18 August 2025 – I’m just off a False Creek ferry and walking uphill toward home, still full of Flat White and café chatter with a good friend, when I stop to admire another good friend. (Albeit in a different category of friendship: painted, not human.)

There she is, high a-top her alley home, her quizzical smile floating out across the neighbourhood.

Is she our Mona Lisa, 21st-c. alley-girl version?

No. Given the pace of local redevelopment, and the building that is her home, she is our Cheshire Cat. Soon she will be gone, with only her smile lingering behind, and only in memory.

I”m standing at 3rd Avenue & Ontario Street, the intersection at the north-east corner of that L-shaped site, outlined in red. This is the huge redevelopment site purchased by the PCI Group in 2021, whose redevelopment proposal finally received City approval in May of this year. Cheshire Cat Smile is mid-way down lot 5, on the south side of the alley.

I head down the alley. Not for the first time, but it’s different every time, isn’t it? (No need to repeat the Heraclitus discussion…)

Crow in a convex mirror! I’ve never noticed him before, so already the alley is different.

The actual crow, opposite…

which causes me, for the first time, to pay attention to the mural as a whole — signed R. Tetrault and, as I later learn, called Flight Path.

Murals both side of an alley and a whole line-up of hydro H-frame poles in between! Sigh. Life is perfect.

I tip my head, pay homage to the Cheshire Cat Smile…

knowing it’s tagged Lil Top but also knowing I’ve never been able to find any info about that tag. So Cheshire Cat she has become.

The woman I’d noticed under the nearest H-frame, as I photographed Flight Path, is now standing next to me, also enjoying the art.

“It’s people expressing themselves,” she says. “And we get to look at it for free! It makes us happy.”

She points: “Like that flower, that butterfly.”

I point to the message next to it, which sets us both laughing.

And then we go our separate ways, each dawdling where we each prefer to dawdle, walking the line of Ciele Beau murals opposite Flight Path.

I pause at a doorway, its notice as outdated as the reminder to “call your mum.”

Nobody, employee or otherwise, will be entering by this door ever again, I tell myself. Or by any other door, on this doomed brick building.

Ghosts of Eras Past to the north of me as well — torn fencing frames the Cosmic Breeze mural on 3rd Avenue, painted by Olivia di Liberto for the 2019 Vancouver Mural Festival. RIP, VMF.

I leave the alley, turn the corner onto W 4th. I’m now looking at the block-long southern length of the site, Ontario to Manitoba. All boarded up, waiting for What Happens Next.

This artist’s rendering shows What Will Happen Next.

“Innovative industrial and commercial uses,” says the corporate website, “heritage retention and refurbishment, office, daycare and ground-floor food and beverage… centred around a new public plaza.”

Now that I’m home, and learning all this… I have to do a little rethinking, don’t I? And so do you.

Employees will once again go in and out of doors in the corner brick building, which is not doomed after all. And Flight Path may fly again. On his website, Tetrault explains he painted it “on plywood for removal and reinstallation on a new commercial development.”

But, ohhhh… Cheshire Cat will be gone.

Her Smile will have to float in our memories.