26 September 2026 – In comes the rain…
and up pops the shine.
The colours of ordinary street-side plantings that much richer, with their faces fresh-washed in the rain.
I pause on the south-east corner of East 7th and Scotia, with two of the area’s iconic buildings in eyesight — Main St. Brewing opposite and (to the right) the back of the stone-and-brick Brewery Creek Building at East 6th.
I’ll be heading that way, north on Scotia, but I’m momentarily distracted by the shine that is almost literally at my feet.
Even a discarded mirror fragment works magic, when it shimmers a hydro pole at us in blurry brilliance.
At East 6th, some magic that doesn’t depend on rain — though somehow rain makes its story all the more vivid, and all the more poignant.
This handsome bronze cairn reminds us that although rain now courses down a steep roadway, until early last century rain simply added yet more water to a tumbling creek: Brewery Creek.
We are where the maps says we are (in turquoise letters lower right): on the banks of the old creek. In 1897, it still ran free. Now it is underground. The buildings opposite are not the ones shown on this map — Vancouver Brewing and Thorpe & Co. — but they are direct successors. Main St. Brewing, uphill, is the artisan beer company now occupying the 1920s building that was originally a garage for Vancouver Breweries (the amalgamated version of the original brewery), and the Brewery Creek Building, opposite, went up in 1903 as an expansion to the Vancouver Breweries complex. This structure later went through a succession of uses, including candy factory…
before 21st-c. restoration and expansion transformed it into live/work spaces for artists.
The “brewery” tag was, and again is, apt. Early breweries made use of the creek; a collection of new boutique breweries makes use of that history. The whole area now preens itself under the collective label of Brewery Creek.
Another plaque takes us back to much earlier history — some three millennia back — and to those earlier uses of the watercourse and surrounding forests.
Kitty-corner to the plaque, the Native Education Centre it references, and its gardens.
My mind full of what used to be, imagining a creek to complement the rain, I walk on. Walk “downstream.” There is no visible creek, but there is real rain, and colours punched that much brighter as a result.
Including plastic colours, here at East 4th.
But I’m not focused on those tip-tilted chairs, I’m watching the horizontal black umbrella beyond the chairs (upper right). It belongs to a member of the coFood Garden Project that occupies this space, who is carefully shoulder-balancing it with one hand as he uses the other to wrest something out of the tree overhead. Branches interfere, I have no idea what he is doing. (Rescuing an injured bird? Snatching up some Spanish doubloons? Leaving a note for a secret lover?) There is suddenly a loud crack, he pulls his umbrella again vertical, and walks away. Mission presumably accomplished.
One last look north, watching water rivulets course downstream, again imagining a creek instead of pavement ..
and I turn to walk my way back upstream.
One final slight detour into a driveway, to admire one more example of shine in all this rain…
and at last I start thinking about dry indoors space and hot soup.
