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?

To “positivity.”

I like that.