All posts tagged alleyscape

GOA: Murals, Stained Glass, Urban Myth & Art-Deco Dentistry in Nelson

7 May 2023 – – And now here we are in Nelson, tucked up in a verandah-graced unit in a heritage building just off the busy energy of Baker Street. I’m trying to sort out my memories of Nelson and realize I’m not sure I have any — which is pretty well a sure sign that I don’t. I do remember a visit to the “Hot Rats” (aka Hot Ratulations, aka Ainsworth Hot Springs) back in 1980 or so, when my partner and I visited his sister at her back-to-the-land homestead on the east side of Kootenay Lake. But did we spend time in Nelson?

One shake of the head tells me it doesn’t matter; I am here now. And it is sunny and mild outside, and we are bouncing to explore.

Happy chance lands us in Herridge Lane, running between main-drag Baker and uphill Victoria streets, from roughly where we’re staying until the lane bumps into a mountain and can’t go any farther. Mountains are part of the deal, this is more or less a city terraced up its mountain slopes, and staircases abound. Today, we roam horizontally, not vertically.

Herridge Lane rewards us.

A young man pulls in to park, just as I take a photo of this charming mural wrapping an entire small laneway building, charming because of the way mother & baby animals touch noses at the corners.

Young Man is eyeing us in a friendly but speculative way. We chin-point to the mural. “Love it!!” we say. He beams. “There are lots of murals in this lane, just keep going. And… thanks. This building, this mural, is mine.” We idly ask his business. “Cannabis,” he says. It’s a factual statement, no particular inflection.

He says no more about that, but does tell us about “underground Nelson.” He’s only lived here 7 years, he warns us, he isn’t sure of all this, but… “Apparently the original Nelson is now underground and this Nelson is build on top of it. Dunno… some mud slide, or flood, or something? I heard there used to be underground tours…”

We tuck this away for later investigation. Meanwhile, we stick to what we can see, right here on the surface. This doorway, for example, next to Cannabis Man’s office building, with its evergreens and wildflowers…

and, a block or so farther long, the whole back wall of the Capitol Theatre, with old show ads and additional murals like this one.

Other people chance-met at street crossings encourage us to keep going. “More in the next block!” says one fellow whose pony-tail may be silver-white,but is still thick and shining. He’s more sure of the murals than he is of underground Nelson. “Yeah… heard something like that…”

Ohhh, never mind. What we see right here above ground is plenty, all of it informed by laneway context.

Stickers on a rusty stand pipe…

a duck flying into some gas (hydro?) meters…

leaving behind a whole dancing choreography of artwork, wooden crates & doorway.

Dapper Dan twirls his cane above a pick-up truck…

and Pensive Paul slouches against the wall as he contemplates eternity (or, more likely, the smart phone in his hands).

We veer onto Victoria Street for a while, then rejoin Herridge Lane for the bit we had missed.

It rewards us with this glorious stained-glass greenhouse (built by a man who used to do set-design in Vancouver, we are told by a cheerful fellow clearing brush nearby)…

and then, in Hall St. Plaza where Hall butts into the Lane, with Dancing Woman as happy companion to a couple of Coffee-Break Women (who gave permission to be photographed).

A few blocks checking out Baker Street, where we discover that this 1933 Scandinavian Church is now a dental clinic…

and a smiling young woman climbing the steps tells us, “It almost makes me happy to keep an appointment.”

Across the street, the signboard for AFKO, Association des francophones des Kootenays Ouest…

which is a reminder, as are the diverse skin tones and accents all around us, of the many cultures that call this area home. Prospectors up from the USA in USA in 1886; incorporation in 1897 as Nelson (after a typical fuss about which British Big-Wig name to choose); and more arrivals ever since.

And, of course, before all that, some 10,000 years as home to the Ktunaxa, Saixt and SyiLx indigenous peoples.

A few more murals, an afternoon visit to the #23 streetcar museum on Kootenay Lake…

and a conversation with a life-long Nelson resident, and streetcar museum volunteer. We quiz him about the streetcar, and then about Underground Nelson. He chortles. Some wet patches in the lower reaches of some old buildings, he says; people like to call them underground rivers, but really — dramatic pause — they’re sewers. More laughter.

Ah well. Every city needs an urban myth or two.

We eat splendid thali dishes from a Baker St. South Indian restaurant for dinner, and plan the next day’s GOA. It will take us up-lake to Ainsworth & Kaslo.

9 Comments
by icelandpenny on 7 May 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, photography, street art, Travel, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 7 May 2023

https://icelandpenny.com/2023/05/07/goa-murals-stained-glass-urban-myth-art-deco-dentistry-in-nelson/

Spring! (Theoretically…)

15 April 2023 – Ten raw Celsius degrees as I write this, but Vancouver, in a touching act of faith, is acting as if spring were more than a theoretical concept.

The art deco Marine Building, tallest in the British Empire when it opened in 1930…

primps & preens as it admires its reflection in the office tower opposite.

Science World, just off the end of False Creek…

has a pair of worker-ants crawling over its geodesic dome in a fit of spring cleaning.

The Medianeras (VMF 2019) Alley Man, just south of False Creek, takes advantage of his giant size & powerful fingers…

to calmly grab that glossy black car for himself.

A low-rise apartment building up in Fairview offers passers-by a moment’s relaxation in newly scrubbed & positioned chairs…

watched over from above by the resident Balcony Rainbow Spirit.

Farther down the block, a Mountain Fire Pieris flaunts its party trick…

the ability to turn baby red leaves to mature green leaves, right there before your wondering eyes.

And, not to be outdone, one of the street’s many cherry trees…

explodes its blossoms into the sky.

6 Comments
by icelandpenny on 15 April 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, Nature, photography, street art, Vancouver
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Posted by icelandpenny on 15 April 2023

https://icelandpenny.com/2023/04/15/spring-theoretically/

Eternity & 2018

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.

7 Comments
by icelandpenny on 21 March 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in City, City Walks, Nature, photography, street art, Vancouver
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Posted by icelandpenny on 21 March 2023

https://icelandpenny.com/2023/03/21/eternity-2018/

Street + Art

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.

4 Comments
by icelandpenny on 12 March 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, photography, street art, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 12 March 2023

https://icelandpenny.com/2023/03/12/street-art/

Rage & Respect

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.

4 Comments
by icelandpenny on 1 January 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in City, City Walks, photography, street art, Vancouver
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Posted by icelandpenny on 1 January 2023

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Behind the Paint

11 August 2022 – There are the murals, and then there are the stories that take you behind the paint on the murals. I’m reminded of this when I join the Mount Pleasant-area mural tours offered this week by Vancouver DeTours, the VMF guided-tour partner.

I already knew the murals; I didn’t know the stories.

For example: big, bold Courage, in an alley I often pass angling down Kingsway near East 11th. I even know, because I can read signage, that it was created in 2021 by Ariel Buxton.

What I don’t know is that she created it in collaboration with Rabble Rousers, a group of young adult mental health advocates, and that it faces a youth mental health facility housed in the building opposite. The powerful one-word main theme is supported by smaller images, each important to the young people involved. A yellow rose, a cactus, a shamrock and, here on the mural’s east edge, an acorn topped by a butterfly.

As we’re being given this background, I notice a tour member waving vigorously. Big smile on his face. I turn. Arms attached to a whole window-full of faces in the building opposite are waving at us. We wave. They wave. Everybody waves some more.

And then we walk on.

On down that same alley, closer now to Watson Street, a 2018 mural by Pakistan-born Sara Khan. It is called Recycled, for reasons that escape me, and flows strong colours and dream-like images across the wall.

We learn that when the sketch went to the City for final approval (many partners, many steps), the reclining male figure was anatomically correct. When he came back, he was a Ken-doll.

Okey-doke. (Many partners, many steps, and the art of the compromise.)

But ever since, again and again, anonymous citizens have crept forth, paint brush in hand…

to restore his manhood.

One of the tours takes us past the 2022 Melanie Jewell mural I showed you in my murals teaser post, From Bach to Bears. Remember?

Now I learn that the bears, while deliberately painted in folk-art style, are much more than (as I called them) “adorable.” Each one represents a member of this Northern Dené artist’s family; together, they resonate with deeper meaning.

This cuddling pair, for example, represent her grandmother and mother.

They loved each other. They were both, one generation apart, survivors of the residential school system. And when Jewell’s grandmother unexpectedly fell ill and was dying, her mother — at the time a small child away at school — could not come home for one last visit.

There are more stories, other places. Happier ones, for example the time requesting shop-owner permission to paint on her back alley wall ultimately led to the City installing lighting in that alley as well. Upshot: the woman finally felt safe going out to her car in that alley late at night — and even had something beautiful to look at.

So by the time I’m trucking back down Kingsway, I have a head full of stories to go with my eyes full of murals.

And then — right there on the sidewalk in front of Budgie’s Burritos — I see one more.

Well, if they say so!

4 Comments
by icelandpenny on 11 August 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in City, City Walks, photography, street art, Vancouver
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Posted by icelandpenny on 11 August 2022

https://icelandpenny.com/2022/08/11/behind-the-paint/

… And the Edge of the Tracks

26 July 2022 – It couldn’t look more different, but this is the continuation of the walk that took us along the edge of Coal Harbour. I left you with those not-polite Canadians (feathered variety) at the Convention Centre — but I kept on walking.

On east into Gastown, following an alley squeezed between Water St. and the train tracks.

No more sparkling water, foliage, gamboling doggies, and cafés to tempt their owners and the rest of us.

Instead, the grit of an alley. Showing not its Water St. Gastown-tourist face, but its back-door strictly functional face. And displaying, in the process, powerful graphics. Once again, geometry at work. I’m captivated by the lines and curves, but I don’t romanticize them.

This is a DTES (Downtown East Side) alley, and it is not romantic. While I tilt my head in appreciation of a spiral staircase (below), three bicycle paramedics roll by on one of their regular overdose patrols.

Both/and, eh? The reality of those paramedics, but also the reality of these bold lines that make me tug my camera out of my back pocket once again.

The spiral, the verticals, the punch of yellow, the graffiti…

the stark “H” of this (I think) loading dock & the inadvertent colour-blocking all around…

the angles of the window security bars…

some zig-zag…

and gleaming loops of razor wire…

that ground a perfectly framed vertical to the sky.

And then I put my camera away. I really, truly do.

3 Comments
by icelandpenny on 26 July 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 26 July 2022

https://icelandpenny.com/2022/07/26/and-the-edge-of-the-tracks/

Wall Art

8 July 2022 – Nature’s art, thrown against downtown walls.

Alley walls, to be precise, with exuberant clusters of wildflowers sprawling against the fences & concrete barriers that divide them from Polite Society — but also showcase them so beautifully.

Like this…

and this…

and this…

and this.

Then I’m out of the alley, looping back east along West 6th — and, suddenly, the wall itself is the art.

And surely the work of some human hand? A wall-to-wall, ground-to-roof triumph of delicate pointillist tracery — perhaps a precursor of our Mural Festival yet to come?

But no.

The art is on the wall, but it is nature’s art after all.

The Ghost of Ivy Past.

8 Comments
by icelandpenny on 8 July 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in City, City Walks, Nature, photography, Vancouver, Walking
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Posted by icelandpenny on 8 July 2022

https://icelandpenny.com/2022/07/08/wall-art/

Alley Art 1-2-3

25 February 2022 – There’s art, and there’s art. And there’s art.

1 – Window art

Jennifer Chernecki

… with a baleful stare.

2 – Wall art

Makoto, VMF 2016

… with a pointed beak.

3 – Objet d’art

Time, just… time

… with accessories.

First, standing there, I saw the rust. Now I see the tire. The perfectly placed tire!

4 Comments
by icelandpenny on 25 February 2022  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, City Walks, photography, street art, Vancouver
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Posted by icelandpenny on 25 February 2022

https://icelandpenny.com/2022/02/25/alley-art-1-2-3/

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