You met it last post, when I started scuffing back into visibility a poetic sentence that began in a loop there on the corner, and then straightened out to run north on St. Geroge.
I read/scuffed/read/scuffed this much:
“Listen the buried stream gurgles its longing to return to daylight & moonlight…”
I ended with three dots, convinced there was more to find, north on St. George, but my scuffing foot was getting cranky. I promised to return, and look for the rest.
And I do!
I walk prudently in shade, in today’s oppressive heat, as laser bursts of sunlight break through the trees’ protective cover.
Back at the St. George / East 11th corner, I discover my scuffing foot will have no excuse for crankiness today: wind seems to have cleared all the litter from the stretch of sidewalk I still want to read.
You see? We are picking up where we left off, with that word “moonlight” closest to my feet.
I walk on.
to nourish
ducks
bracken
ferns
salmonberry
& you
The complete sentence:
“Listen the buried stream gurgles its longing to return to daylight & moonlight to nourish ducks bracken ferns salmonberry & you”
I find this hauntingly beautiful, magical. It brings powerfully to mind an equally anonymous artistic impulse I encountered in Toronto — the Stealth Art Collective — whose tributes i used to find out on Leslie Spit. I am sorry to see that their latest post is dated July 2022.Click on the blog anyway; it is worth the visit.
May the Collective return! And, if it never does, my thanks for all that it added, in words and transient art installations, to the Spit over many years.
12 May 2023 – I’m walking north on St. Geroge through residential Mount Pleasant, just about to cross East 11th. Quietly friendly and human-scale heritage homes; warming temperatures; the season moving from cherry blossoms (now carpeting the ground, not trees) to showy Iceland poppies.
Important further information, for what is about to happen: this area slopes northward to what was the natural end of False Creek before all the infill took place, and many now-buried streams lie beneath these streets, still part of an invisible watershed.
I’m looking about happily as I walk. I almost don’t look down, just there on that far corner.
But then I do. And, only faintly, faint enough & further camouflaged by dappled light & fallen blossoms that I have to squint and blink at it, I see one word inscribed — how long ago? — into still-fresh cement in a neat cursive hand.
The word is…
Listen
There must be more, I think, and i start to scuff dead cherry blossoms out of the way.
There is more! The words first spiral around the fatter space of the street corner, then carry on, straight-line, north on St. George.
the buried
It is so hard to read! I keep scuffing, keep guessing, keep reading.
stream
gurgles
its
longing to
return
to
daylight
& moonlight…
Dot-dot-dot, because there is more. I’m pretty sure there is more. But that next stretch of sidewalk is encrusted with muck and yet more cherry bloom litter. Ya basta for now.
I’ll return, I will. And I’ll share the rest of the message with you.
Meanwhile, let’s all honour that hidden stream by enjoying our own daylight & moonlight. Let’s enjoy them like crazy!
Because we can, and it no longer has that privilege.
15 November 2022 – Not “the 5th” as in a self-shielding legal manoeuvre in a US courtroom. Instead, “the 5th” as in bouncing down Vancouver’s West 5th Avenue, wide open to the cultural/commercial fizz erupting on all sides.
Fizz indeed. I’m in the Quebec-to-Alberta stretch running through Mount Pleasant, known (well, in real-estate circles) as “Vancouver’s most desirable mixed-used neighbourhood.”
I am all in favour of mixed-use, aka diversity; I grow either nervous or bored when faced with homogeneity. No fear of that around here! While this cityscape has lost any trace of the millennia-old indigenous use of the land, it bears remaining evidence of early working-class settlers, who used their muscle-power either in their own small enterprises or in service of the industrial needs of the CPR. You still see a few auto-body shops, for e.g., but by now the transition from strong arms to strong brains is well underway.
Emphasis on creative/digital brain power.. all wrapped up in green. Proclaiming eco-sensitivity along with floor space. (Cf. my recent Into The City post.)
This brand new “slats” building between Quebec & Ontario…
offers “a superior location” and boasts its high ratings for walking/transit/biking criteria.
→An aside to explain the cross streets: I’m in a stretch named for the provinces in Confederation at the time of naming. They are slightly out of geographical order and include a territory, but let’s not quibble.
At the intersection of 5th and Ontario, older & newer versions of creativity shimmer at each other from every corner.
ricochets midway down the next block, to nature’s own rust on this chain. It locks the courtyard gate beside the heritage brick home of Image Engine (“world-class visual effects for film”).
More nature near the corner of 5th & Manitoba, this time yellow flowers that survived the snow and are still perky as all-get-out.
They sit in front of another artisanal bakery, Terra Breads. Together, they play compare/contrast with high-tech parking and the shiny-new neon-green “2131” building kitty-corner.
Completed last year, says the online promo, it provides office and light industrial space for a number of tenants, including AbCellular Biologics.
All very fancy and brainy and new… but with older art styles as the streetscape context.
Right across the street, this 2019 Vancouver Mural Festival wall…
back on 5th and just west of Manitoba, some grotty-old, unapologetic-old, roof-top graffiti…
and a tad farther west again, two doorways plastered with stickers.
I am not a stickers fan. Don’t get it. Grumble, grumble. But I read these, and… oh all right… some are mildly bemusing. “Scrub out racism not stickers” says one; “dump your porn addicted boyfriend” urges another; and another proclaims “timbit taliban,” which I suspect would confuse the Taliban as much as Tim Hortons.
More mixed-use, as I make my way from Manitoba to Columbia: Maison d’Etre Design Build (surely the world’s best bilingual marketing pun, but I wish they’d kept the accents), and two beauty-devoted outlets, focused respectively on hair salon supplies, and high-end residential flooring.
Almost at Columbia, I’m stopped flat by the elegant, but enigmatic, signage on an otherwise entirely anonymous building:
It only makes sense much later, when some online scuffling around shows me this used to be a Canadian Tire customer pick-up centre.
5th & Columbia is like a case study in past-present-future.
The south-west corner lot is for sale, with this tidy but older home surely doomed. (Note the home immediately beyond — beautifully painted, its owners raking leaves and very much not for sale.)
Facing the for-sale, an already-sold: something new rising up from the ground on the north-west corner, bearing the name Renditions Developments and promising “a new chapter.”
Beyond that, continuing west on 5th, wonderful names for what I fondly hope are wonderfully creative little boutiques — Rad Power Bikes; Hot Sauce Digital Marketing; Adventure Technology; Black & White Zebra. (And somewhere in here, I forget exactly where, the offices for the newspaper Vancouver Is Awesome.)
Corner of 5th & Alberta, a very empty, very space-y, space, announcing “This must be the space.” Tenants yet to arrive.
Kitty-corner, a space already full of tenants: Beaumont Studios — outdoor courtyard; indoor venues available for events; and an artists’ collective of rental studios.
I cross over, walk along the mural, contemplate the humanoid at the end.
Pop-eyed in amazement, as seems fitting, and with hands raised either in horror at recent developments…
or to warm them at the flame of all this new creative energy.
30 September 2022 – All those mountains/lakes/canyons/trails/fields/elk/sheep/cows.
And now, some pavement.
I head north-west in my own Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, a community just off-centre from downtown. It’s an early community (as settler history here in Vancouver goes), more worker than boss in its demographics, with an industrial phase built around servicing the railway, subsequent decline, subsequent admixture of artists (of all types) & small-scale entrepreneurs (ditto), and now — though interrupted by COVID — a push to make this the heart of the city’s high-tech, sustainable, innovative future.
I don’t have all this consciously in mind as I set out. I just set out. And I immediately begin to see past & future piling up all over each other. Literally on top of each other, here on the N/W corner of East 7th & Main.
Fact is, I’m not terribly drawn to these murals, but I am fascinated by what they represent.
Each fabric panel, tacked to existing backboards, is a work created in the Murals Without Walls workshops run by Kickstart Disability Arts & Culture as part of the Low Barrier Arts Program of the 2022 Vancouver Mural Festival. These new panels sit atop now-fading 2017 murals, painted onto parking spaces in what was then a municipal parking lot, as part of that year’s Mural Festival. (Oddly, not shown in the VMF photo gallery, but still alive in my personal photos.)
So I do have past/present in mind as my feet decide to turn right onto Quebec Street and lead me down-down-down, north-north-north, toward False Creek.
You want future? I’ll give you future — 2025, to be precise. Right at the next corner.
I read the signage and decide to include the whole thing in this post. While the language is PR-bravura, it is instructive to notice what companies want to boast about, these days. Starting on the left…
and sweeping to the right.
T3, I later discover online, stands for Timber/Transit/Tech. This will be Western Canada’s largest, tallest mass-timber office building: “transit-connected, tech & amenity-rich”; “one of the most environmentally-friendly, sustainable and wellness-focused developments in Vancouver”; “in one of Vancouver’s most dynamic and creative technology hubs.” The project will include the renovation of the now-delapidated building whose peaked roof juts above the signage, and its use as an arts centre, run by the City.
No, I have not turned into a company shill. But yes, I’m glad that these are now project ideals, however imperfectly they may be carried out. (And indeed, however imperfect time may show them to be, even as ideals.)
Pre-COVID, another complex had already led the way. Here at Quebec & East 4th: “Canada’s first completely net-zero work environment.”
It is one structure in the 5-building, 4-city-block Main Alley Campus that consists of three new buildings, one addition to an existing building and one renovation. I don’t know, nobody yet knows, where high-tech workers will end up working, this side of the COVID watershed. From home? Back in an office? Hybrid?
Main Alley perforce gambles that they will return to the office — those structures have already been built. It’s interesting to see that T3 is going ahead, an expensive vote of confidence that the future will be significantly physical, as well as virtual.
I confess that I like the broad-strokes vision, the idea that some environmentally & culturally responsible complexes will nurture a sustainable, inclusive and creative tech economy here in Mount Pleasant.
Even so, I don’t want new complexes, however admirable, to steamroller everything else out of existence. I want continued space, a continued welcome, for the little guys of every type and gender.
Just walking on down Quebec, I see examples of what I mean.
There’s the multi-generation John & Murray Motors Ltd., near East 3rd…
there’s the relatively new Fife Bakery, just around the corner on East 3rd…
which leads me a few more steps, to the mural wall right next door for JFS The Kitchen.
Later I discover this is the hub for the Jewish Food Bank, a partnership of JFS with the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver. (Not all is shiny-beautiful, either in Mount Pleasant or in the City as a whole.)
Another automotive shop, complete with this stunning old Chevy, as I angle through the alley between 3rd and 2nd…
and then the 1912 brick majesty of the Quigley Building at 2nd, which houses Earnest (“seriously good”) Ice Cream.
I want all of it. The big new, the small new, the old.
New builds on Main, fine — but I want still to peek through the courtyard to the alley, for a glimpse of Carson Ting’s contribution to the 2017 Vancouver Mural Festival.
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We need it all. If nature has shown us anything, over all these millennia, it is that diversity is the robust option, not mono-culture.
"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 