esoteric corners

In a time when the idea of attending a place of worship seems a quaint and almost antiquated activity, such places still continue to exist and flourish with their own dedicated followers, often tucked into residential neighbourhoods where they sometimes crouch inconspicuously on quiet corners and where their architecturally diverse edifices do not overwhelm the scale of the houses on their streets...
I have always admired the minimal nordic variant of art deco styling of the church above on the corner of East 19th and Prince Albert Street built by the local Danish community in the 1930's as the first Danish Lutheran Church in Vancouver - Saint Ansgar's congregation has long since moved out of the city to another location...

The Shiv Mandir-Shree Sanatan Dharam Ramayan Mandali of Fiji has served as a Hindu temple for the last 30 years after being a Presbyterian church when it was raised in 1908 on the corner of Napier Street and Salsbury Drive...

Hidden behind the trees on a high corner above 810 East 13th Avenue is the mysterious Russian Synodal Orthodox Church with its small but distinctive blue onion dome and gilded icon above the entrance doors...

Around the corner from the bustling produce stalls of Norman's on Commercial Drive and Graveley Street is the slightly forlorn looking Chinese Grace Mennonite Church housed in an old apartment building...

And in a tranquil pocket above Clark Park on the corner of East 18th Avenue and Fleming Street stands the always immaculately maintained German Saint Markus Lutheran Church bestowing its touch of Teutonic flavour to our multi-ethnic neighbourhood...

the vines remain...for now...

A generation's worth of summers tending to the meticulously trained vines on trellises that span the length of a standard city lot...

A verdant canopy of an urban vineyard to supply a family with enough grapes to crush into a few dozen bottles of home-made wine a year...

This season's bounty will not be harvested by the same family anymore - the house has been sold and who knows if the new owners are wine lovers, grape eaters, pruning enthusiasts...

I have walked by this suspended viticultural endeavour [at the corner of Victoria Drive and the East 14th laneway] on the way to Trout Lake [John Hendry Park] for almost three decades now and have always admired the enduring dedication in the maintenance of their elevated grape production and their old world attitude towards using their whole property - including the space above their land - to yield what they need...

the house sits empty now, the grass unmowed... but the vines thrive on without the hands that have known them for so long, and even without the required sunshine hours so sadly lacking in this non-summer of ours...

 a left behind concrete table that would have known many a bottle and cluttered glasses and bearing stains from more then a few spilled drops...

the path to the [almost wine-coloured!] front door of the large Vancouver Special house is edged by sedum-filled pots fashioned from cut opened rubber tires...

when I walked by on the weekend, I spied the clusters of green grapes dangling demurely from the tangle of vines and leaves, their pulp slowly sweetening in the already fall-like sunshine...
in the garage where the large wooden barrels would have been rolled out in anticipation of the juice to be fermented, renovation work is underway - and I was hesitant to ask if this expansive grape arbour will remain, not wanting to know the negative response...

strathcona corners:: round one

good to know that we can renew our luck - or get lucky again - in this one particular room, for rent [I presume!] in the Strathcona neighbourhood just east of Chinatown...

the ethnic mix here has shifted from immigrant italians early on to chinese workers to artists, mostly white, to determined home renovators and staunch heritage buffs, also mostly white...

still, many cool old houses from the turn of the 20th century remain, albeit in various states of redressing, making for an interesting residential pocket in the downtown eastside that is easy to miss buffeted as it is by the industrial edges of Clark Drive, the messy distractions of East Hastings Street, and the bright lights of Chinatown...

during a recent culture crawl event that encouraged the opening up of artists' studios/homes to curious outsiders, I wandered around briefly mostly looking in, but plan to return for more photos when the streets are less lively...

 [this was taken in the summer when visiting a friend staying here in this truly haunted house!]

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...

walking the drive

the Drive [Commercial Drive] is my neighbourhood shopping street...

I have walked up and down both sides of it now for many, many years!

that bowling pin sign has hovered above the corner of East 7th forever,

and incredibly, people still go bowling!

at the entrance to the stairs that lead up to Johnny 5's Billiard Club & Cappuccino Bar, which I have never dared to venture up, partly because I don't think a nosy asian woman would be very welcome in this what I imagine must be a time-warp macho-male dominated domain!

on the side of Norman's greengrocer, a produce institution on the Drive, giant red birds on a wire look down greedily in anticipation of discarded fruits and vegetables, mimicking the real crows and pigeons waiting on the live wires above... 

shrink-wrapped

at Woodland Drive and East Broadway, a shimmering ocean liner parked behind a condemned bungalow...

a corner of east 10th and Main

death of a house

"GREEDY DEVELOPERS TORCHED THIS BEAUTIFUL HOME...QUESTION YOUR POLITICIANS!
(BUT THEY WILL LIE!)"
by Anonymous Concerned Citizens who Write their Thoughts on Unvarnished Plywood Sheathing behind Dying Houses

the telephone stopped ringing...

long incommunicado at the corner of East Broadway and St. Catharines