Monday, May 31, 2010

east hastings vestiges

If there is one street in Vancouver that I haven't ventured alone for a very long time, it is the much maligned East Hastings stretch through the impoverished downtown eastside, often demeaned in the media as "the poorest postal code in all of Canada"...and yet people survive and conduct business and feed and sleep - in perhaps not as safe, hygienic nor as comfortable quarters - but life continues pretty much as it has for quite a long while now...
In the last few years however, the long touted efforts to "clean up" the area has been yielding to the gentrification projects in the surrounding Gastown and Chinatown enclaves...and so a new generation of developers with design sense and of course, dollar signs in their starry eyes has finally encroached and con-descended [and so rises the anchor - a mightier and loftier cap-red-W Woodwards, with other aggrandizement projects following in its wake...]
Before every building and block is liberally dusted by the re-development vanity-wand, I decided to spend an afternoon biking through to find whatever traces still abound...especially vestiges of old advertising signs from the early decades of the 20th century painted directly onto the brick walls of multi-storey buildings...

the ubiquitous red and white Coca Cola logo very much fading away...

this building has already been renovated but they seem to be keeping the old sign intact, for now...

the signage is long gone, but the squiggly grime pattern presents a strangely subliminal-minimal canvas...

does the prominent sign of the old Ovaltine Cafe still light up at night... do they still serve Ovaltine drinks in the cafe... what kind of product is the large sign on the side advertising...




a little further east along East Hastings, the elegant façade of the Ferrera Court building announces itself quietly on this  block of mostly nondescript design and banal destination businesses, and the reach of the downtown eastside has loosen its grip somewhat as Hastings continues into East Vancouver's residential ethnic mix and  detached home equity...


Friday, May 21, 2010

railspur alley pictographs*

inscribed on a very short stretch of banged-up and rusty corrugated metal walls along Railspur Alley are some forgotten "pictographs" of unknown vintage that somehow escaped the great Clean-Up and Beautification Projects around Granville Island in fervid anticipation of the 2010Wilted O-LIMP-ics party date...




 




*post mortem:: almost all the above "pictographs" have since been painted over with a very bland shade of beige...

Saturday, May 15, 2010

granville island grit

on Granville Island, that floating conglomeration of art, food and cement production, one can still walk into a dark and dingy industrial building [now converted into a parking lot] and find leftover traces of grit and grime from a past era in the shadows...

snowflakes of bird poo and feathers float onto a giant net above the bright shiny cars...

the complicated pattern of wood trusses and beams bearing the corrugated metal roof is calibrated and dignified by the leaf-green light...

a high bank of multi-paned windows stream in natural light and an underbelly view of the looming Granville Street bridge from above...

these weathered wood slats on the ceiling have not been freshened up, leaving the sketchy history in the worn patina...

and as I shoot this last image, a worker in uniform walked by and spontaneously informed me that this barn of a building used to house a chain-making factory...

Friday, May 7, 2010

emily carr grad show:: downspotting










because her name is art itself...

[wandering through the studios of the fine arts grads, accidental abstractions on the now immaculately clean floors also claimed artistic acknowledgement, especially that crinkled up candy wrapper under a display table and the blue pinhead by a plinth... and I pointed my camera downwards many times to the puzzlement of the other visitors!]

Saturday, May 1, 2010

behind japantown

the Downtown Eastside is never a Sunday stroll in the park, but on one such lovely Sunday afternoon when all was quiet and tame on the eastern front with the spring sunshine calming the few local sidewalk citizens, we biked the back lanes and deserted streets north of Powell Street to find the most time and weather worn remains still boldly holding up in their gloriously dilapidated state...

detail from the TAMURA HOUSE entrance on Powell Street...

dark and ancient wood striping this back lane structure...

fading graffiti high up behind the old foundry building at the corner of Powell and Jackson...

fabulously deteriorating back wall of the same foundry building...

the mysterious yet hopeful "BRENDA" garland decorating a broken wall of a demolished site...

traces of vines long expired and stripping off the side wall of an old house...

a study in celadon and burgundies on the back alley access of a warehouse...

an abstract painting in the making on the numbered wall of an empty parking lot...