sweet lulu swing

 she may be old and creaky now, but she can still swing open for the big boys needing to get through...

 the heavy freight trains keep rumbling along her dark trestle legs, and yet, when out of sight, out of mind...

 sweet old lulu island bridge, she be hanging on to the north arm of her strong river Fraser for a while yet...

[Lulu Island was purportedly named after an american showgirl known as Lulu Sweet who had been up to entertain the Royal Engineers in Vancouver in the mid-1800's]

 ***

 across from lulu's old trestle are tart cranberry fields lying around in russet fallow in the spring sunshine...

Lulu Island Bridge at 2100 Block of River Road, Richmond [Lulu Island]

downtown westside:: the sexy sixties [episode one]

Soaring glass behemoths squeeze around the odd oldie still holding out on its tiny piece of developer's baitlot...
they may be sleek and shiny, with self-contained promises of high efficiency appliances and measured to the millimeter space-planning illusions, but these 21st century luminous colossi have none of the idiosyncratic sexiness of some of the modernist structures implanted on downtown soil in the oh-so-long-ago 1960's when Vancouver was nary a blip on the world map of architectural avant-gardism...

The well-hung Westcoast Transmission Building at 1333 West Georgia Street [1968-69, by Rhone and Iredale] has ridden out the decades in suspended glass-sheathed immutability...and has recently been transformed into a QUBE-full of too-cool condos for dark shades wearing sophisticates...

The virginal white and coquettish detailing of the East Asiatic House building at 1201 West Pender Street [1963, by Gerald Hamilton and Associates] still marks her as a delicately alluring stand-out amongst the leggy glamour-glazed models now posing all around her...and almost half a century on, her proportional compactness and fineness of features have been left relatively unmolested by over-excitable upgrade casanovas!

[after all, her corner stone had already once been laid by a suave and elegant danish royal!]