The title of this 1981 steel sculpture (Alan Chung Hung) is Spring. Of course it is! Even with that bit of temporary fencing on the left, we can see that the structure is a spring, a handsome great spring that earns its keep — or would have us believe it earns its keep, holding up the second level of Robson Square.
I play along.
See? There’s a sturdy spring end, doing its job.
I’m used to this particular joke, so my attention moves on, enjoys the play of sculpture with context: the light, the shadows, the plaza lines of Robson Square, the hints of the BC Provincial Law Courts above, the stripe of green shrubbery, the bicycles.
I move in, start prowling, curious to see the play from different angles.
Peer low: glimpses of that upper level, one fragment of the magic on display over my head, the marriage of Arthur Erickson‘s architecture with Cornelia Hahn Oberlander’s landscape architecture to create the flowing, harmonious Law Courts whole.
Peer high: a view the other way, back toward downtown city towers.
Come closer, peer through the spiral — and frame another photographer. (Photographing the architecture, please note; not himself.)
Come even closer and, in all this sunlight, the uniform gloss of the red starts to break up.
Come even closer than that, and my eye starts telling me lies. Look! it says; alternating twists of silver & red! My brain knows this isn’t true, and my eye doesn’t care. It sees what it sees. Or… “sees.”
Time to back up a little? Restore agreement between eye & brain?
Still close, but at a different angle. All the spirals are once again red. Set off by the green of that modest, meticulously placed, line of shrubs-in-tubs.
One more re-angle, and now the spirals and their reflections bounce back and forth across the line of shrubs. I imagine an invisible tennis ball of light rays, flashing across that net of visible green…
And then, I walk on.
Deliberately one street over, now southbound on Howe…
where a cascade of Oberlander greenery washes my eye clean of all that red.
14 February 2024 – Two parks, both small, and so very different in the story they each tell.
One, a park I only discovered recently, thanks to falling across the Vancouver Park Guide blog, in which Justin McElroy takes on the task of visiting every park in the city. The other… well, it’s my local, innit? Some people have a pub, I have a local park.
Yours To Enjoy (within limits)
Thanks to McElroy, I’ve headed south on Granville Street into Kerrisdale, to walk through what he (& the City’s own website) calls Shannon Mews Park, but which the signage identifies otherwise.
A modest little name, by definition quickly outdated, but on the edge of a property with considerable architectural and historic significance. To the rear right, the Beaux-Arts mansion commissioned early in the 20th century by B .T. Rogers (founder, British Columbia Sugar); to the rear left, some of the mid-20th century apartments designed by renowned BC architect Arthur Erickson and, in the 21st-century, “revitalized” by the 10-acre site’s subsequent owners, developer Peter Wall and the Wall Financial Corporation.
There is also a street-side map showing “accessible” walking routes, with the usual icon of a figure in a wheelchair. However, thanks to McElroy, I have been warned. Though there is indeed some public space in front of this complex, it offers minimal accessibility to non-residents, whether in a wheelchair or on their own two feet. And, he added darkly (in a post that is now just over a year old), there is some on-going history of attempts to limit the pesky public even more.
I put my pesky-public feet on one of the designated pathways and walk on in.
Even mid-winter, with the Italianate gardens severely shorn, it’s an attractive walk. There is a small children’s playground to the east, and a few benches to the west and north. It’s fine.
But then, boom…
I’m up against it. A locked gate, barring access. Go away, pesky-public-person, says the gate. I try another path, and soon find myself in front of another lockable gate — which, at the moment, is ajar.
I walk on through. i want a closer look at the mansion.
Well, good luck with that.
As long as I keep my pesky-public feet on the path, I am allowed to look across the lawn and the water feature to the mansion beyond. But I am now on PRIVATE PROPERTY, and everywhere I now turn, there is another big red sign to remind me of my interloper status.
So I leave.
Before I do, i squint my eyes at the gargoyle midway on the wall just beyond the water feature. Spread the photo, you can see him as well. He is either grimacing in solidarity with me, or laughing at me. I choose the former interpretation, and go on my way, head held high.
A public park, yes, but cold. It does not welcome us. We are on sufferance.
In contrast to…
The Warmth of the Chill
I am back in my “local,” Guelph Park. Known to us all as Dude Chilling Park, in honour of the Michael Dennis bronze sculpture that is the park’s only claim to aesthetic merit — officially Reclining Figure, but the nickname is the name we use.
It’s a small and simple park, with a few amenities: benches at the periphery, a bit of a playground, two tennis courts. But this park is ferociously loved and much used. And also much-adorned, by all the people who think of it as their own.
Our area Yarn Bomber, for example, has hung her work on the mesh fence and wrapped each of the poles that dot the park.
Beyond this pole, you see people gathered around one of the benches. The park has its regular visitors, each group with its regular bench or set of chairs — just like any local pub.
A tree near the south end of the park is typically covered in changing ornaments, each one a testimonial to someone, to something. (One day a young man detached himself from his cluster of friends to tell me about one of the people he associates with that tree, and the memories it sparks for him.)
Today, the tree base is freshly circled with these bright hearts and flowers, and a new selection of stones. That grey stone reads: “But until then, I’ll see you in my dreams”
For the first time, I notice the plaque on one of the benches along the western edge of the park.
This is a park that, despite the chill in its nickname, is very warm indeed. It welcomes us all — and it even gives us a role model. Who would not want to be known as a “Chill dude with the best laugh”?
"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 