the undriven Drive

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...

marking my clark park:: part II

Summerfall...
as in fallen branches from the late summer pruning of the aging trees,
as in summer turning much too soon to fall...

wreathed festively around a trunk...

lying scattered in dapple sunlight...

and strewn about in voluptuous garlands...

the holly and the pine were prematurely trimmed...

and these little acorns have lost their raison d'être...

dead branches were rightly removed...

but fresh young ones fell disconsolate...

ever mournful in the cooling tree shadows...

 dark lace beneath my dreaming trees...

around oppenheimer park:: façades

Oppenheimer Park in the Downtown Eastside/Japantown enclave has been recently returned to the neighbourhood with much fanfare after a 2.5 million dollar facelift that now seems almost too posh for its previous regular inhabitants, although if they have already re-occupied their "home" territory, the washroom facilities are much brighter and cleaner and well-worth a visit...

I, however, find the blocks [Dunlevy Avenue, Powell Street, Jackson Avenue and Cordova Street] facing the park much more intriguing in their evolving cosmetic alterations and wildly diverse stylistic modifications...

from this vertical strip-lapped bento-boxed minimalism...

to more traditional ship-lapped frontier-style trading post, now jazzed up like a garish show-girl...

to cagey yet hip with cool signage for those without a second hand???

to the sturdy, trustworthy provider of faith and hope for the needy and the speedy...

to a gracious classic pioneer box house with welcoming front porch [but concealing curtained windows]...

to a turn of the 20th century deco-moderne funeral parlour converted into art gallery and multi-purpose live venue for the mostly undead...[needless to say,  memorial services can still be arranged]

around oppenheimer park:: vignettes

During the 34th annual Powell Street Festival held in the renewed and recently reopened Oppenheimer Park, I wandered around the periphery of the lively park and well-attended event to focus instead on the details of a gentrifying block that has yet to shed its rough and tumble edges...

Despite the huge effort to clean up the neighbourhood by revitalizing the park and to attract families and tourists [and adventurous yuppies!] who are not turned off by the continuing presence of street people and drug activity, the more squeamish will have to avert their eyes to such gritty evidence as needles stuck to trees and certain fragile beings breaking down unheeded by the masses of better dressed and culinarily sated visitors...

violated trunk...

classical pretensions...

workboots and chandeliers...

portrait behind bars...

a century of grime...

gas pump blues...

chapel revival...

courtyard respite...

and a gauzy reprieve...

city haunts

Surreptitiously wandering the aging corridors of municipal power one summer afternoon, the art deco halls were hauntingly silent while I stole a few ghostly images of the original fixtures and detailing still in use from so long ago...

[there was a wall of framed photographs of all the previous mayors of Vancouver - needless to say, they were all male, all white, some with bushy beards...]

Vancouver City Hall, operating since 1936,
designed by the architectural firm of Townley and Matheson,
Captain George Vancouver guiding on...
[façade facing West 10th Avenue, Cambie Street to the right]

MOA outside

Perhaps the most sensitive and intuitive of Arthur Erickson's many prominent creations, the much vaunted Museum of Anthropology rising from the edge of the University of British Columbia campus remains a lyrical and distinguished contemporary depository for the collected and preserved art and ritual objects of indigenous cultures from the Northwest coast and all the continents...
I began my studies at UBC a couple of years after it was completed in 1976 and took a class in archaeology in my second year that enabled frequent access to the museum - thereby spending many fascinated hours exploring the collections in the crowded glass cases and countless drawers...
I have returned sporadically over the years but have never photographed the exterior [except during a totem pole-raising ceremony well over 20 years ago, the photographs from which may still be in a box somewhere!], and on this bright summer's day I am entranced once more by the visual poetry of the raw concrete edifice - Erickson's elegantly minimal interpretation of traditional Northwest coast post and beam structures - and the powerful play of light and shadow on the strong basic forms that are as solid as the ephemeral lives that created them are not...

"At this stage in our history when most forces at work in society are dispersing our energies, fracturing our society, disrupting the ecology of our planet, dismembering our cities, the architect has the opportunity - and I believe the duty, though he seldom seizes it - of being a cohesive force, of providing wholes, "integrities" as Buckminster Fuller would put it in a different sense.  As the mechanization of life and man proceeds on its relentless course, we need to reaffirm that which the machines would atrophy in us - the human spirit."

ARTHUR ERICKSON [1924 -2009]