opsal skeletal

The long suffering OPSAL STEEL building on the corner of West 2nd Avenue and Quebec Street has finally been stripped of its tattered wood cladding and now sits as a hulking carcass with its innards mostly gutted...

Waiting for its new incarnation as two residential towers looming over a measly token remnant of its original west coast vernacular industrial building design from 1918, this salvaged skeleton is the last of such structures that once populated the grimy end of False Creek...

The two photos below are from a series I took of the building a few years ago when reindeer still dared to land on its roof and perched there for a while...

For another recent posting about this development:: www.miss604.com/2011/03/opsal-steel-building

mount pleasant fragments

 We walked - frequently slowing down - under a mixed bag of early spring weather cues on a recent afternoon around the eastern slope of the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood...

towards Kingsway and Fraser Street and up Fraser to almost East 30th Avenue, then down to Kingsway again, with their block after block of rather banal and gritty storefronts and restaurants operated by mostly

Vietnamese and Philippino interests, with the odd Polish deli and bakery remaining...

I was more taken in by the odd splashes of colour and art that jumped out every now and again then by the fairly benign street life of a quiet Saturday afternoon along these stretches...

and by the quirky home-made signs gently exhorting drivers to slow down in the laneways, and for those on foot to slow down and look up or sideways or downwards every once in a while...