less and less arden

just another old run down apartment building on east broadway waiting to be replaced...
I have driven, bus-ed, biked by too many times and always the name on the glass above the front door catches my attention - pulling from some nostalgic incantation...
so many times, too, I tell myself to go back and capture salvage save it from oblivion,
and now finally on the eve of the building's demise, I am here to record it before ARDEN APTS. in pale gold lettering shatters to pieces along with the rest of the building...

and such arden apartments with flaking paint and sad-eyed windows are no more...

up china creek yo...

yo mama's house?...here bitch yo...

the Vancouver Parks Board has since replaced the missing "i" and the halfed "e" but did not see fit to remove the scratched in letters above the "Ch" that makes it into an archaic racial epithet, thereby perpetuating and perhaps also condoning the handiwork of racist oINKers...

yo bitch, listen to "china creek" by half chinese from their album we were pretending to be...hear bitch yo...

and on various youtube vids...

[more shit on China Creek Skate Park here...yo...]
 

dot dot dot... stripes---

without the perkiness of such contagious red spots the modest post-war bungalow and her attendant garage above would be plainer than jane...

and without the bright  blue and green horizontal banding on these humble eastside apartment buildings below they would be much less average that joe...
 

stairway to demohell

corner of east broadway and quebec

the entire Broadway corridor has always been endowed with mostly banal and C-grade architecture...if one were to drive, bus, bike or walk the length of it from east of Commercial to Alma, the low rise [and some higher] buildings will blur into a murky porridge of really bland barely sweetened and stirred conglomeration!

but time for renewal has caught up in fits of fire and demolition episodes, especially along the stretch around Main...the most basic 1960's office box at East Broadway and Quebec is now a swampy pool of deconstructed debris out of which will rise the most recent breed of design homogeneity...you know, brick and/or concrete walls, visible metal trusses and beams, solid wood detailing, subtle glazing - to convey a blatant expression of substantial quality and the requisite stilted impression of pre-packaged stylishness...