5 Comments
by icelandpenny on 18 March 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City Walks, Nature, photography, street art, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 18 March 2024

https://icelandpenny.com/2024/03/18/the-skunks-of-spring/

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