I have walked Commercial Drive a thousand times over the many years that we have lived in this neighbourhood...and the energy and atmosphere is not so different as it was...
The changes in ethnic and age demographics are evident, as are the comings and goings of certain restaurants, cafes, and sundry businesses, but much have also stayed the same...
Look beyond the Starbucks and fast food chains, the busy pub-bistros, the encroachment of Main Street hipsterism, and we still have Norman's and Santa Barbara's bountiful boxes, the always helpful guys at the stuffed to the rafters Magnet Home Hardware and in the recently reduced by half in size Kitchen Corner, the full-frontal Italian kitsch of Calabria, the crazy stock-jam at Beckwoman's...
Yet, change is inevitable as owners retire, rents increase, buildings get renovated, and now with Grandview Park being torn up for a total makeover, the north end of Commercial will be somewhat sanitized to attract a different populace to come...
And as I walk down the Drive on another lovely end of summer's day, I find my appreciable bits and pieces still in their usual suspect places, albeit barely perceptible to most who pass them by...
this sign has been so forever there that you wonder what you can still possibly get for 4 cents...
one of the last "minimally abstract" patchwork walls that has not been "defaced" by officially sanctioned and government funded anti-graffiti murals of questionable artistic merit...
post of a million staples - an anthropic stitching of words and images now long gone...
vestiges of sloppy paint jobs and ripped off vine creepings on a side wall...
disintegrating address on a building in a similar state...
a shaded glimpse upwards provides a graceful relief from the street level visual cacophony...
the lost art of custom tailoring capitulating to the art of customized coffees across from the soon to be new and improved Grandview Park...
groundswell tags to claim ownership of their tiny patch of the unswept sidewalk outside Santa Barbara's...
and across the street, the old silent trees stand stoically as they rip up the ground around them, just as the tired ancient faces of Italy and Portugal look out from their dedicated cafes at the post-punk martyrs and enlightened ethnic food shoppers stomping and chewing their way down the Drive in droves...
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